This is a superb volume, rich in detail, and impressive in its interdisciplinary assessment of the transformation of North Africa in the Late Antique and Early Islamic periods. The volume’s 15 chapters are organised under three rubrics: ‘Contesting Byzantine Africa’, ‘Shifting structures of daily life’, and ‘Africa in the Christian Empire’.

In their Introduction, Stevens and Conant articulate three objectives for the volume: to examine “both the internal and external connections of Byzantine Africa”, to reflect on the Vandal legacy and to “look forward to the earliest Arab period”. At the same time, the contributions by the various authors are less concerned with the history of this period, instead focusing on the “lives and experiences of the variety of people who inhabited or settled in sixth-, seventh-, or eighth century North Africa” (pp. 3–4).

Anthony Kaldellis’s first chapter makes a compelling case for reading Procopius’s dark critique of Justinian’s reconquest of Africa in the Secret History in tandem with the Vandal War. He argues that Justinian’s intent to reconquer the West should be understood within the larger and longer-term context of late Roman imperial policy. From this perspective, we might ask whether Procopius is writing to restore his own reputation, given that he was originally an enthusiastic supporter and participant in the imperial mission. The relative ease with which Belisarius reconquered Africa in AD 533 was facilitated, in Andy Merrills’s view (Chapter 2), by the military, political and diplomatic instability arising from Gelimer’s seizure of power. Elizabeth Fentress and Andrew Wilson (Chapter 3), however, contend that the military difficulties along the southern frontier of Africa faced by both the Vandals and the Byzantines arose from the often violent migration of Berber tribes from the deep Sahara. These were “not simply camel-riding desert nomads, but desert agriculturalists who had mastered complex irrigation technologies such as foggaras and lived by a combination of oasis agriculture and both short- and long-distance trade” (p. 62). These invaders, the authors speculate, were motivated by the breakdown of the Saharan oases and trading connections that stretched deep into the former Roman provinces. In many ways, as Walter E. Kaegi (Chapter 4) shows, the Islamic conquest of the seventh century constitutes a further military and cultural invasion, this time from the east, of the old Roman (now Byzantine) African provinces. Kaegi offers a valuable and detailed reconstruction of the Muslim raids and campaigns, despite the source difficulties. But, perhaps more importantly, his chapter should remind us that the periodic movements of new peoples and cultures, and even the emergence of new polities, have been as much a part of this region’s history as the more well-documented periods of institutional and structural stability.

The five chapters in Section 2 offer new assessments of the society and economy of North Africa in Late Antiquity, based, notably, on archaeological work conducted over the last 50 years. Susan T. Stevens (Chapter 5) documents and evaluates the archaeological (and limited textual) evidence for the centuries-long ruralisation of Carthage following the Islamic sack of the city in the late seventh century. Some basilicas appear to have been destroyed and used as stone quarries, and in some cases became agricultural hamlets and villages. All of this makes clear that, while Islamic Carthage was not completely emptied of its inhabitants, its history as the great metropolis of Africa ended definitively after AD 698.

Transformation in the African urban and rural landscapes is the subject of Philipp Von Rummel’s important Chapter 6. There is still considerable debate over how to interpret the changes that occurred in African cities over such a long period. The recent turn in scholarship downplays, as does Von Rummel, the interpretive binary of prosperity and decline in favour of patterns of transformation and continuity. That said, there is no question that both the striking growth of cities in Africa and their subsequent ‘transformation’ correlates closely with the advent and waning of the Roman tributary empire of the Mediterranean. The impact of the empire is even more clearly evident in the case of the countryside, where Roman-period agricultural development was by any measure extraordinary for the pre-modern world. I see the drop-off in rural agricultural sites beginning broadly in the late sixth and seventh centuries as evidence of the inevitable disengagement of the African countryside from the retreating Roman economy of the Mediterranean, and with it the contraction, both economically and culturally, of the cities once nourished by this system.

Paul Reynold’s fresh survey (Chapter 8) on trade and economic trends in post-Roman Africa-Ifriqiya and the larger Mediterranean between the fifth to eleventh centuries, as well as Cécile Morrisson’s impressive study of coin evidence as a guide to the late African economy (Chapter 9, see below) should be read in tandem with Von Rummel. Reynolds argues convincingly for substantial continuity, particularly under the Vandals in Africa, in maritime trade connections from the late Roman period, and the continued vitality, into the seventh century, of Tunisia as a substantial exporter of grain, African Red Slipware (ARS) pottery, and amphorae. In Chapter 7, Mohammed Benabbès offers a cogent reminder, exemplified in four discrete case studies, of how little historians and archaeologists of Roman and Byzantine Africa have read, let alone deployed, untranslated medieval Arabic texts in the identification and reconstruction of its rich historical geography.

The final section of the volume begins with Jonathon Conant’s study of the migration of eastern saints’ cults to Africa, and how they reintegrated the region into the cultural and religious networks of the Byzantine Empire. He demonstrates convincingly that it was less driven by the new imperial administration than local African clergy who sought “to buttress their own status through the divine patronage that these eastern cults offered” (p. 202). The physical conversion and renovation of churches in Africa during the Vandal and Byzantine periods is the focus of Ann Marie Yasin’s engaging contribution (Chapter 11), which makes clear from the outset that distinguishing changes in churches as a reflection of inter-Christian rivalries and differences in theological emphasis is not necessarily a fruitful avenue of study. She directs her attention instead to the changes and renovations of architectural and ritual focal points manifested in the alterations of, and addition to, the churches themselves.

The title of Kate Cooper’s chapter (12) ‘Marriage, law, and Christian rhetoric in Vandal Africa’ does not begin to capture its importance for our understanding of the emergence in the African Catholic Church of the concept of secularism and the distinction between Roman and Canon law. Cooper demonstrates, through the optic of evolving concepts of Christian marriage, the path by which the Catholic Church in the ‘Wilderness period’ under Arian Vandal rule nourished “a way of thinking about law and obligation that stood free of Roman law” that “would have marvelous staying power in the Latin West” (p. 149). The search for spiritual freedom in Byzantine Africa following on from the Vandal period is further explored by Leslie Dossey (Chapter 13) in her contention that the ‘Three Chapters’ controversy under Justinian was ultimately about the right of Church theologians “to disagree with and critically interpret each other’s work” (p. 266), and that the emperor’s attempt to condemn the authors of exegesis was wholly misplaced. Gregory Hays (Chapter 14) seeks to explain the decline of Latin poetry in the Byzantine period, particularly after the middle of the sixth century. Hays sees a shift at work from the Latin-dominated training and literary patronage by legitimacy-seeking Vandal elites to “a province now dominated by church officials and Byzantine military men” in which the “growth of Greek culture came at the expense of Latin” (p. 287).

Peter Brown in his concluding remarks (Chapter 15) imagines that the “appeal of late Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, and early Islamic North Africa is that it seems to end in silence […] a world without a future—a world that nobody claimed as their special past (as the Roman Empire has been as the special past of Europe)” (p. 296). A place of silence, he says, requires silent skills; the work of archaeology, linguistic analysis, epigraphy, and so on. This volume has brought those skills together, as well as others, to produce, in this reviewer’s opinion, a freshly reimagined synthesis and new interpretive agenda of North Africa during its transition from Antiquity to the age of Early Islam.