This book is a contribution to the social history of Gaul in the later fifth and sixth centuries. Based on the approaches of Peter Brown, Ralph Mathisen and Raymond van Dam, the author explores the question, to what extent Gallic society offered opportunities for upward social mobility and which groups were able to participate in this process. After discussing his main sources, especially Gregory of Tours, Jones proceeds along two main lines. First he compares strategies of elite and non-elite status achievement, which according to Jones did not fundamentally differ; in the absence of a well-defined aristocratic status and distinct culture of nobility, the same means of social advancement – accumulation of wealth (mostly by marriage), ascent by service at court and in the hierarchies of the Church – were available to all social strata. The longer second part of the book deals with separate groups (captives, the poor, physicians and healers), for whom Jones identifies different opportunities to improve social status. Apart from the physicians, whose traditional claim to social recognition rested on the fact that medicine had been a respectable profession since late antiquity, other forms of social advancement required integration in or at least cooperation with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This necessity would have been especially felt by healers, as potential rivals of the Christian saints, but also the agency of matricularii, who occasionally acted as influential pressure-groups, was limited by the fact that their influence depended on the patronage of a saint or a bishop. In this study, Jones offers a vivid picture of different forms of patronage (poor relief, redemption of captives, miraculous healing) based on extensive readings of Gregory of Tours, and shows a deep familiarity with current scholarly debates on his specific subject matter. Comparable attention to the broader context would have been desirable. The main problem of Jones's study is its superficial engagement with the relevant literature in this respect, as well as a general lack of reflection on methodological questions. Social order (not only of late antique Gaul) is open to different and competing patterns of stratification – juristic, economic, religious, to mention only a basic few. Jones's attempt to reconstruct a model of Gallic society without taking this systematically into account necessarily leads to confusion. Categories like personal freedom, economic poverty and sinfulness are not simply complementary attributes of a society characterised by a ‘deep seated cultural unity’ (p. 8), but belong to different and competing ways of conceptualising that society; even single terms like ‘captive’ or ‘poor’ are multi-layered concepts in this regard. Therefore, to start by deconstructing a two-tiered-model of late antique society in order to postulate a homogenous culture (pp. 1–22), is to miss a central point: apart from the fact that the two-tiered model was never designed to conceptualise social history, this approach simply takes for granted what in sixth-century Gaul still was a dynamic process, namely, the implementation of a specific construction of society, based on religious authority and biblical models. All this is not to diminish the value of the book. The reader will get a profound and often thought-provoking analysis of the social relationships that structured the world of Gregory of Tours. In this field, Jones's study is an important contribution for scholars not only of Merovingian Gaul but also those generally interested in the transformation of the late antique world.