Stanisław Adamiak's recent study explores the ways in which three different conceptions of church governance interacted and conflicted in Byzantine North Africa: ‘the imperial administration was aiming to exercise full control over the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the popes … were intent on treating African bishops as suffragans, whereas the bishops, themselves, were most eager to preserve the autonomous and conciliar character of their Church’ (p. 163). All three models succeeded and failed in differing degrees, but by the seventh century, Adamiak contends, the African Church was firmly entwined within both the imperial system and the papal hierarchy.

By the later Roman period, Adamiak argues, ‘a stubborn conservatism’ had already become deeply engrained in African Christianity, as had a ‘certain insularity, an attitude of self-sufficiency’, and a ‘peculiarly collegial character’ (p. 15). The African Church was no stranger to persecution, whether under Roman emperors or Vandal kings, but from the 520s onward – and throughout the Byzantine period – political instability and warfare posed an equal or greater threat to local Christians (chapter i). The emperors in Constantinople claimed a broad competence to intervene in their empire's ecclesiastical affairs and after Justinian's (re)conquest of the region Africa was no exception. Emperors mediated jurisdictional disputes between provincial bishops, issued laws constraining the religious liberties of those deemed heterodox, funded the construction and renovation of churches, spear-headed the evangelisation of the region's autochthonous ‘Berber’ populations, and eventually demanded Jewish conversion to Christianity. Interventions of this sort sparked fierce opposition from African churchmen only when emperors also sought to redefine orthodoxy in directions that departed from a strict Chalcedonian standard, above all in the controversies surrounding the imperially-sponsored condemnation of the Three Chapters in the sixth century and the endorsement of Monotheletism in the seventh. To put down such opposition, the emperors relied on exile and political trials, but the direct imperial appointment of bishops to African sees was rare (chapter ii). Issues of doctrine rarely divided the Churches of Africa and Rome. In the Byzantine period, though, the African episcopate was increasingly suspicious of clerical movement overseas and sought to limit rights of appeal both to the apostolic see in Rome and to the emperors in Constantinople. At the same time, popes interested in establishing clearer lines of hierarchy within the Church emphasised both the metropolitan authority of the bishops of Carthage over their colleagues across Africa and the patriarchal authority of Rome over Carthage. Gregory the Great in particular was ‘intent on having himself obeyed in Africa’ (p. 143); and though he enjoyed only limited success in this regard, Adamiak argues that from the mid-seventh century onward the African episcopate did accept Roman primacy, as revealed in the acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 (chapter iii).

The first book-length study wholly dedicated to the ecclesiastical history of Byzantine North Africa, Adamiak's monograph draws on a comprehensive array of relevant written sources, including letters, imperial rescripts, conciliar acts, theological treatises, chronicles, histories and holy biographies. The author deals ably with this material, detailing the development of events with careful precision. The juxtaposition of imperial and papal interventions in the affairs of the African Church is instructive, and important insights emerge from analytical threads that weave back and forth through the investigative framework that these two poles provide. Perhaps most striking are the internal struggles that unfolded within the African Church as competing interests collided: the metropolitan ambitions of the bishops of Carthage, the fierce autonomy of the primates of Byzacena, the efforts of these and other primates – in Africa, simply a province's longest-serving bishop – to exercise increasing control over their episcopal colleagues and the efforts of bishops to do the same over their clergy and over monasteries within in their sees. Adamiak's vision is of an African Church that was both dynamic and robust: by the end of the Byzantine period, that Church was no longer that of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, but ‘she was still able to defend her singular interpretation of dogmas and her unique customs’ (p. 165).

The letter included in the Lateran acts of 649 which is here read as demonstrating the African primates’ acceptance of papal primacy has not always been accepted as strictly genuine, including by the acts’ modern editor. Of course, the grounds for such scepticism can be contested; but it would have strengthened the study to have acknowledged and openly addressed other scholars’ doubts about this critical point. Similarly, the highly contentious and unsubstantiated claim that ‘Since the great revolts of 66–70 and 132–5, the Jews had never abandoned their hostility towards the Empire’ (p. 90) deserves at a minimum to be sourced. Ideally the assumptions and presuppositions that underlie this assertion would be critically reassessed, all the more so given the role that the idea plays in a line of reasoning used here to explain the forced conversions of the seventh century. The analysis does not reference many scholarly works published after about 2010, a point that Adamiak concedes and attributes to the fact that the book is essentially his PhD thesis, defended in 2011. Adamiak also recognises the study's reluctance to engage with material evidence, and rather disarmingly attributes this to his own lack of archaeological expertise. None of these objections obviate the utility of this monograph. Taken together, however, they do leave the field open to future research, and to the further exploration of issues including, for example, how bishops sought to direct lay pieties and curate memories of the past; the imperial use of coinage to convey religious ideologies; secular interest in theology; the discomforts that some Nicene churchmen felt about their restoration to worldly power after the Byzantine conquest; the social role of bishops and their clergy; and the intertwined relationship between the material prosperity and social power of the African Church.