At just over nine hundred pages, Brent Shaw's study offers a compelling and meticulous history of violence for late Roman North Africa, with a focus on the ‘sanctified violence’ of the fourth and fifth centuries. S. defines such violence as the ‘direct result of commitments and quarrels of a religious nature’ (773), and, in view of the period under discussion, the study's inevitable cynosure is the sectarian struggle between Catholic and dissident — rightly preferred by S. to the ‘othering’ label ‘Donatist’ — Christians, which came to be the defining struggle for generations of African Christians of the time, including Augustine of Hippo. As S. makes clear from the beginning, the rôle of Augustine and his ideas in the study have been intentionally diminished at the expense of investigating ‘the specific hatreds of Augustine's own generation’ (3): while commendable and in places edifying, S.'s ambition to keep Augustine's ‘self-promotion’ out of the controversy is only partially successful (was it ever really possible to do so?) and appears to have been all but forgotten by the end of the study: for example, ch. 16, with its focus on suicide as an example of sacred violence during the Catholic-dissident struggle, measures the meaning of self-killing in the struggle against Augustine's own moral and theological objections, and presents the crystallization of these objections in Augustine's De civitate dei as a philosophical bequest to Western moral thinking. This teleological approach is largely out of step with the rest of the study which in the main offers rigorous and unprecedented contextualization of the minutiae of late antique Christian sectarianism.

Sacred Violence is a big, complex book, which makes few concessions to those unfamiliar with the period and the issues under discussion. The study disavows a linear, narrativizing of North African sectarian relations, and pursues instead the reconstructive task of understanding the emergence of specific instances of violence in a range of civic settings. As a consequence perhaps of the absence of conventional signposts in the study (e.g. recapitulative introductions and conclusions to chapters are largely absent throughout), the impression given is of a series of investigative exercises into localized instances of violence in environments where both perpetrators and victims nevertheless share common ideals and experiences. Prominent themes connecting the chapters are nonetheless in evidence throughout the work. As S. indicates on a number of occasions, the performance of violence in the period is only half the story: the justification for the threat or use of violence was also central to the activities of both Catholic and dissident Christians. Therefore, much of S.'s analysis is dedicated to understanding the emergence of rhetorical cultures of violence and the rôle of social and cultural memory in honing justifications for violence, including some brilliant discussion of the rôle of rhetorical discourse in shaping sectarian boundaries (chs 5–7), and the conscious, sectarian imitation of the language and activities of potent interventions perpetrated by the imperial state (passim). All of this is offset by the moral markers prominent in many of the sources consulted which wrestle with advocating or condoning violence, whilst also conceding that its effectiveness was finite — limited as it was to localized rivalries. One detects that S. is intimating throughout a moral critique of sectarian violence, revealed perhaps by the use of comparative instances of episodes in modern, sectarian conflict (for example, Northern Ireland), and by highlighting the broader, violent context for ecclesiastical sectarianism in the activities of the Roman Empire, and the Vandal invasion of North Africa in the fifth century. As S. opines in ch. 17: ‘There is enough evidence to show that nothing internal to the identity politics engaged in by either side shifted the ground on which the battles were fought as much as did the sudden and unforeseen intervention of a tidal wave of large-scale violence: the Vandal incursions into Africa’ (802).

The study comprises an introduction, seventeen chapters, eight appendices (including Appendix F which offers a valuable reappraisal of scholarly assumptions about the feared Circumcellions), a detailed bibliography listing primary and secondary sources consulted by S. and a general index. In light of the study's length, the publication sensibly utilizes footnotes. In brief, some themes arising from individual chapters: ch. 1 (‘This Terrible Custom’) presents a survey of violent episodes in late antique North Africa in an effort to cleave apart micro from macro instances of violence, and introduce taxonomies into the study of sectarian conflict; ch. 2 (‘Church of the Traitors’) introduces the theme of betrayal as the central ideology shaping Catholic and dissident relations during the fourth and fifth centuries; ch. 3 (‘A Poisonous Brood of Vipers’) considers the historical realization of accusations of betrayal during these periods; ch. 4 (‘Archives of Memory’) discusses the rôle of historical memory in shaping the reception of archetypal events from the early 300s into the later decades of the fourth century; chs 5 (‘The City of Denial’), 6 (‘Ravens Feeding on Death’) and 7 (‘Little Foxes, Evil Women’) consider the uses to which state and ecclesiastical intervention against pagans, Jews and heretics (principally in North Africa being Manichaean Christians) during the period, supplied both the language and apparatus for managing sectarian conflict in Africa; ch. 8 (‘Guardians of the People’) analyses the changes in both Catholic and dissident enacting of the episcopal office during the period; chs 9 (‘In the House of Discipline’) and 10 (‘Sing a New Song’) provide highly valuable analyses of the rôle that homilies, pamphlets and hymns played in inciting aggressive behaviour among hearers and readers (cf. 436); ch. 11 (‘Kings of this World’) looks at bishops as lobbyists at the imperial court; ch. 12 (‘We Choose to Stand’) presents a stimulating reading of Catholic and dissident rivalries during the Council of Carthage in a.d. 411; ch. 13 (‘Athletes of Death’) investigates the necessary reappraisal of ideas of martyrdom in the landscape of Constantinian North Africa; chs 14 (‘Bad Boys’) and 15 (‘Men of Blood’) consider the identity and activities of Catholic and dissident enforcers of violence, primarily the controversial rôle taken by the Circumcellions; ch. 16 (‘Divine Winds’) discusses the practice of self-murder as a manifestation of dissident protest during the period, and the theological problems which suicide raised for commentators; ch. 17 (‘So What?’) serves as a conclusion by way of setting North African sectarianism of the fourth and fifth centuries in the context of events surrounding the demise of the Western Empire.

Sacred Violence is an enormous, humane work of monumental importance for which S. should rightly receive many accolades. It is written with a verve and alacrity which given its length, is a remarkable achievement. Among readers it is likely to divide opinion purely as a result of its organizational structure which is somewhat eccentric: it is hoped that future editions will include a revised introduction that — at the very least — will offer a summary of the contents of individual chapters.