This collection of nine essays on African Christianity was intended to celebrate the retirement of Maureen Tilley, but, sadly, it ended as a memorial volume. The authors include a few younger scholars—Bass and Dever—but the majority are ones who might be described as pezzi grossi of the profession: Burns, Dunn, Dupont, Fitzgerald, Jensen, Leyerle, and Tabbernee. The book is prefaced by brief personal recollections of Maureen Tilley by Elizabeth Clark and Zachary Smith. A fuller minibiography appears at the end, along with a full bibliography of Tilley’s publications.

The first three essays are focused on Tertullian, the first two on the exegete and animals. Blake Leyerle’s piece neatly complements her earlier study on Tertullian and the chameleon that appeared in the Journal of Roman Studies (2019). She decodes a series of animal riddles in the de Pallio to show how one can interpret animal transformations as signaling the writer’s transformation from philosopher to Christian. I wonder, however, if it might not be more useful to see the original as a rhetorical display piece typical of the Second Sophistic, like those of a previous generation delivered to the elites of Carthage by Apuleius? And a speech delivered by Tertullian when he was not yet a Christian or, at least, not publicly presenting himself as one? Where he only later Christianized the piece by artificially attaching a sectarian tailpiece to it? It seems that if he was a Christian at the time writing the original, he surely would have made more of the serpent. In one of the more arresting chapters, Columcelle Dever features the inimitable beaver, much famed in antiquity for its tendencies to autocastration—indeed, its genus name as an animal, Castor, has given us the verb. He persuasively argues that the “animalization” of heretics is being exploited by Tertullian in his Adversus Marcionem. Marcion at once becomes the one who rejects the animal unity of God’s creation but who also, like the self-defeating beaver, has cut himself off from truth. Last in this line, William Tabernee begins the problem of serial “publication” in antiquity by focusing on the case of Tertullian’s evolving views on the nature of marriage as iterated in serial retakes. His categories of the forbidden, elaborated in repeated versions of the Contra Marcionem and in subsequent treatises, appear to be every bit as complex in their hierarchies as anything in Augustus’ family and marriage legislation but, in the end, most distinguished by his strong animus against remarriage.

The following section is devoted to essays on Donatism, a central preoccupation of Tilley’s lifetime of scholarship. Alden Bass presents an interesting unravelling of the figure of Satan as explicated through the prophecy of Ezekiel in the writings of Optatus of Milevis and Tyconius. Not unexpectedly, the orthodox Catholic and the dissident saw him in rather different ways. Patout Burns begins with a different prophecy of Ezekiel on the bad shepherd to open an analysis of the role of the bishops, good and less-than-good, in propagating the message of the universal church. In a critical assessment of the role of Catholic bishops in divided African communities, he shows that Augustine was pragmatic, willing to entertain and to justify the preaching of the good message to parishioners by defective and unworthy clergy who did not practice what they preached. Like baptism, although with important differences, Augustine argued that it was the integrity of the sacrament and the word that mattered and not the flawed man who delivered them. Geoffrey Dunn and Allan Fitzgerald concentrate more on exegetical and disciplinary matters, especially as concerned rebellious “Donatists.” Dunn details how the dissidents, beginning with Parmenian, began to interpret the prophet Jeremiah on “the wheat and the chaff” to their advantage. The detailed response from Augustine in 411 allows us better to understand the function of the metaphor at the great conference at Carthage. Fitzgerald shows how Augustine was successfully able to leverage the ideal of humility as a disciplinary weapon. Although specific to the African context, the development of the strategy lies somewhere between Yelena Baraz’s, Reading Roman Pride (2020) on the one hand and the later Foucault on the bishop’s power, on the other.

In the final section, Robin Jensen provides an extension of work for which she is already justly reputed: in this case, the place of the great extra muros basilicas of Carthage. All of them, logically, were external to the city since they were founded in or near existing cemeteries where not only ordinary Christians but the martyrs of the faith were buried. Her suggestion that these churches functioned as centers of pilgrimage, in which even baptismal fonts had an important auxiliary role, seems almost certain since the churches were identified with the maiores, the ‘greats’: the illustrious martyrs of the foundational age of African Christianity. The basilicas continued to be elaborated on these lines with the construction of facilities to aid the spectating of pilgrims, as demonstrated by Heimo Dolenz’s excavation of the subterranean cyclotron at the Damous-el-Karita. The collection ends, perhaps fittingly, with a woman, indeed a “strong woman” as Antony Dupont names the famous Melania. He offers a welcome general assessment, in the light of recent decades of work on her, to ask just how typical she was of Christian women in her age. His final judgment is that the factors of legal status, personal wealth, and individual character allowed her to act in the public space of the church, but that her example was still very unusual in a world whose moral standards and positions of power were dominated by men. In the long duration, however, we could say that she was also typical, having been preceded by many notable examples of women in the Roman world who benefited from its legal system, family wealth, and their personal characters to serve as political persuaders, civic benefactors, and social influencers.

Unlike many collections that I have encountered, this one laudably exhibits a substantial uniformity in the high quality of its scholarship. In forming it, the contributors have created a wonderful memorial that not only celebrates the memory of Maureen Tilley, but also, vicariously, as I am sure she would have appreciated, that of her great mentor Elizabeth Clark. The work is both a testament to a scholar whose untimely loss was keenly felt by the community of Africanists and also, more sadly, to my memories of the good person herself.