The title of this book reflects accurately the breadth of the topics dealt with in its eleven chapters. A priori, such a breadth would make sense only if the volume were conceived as a series of synthetic chapters dealing systematically, in chronological order, with the multifaceted interface between religion and politics in the Christianised Roman Empire, the early Caliphate, and the western European tradition. In all societies, religion and politics are intimately related. The Constantinian revolution and its sequels, however, establishing a religion founded on the principle that ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, created a particular dialectic found only in societies rooted in the prophetic tradition of the Abrahamic religions. This book, however, is a Festschrift, not a systematic introduction. Its chapters are all focused studies of particular cases, problems, puzzles, written by former students and colleagues of Harold Allan Drake, from the University of California in Santa Barbara. Its breadth, then, is a testimony to Hal Drake's vast intellectual horizons and, not less, to his pedagogical gifts and to the enthusiasm which characterises him, and which he was clearly able to infuse in his students. It would not be useful to list here the titles of all chapters. Let us only note the judicious decision of the editors to divide the volume into four parts: ‘The image of political and episcopal authority’; ‘The function of Roman tradition in emergent societies’; ‘Civic elites in the Byzantine east’; and ‘Adressing challenges to sacred texts and rites’. Most chapters deal with aspects of late antique history, east and west, but one (written by the late Thomas Sizgorich) deals with early Islamic attitudes to Rome, one with early Christianity in Ireland, and one with the authorship of the Pentateuch from late antiquity to the early modern times.