In this brief work, Maia Kotrosits sets for herself a simple, if impossible, task: to tell a history of “speculative leaps in the field” (2). For Kotrosits, theorizing means speculating about big, intractable problems. Because she knows it is impossible to detail a comprehensive history of creative problem solving in the study of late antiquity, she unfolds a narrower yet still engaging account. In three separate but related sections, she traces the legacies of three renowned thinkers in the field. Section 1, oriented around Elizabeth A. Clark, traces how her feminist historiography compelled scholars to think about gender beyond the so-called “real women.” Clark, and her intellectual successors, chronicled the violence wrought against women (and non-male bodies) by means of language and representation. The next section, centered around the work of Peter Brown, examines Foucault’s profound impact on the study of late antiquity. Kotrosits discusses the conjoined Foucault-Brown influence over scholarly approaches to a host of issues, including authorship, power, subject formation, knowledge production, and narrativization. Finally, Section 3 addresses the shadow of colonialism and imperialism via the writings of Henri-Irénée Marrou. Here, Kotrosits describes not only early Christian scholarship about imperialism (and its expansive trajectory) but also the intractable influence of contemporary colonial systems and knowledge projects on scholarship. Even as the pamphlet offers a learned albeit predictable tour through some of the watershed moments in theorizing late antique religion, it functions, more than anything, as an advertisement for these works of scholarship. While the book will be helpful for students looking to get their bearings about gender, Foucault, or imperialism, there is little about Kotrosits’s overarching narrative that stands apart from this scholarship itself. Too often, her narrative mixes the voices of late antique sources, scholars writing about late antiquity, and theorists who have influenced those scholars. Even more often, Kotrosits’s invocation of the latter group – as the heart of her effort to find connections across the field – distracts from the nuances and voices of the scholarly works about late antiquity she aims to foreground. But despite those drawbacks, this primer will still be of great use to students interested in the religions of late antiquity.