Throughout the twentieth century, the history of Vandal North Africa (439–534 ce) suffered under the presumptions of the ‘decline and fall’ model of historical change. In particular, the death of Augustine of Hippo during the Vandal siege of Carthage in 430 has long served as a watershed in western history, when an incursion of northern barbarians, whose reputation for violence endures to this day in the verb ‘to vandalise’, laid low a centuries-old classical culture. And while these Vandal invaders were Christians, they were the wrong kind of Christians – heretical Arians – with a penchant for persecuting the Nicene Christians in their midst. As a result, historians have tended to compare Vandal North Africa unfavourably with other post-Roman states in Italy and Gaul. It was nothing less than a failed state that endured uneasily for less than a century until its swift and conclusive reconquest by Emperor Justinian in the early 530s. Fortunately, a new generation of scholars has begun to rehabilitate the history of the Vandal kingdom by examining with fresh eyes the ample textual sources and rich archaeological record for post-imperial North Africa. Robin Whelan's monograph is an important contribution to this new historiography.

Over the course of seven chapters, Being Christian in Vandal North Africa complicates our understanding of the relationship between the Nicene Christians and their non-Nicene competitors in the Vandal kingdom. The latter, he argues, were not Arians at all, but Homoian Christians whose theological stance articulated a compromise between the teachings of Arius and the Creed of Nicaea. Nor was the Homoian Church strictly a Vandal institution; there were Homoian communities in cities around the Mediterranean rim. Whelan's book successfully decouples the history of Christian debate about correct belief in North Africa from the political ambitions of Vandal rulers themselves. The first part of the book (‘Contesting Orthodoxy’) uncovers ‘a controversy whose methods and substantive concerns were those of the Christian conflicts of the later Roman Empire’ (p. 23). Chapter i makes the case that Nicene and Homoian communities in the Vandal kingdom were very similar in their size, had comparable cultures and both encompassed congregations that were ethnically and linguistically heterogenous. These similarities served to heighten the antagonism between them. As Chapter ii shows, Nicene and Homoian clerics alike composed ‘almost industrial quantities of heresiological polemic’ (p. 84) to argue with one another, sometimes in the form of dialogues that may have reflected real-life face-to-face encounters between these rival groups. This impressive body of source material attests to the active competition for congregants between the two groups. In chapters iii and iv, Whelan examines how Homoian Christians presented themselves as the true representatives of orthodoxy by tarring their Nicene opponents with the epithet ‘Homoousian’ and crafting imaginary dialogues depicting celebrated patriarchs like Athanasius and Augustine as heresiarchs. In response, Nicene Christians drew upon their knowledge of fourth-century church history to depict their Homoian rivals as deviant Arians, a slander that has proved difficult to dispel.

In the second half of the book (‘Orthodoxy and Society’), Whelan steps back to consider the relationships between North African Christians and the Vandal court. Chapter v argues that compromise, rather than conflict, was the modus operandi between Catholics and their Arian overlords, despite the shrill testimony of Victor of Vita's History of the persecution of the African province. While Victor's work explicitly associated Christian (Arian) and ethnic (Vandal) identities, Whelan finds that most of his fifth-century contemporaries did not. In chapter vi he concludes that ‘even in instances where ethnicity is involved, invocations of ethnic self-identification or ethno-graphic stereotyping can rarely be followed through to demonstrably differential treatment of Christians’ (p. 194). The final chapter of the book goes one step further to show how North African Christian elites competed with one another through expressions of piety and social prestige without reference to their confessional or ethnic identity. In other words, as the ground-breaking work of Eric Rebillard and others have shown, their identities were much more fluid and pragmatic than earlier paradigms have allowed.

Being Christian in Vandal North Africa offers a fresh view of the vital, and sometimes violent, competition between rival Christian groups in the Vandal kingdom that dismantles long-held presumptions about the relationship between the Vandal court and its Christian subjects, both Nicene and Homoian. In doing so it contributes in important ways to the rewriting of the history of Vandal North Africa. Whelan argues convincingly that being Christian in this period was clearly not as straightforward as we have been led to believe.