Almost fifty years since the appearance of his Franciscan poverty in 1961, during which he has also become well-known for his books on heresy and heretics, Malcolm Lambert now turns his attention to the quite different topic of the coming of Christianity to Britain, seeking to show how what was ‘a minority religion’ in Britain in the fourth century ad was transformed into a ‘family of Christian peoples’ by the time that Bede died in 735. In order, however, to reach a wider audience than the readers of ‘specialist periodicals’, the author has settled for ‘an outline narrative’ (p. xvi). The problem is that there are a great many books on aspects of this important period and a fresh contribution, though always welcome, really needs to offer more. The core of the volume is the Romano-British Church. Readers newly come to the subject should certainly find the early chapters in particular (on the Romano-British Church, the impact of Germanic paganism and the Irish dimension) helpful as an introduction and as a convenient source of footnote references to recent scholarship; but the account of the conversion of the English tends to become superficial and attenuated as it progresses into the age of Wilfrid, lacking critical analysis of the sources to deepen it. There is clearly a tension between the requirements of an outline narrative on the theme of the conversion of Britain and the reservations of recent critical study as to whether limited and uneven source materials permit the construction of such a narrative. There is slight reference to the Jarrow Lectures and the author fails to deal, for example, with the question of Bede's credibility and the degree to which his account of the conversion of the English is shaped by the concerns of his own day.