Journal of Late Antiquity

This is an excellent book and an absolute delight to read. Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the topic in recent decades, Robin Whelan successfully presents a profoundly original contribution to our knowledge of Vandal Africa. Victor of Vita’s shadow traditionally has loomed ominously over any account of Vandal Africa and seemed nearly impossible to escape. Whelan sidesteps this important limitation by including a wide range of previously neglected anonymous and pseudonymous sermons and imaginary dialogues, heresiological texts which he successfully analyzes in order to present a counter-balance to Victor of Vita’s gloomy and polarized perspective.

The book’s main argument is that Vandal Africa’s Christian conflicts—rather than a one-sided “Arian” persecution of “Catholics”—should be situated within the history of debates over the nature of the true Christian faith. The fascinating result is no less than a remarkable reassessment of the role of Christianity in the political, social, and cultural life of Vandal North Africa. In Whelan’s interpretation, Vandal exceptionalism yields to a late antique polity firmly anchored within the Mediterranean post-Roman culture. Rather than taking Victor of Vita’s perspective as normative, as historians traditionally have done, Whelan relativizes by situating it within the whole spectrum of beliefs and, crucially, by presenting alternatives to his dominant [End Page 264] voice. The result is a much wider purview of what the Christian universe might have looked like in Vandal Africa, and an important step forward toward a better understanding of this misunderstood late antique region.

The book is divided into seven chapters, grouped in two parts, in addition to an introduction, an epilogue, a bibliography and an index. The introduction admirably sets the context of both the historical topic and its historiography, thereby presenting the key notions analyzed in the rest of the book. Part I (“Contesting Orthodoxy”) analyzes the numerous ramifications of Christian debates over the nature of the true faith, which Whelan rightly sees as central to the story of post-Roman society. Chapter 1 focuses on the two rival factions which disputed precedence within North Africa, the Nicene and the Homoian churches. Whelan emphasizes the similarities between both churches, which explains the need for Nicene writers to accentuate the differences between both sides. Against the notion of “national” churches, Whelan argues that both churches were ethnically and linguistically diverse (pp. 41–42), and competing over the “orthodox” label.

Chapter 2, perhaps the most fascinating for readers not well versed in the heresiological literature of the Vandal era, introduces this “Christian polemical literature” (catalogue on pp. 86–89). Following Averil Cameron, Whelan considers these texts as weapons deployed within a centuries-old combat over the claim to orthodoxy. Whelan identifies the aftermath of the conference of 484 in Carthage as the immediate context for many of these texts (p. 61). Both sides competed over Christian intellectuals to gain the legitimacy granted to the faction perceived to hold the true faith. Many of these texts are imaginary, presenting debates between long-dead figures such as Athanasius and Augustine, Nicene heroes who lent their prestige and authority to the author “performing orthodoxy” (pp. 83–4). Surprisingly, none of them presents a clear victory over their Homoian disputant, which Whelan takes as representative of the situation the Nicene faction found itself in.

In chapter 3, Whelan explains the implications of the Vandals’ support of the Homoian church. Primarily, Homoians became the representatives of orthodoxy, the arbiters of the faith, supported by scripture, based on the councils of Rimini and Seleucia, and they claimed Cyprian—the most important North African saint—as their own. Conversely, this meant that the Nicene church became the heresy of the Homoousians, and as such liable to anti-heretical laws. The fictitious dialogues discussed in chapter 2 were reactions attempting to subvert and undercut this new situation. For Whelan, Homoian Christianity in Vandal Africa...