This chapter focuses on the transformation of rural landscapes in the western Roman Empire during Late Antiquity, analysing shifts in settlement patterns, economic structures and agrarian practices. It highlights the increasing availability of archaeological data over the past two decades, which has reinforced the idea that rural experiences during this period varied significantly across regions. Rather than a uniform decline, the countryside exhibited multiple trajectories, including contraction, reorganisation and, in some cases, expansion. A major theme is the decline of the villa system and the parallel emergence or resurgence of upland settlements and forested regions as integral components of rural economies. This study argues that these changes were not simply responses to political fragmentation but reflected broader socio-economic transformations, including shifts in land ownership, subsistence strategies and local production systems. It also examines the interplay between long-distance trade and localised economies, challenging the notion that rural economies collapsed entirely after the fall of Rome. The chapter further critiques traditional narratives that frame rural change through the binary lens of ‘continuity versus decline’. Instead, it advocates for a more nuanced approach that recognises both persistence and adaptation in late antique countryside economies.

Local, provincial, or ecumenical councils offered rare opportunities for bishops and other clergy members to weigh in on normative practice and establish precedents for ecclesiastical polity. While it remains debatable whether councils were effective in prescribing (or proscribing) Christian conduct and beliefs – be they among the heady echelons of clergy members or among the vast majority of laypeople – they nevertheless offer precious windows into which matters Christian leaders considered most urgent and immediate. Conciliar canons from late antiquity, and any historical period, resound with the bias and agenda of the dominant majority, and so treating them as windows through which modern readers can see what religious life was like “on the ground” for everyday Christians is problematic at best. By design, the canons convey the voice of the victors, so figuring out objections to them can be a challenge – and we can be sure that alternatives to the conciliar decisions existed. What conciliar canons do provide, then, is an indication of debates that raged among Christian groups in particular localities – debates about theology, clerical authority, communal organization and identity, ritual performance, and ascetic behavior.

Here is another text that witnesses to the early period of the island monastery of Lérins. Its author, Faustus, succeeded Maximus twice, first as abbot of Lérins and then as bishop of Riez. For his part, Maximus became the abbot after the monastery’s founder, Honoratus, was appointed bishop of Arles in 427 or 428. Maximus served as abbot until 433 or 434, when he became bishop of Riez. Faustus then replaced Maximus as abbot of Lérins, and when Maximus died sometime between 457 and 461, Faustus replaced him again, this time as bishop of Riez. Shortly after Maximus’ death, Faustus preached a homily to the church of Riez that stressed how the monastic virtues Maximus acquired at Lérins were a providential training for his pastoral ministry as bishop of Riez. In fact, Maximus was but one of several Lérinian monks installed as bishops in the 420s and 430s: besides Honoratus becoming bishop of Arles, also Hilary was made bishop of Arles in 430 and Eucherius bishop of Lyons around 434. Of course, Faustus himself followed the same trajectory.

As noted in the introduction to Hilary’s Sermon, Honoratus founded a monastic community sometime between 400 and 410 on an island off the coast of what is now Cannes in southern France. Then called Lerina, the island is now called Île Saint-Honorat de Lérins. Inspired by the desert fathers he had visited during his travels, Honoratus initiated at Lérins a style of monastic living that stressed individual ascetic pursuits within a communal context. It has been described as a monastery of hermits in community. As time went on, however, and due to the influence of the writings of Augustine and John Cassian – the latter dedicated his second set of Conferences to Honoratus and Eucherius (another monk of Lérins, who was chosen bishop of Lyon around 434) – the monastery of Lérins came to place more emphasis on the communal aspects of monastic living.

Between 400 and 410, Honoratus, the scion of a noble Gallic family, founded a monastic community on the island of Lérins (modern Île Saint-Honorat de Lérins, just off the coast of Cannes in southern France). A charismatic figure, Honoratus inspired many men from Gaul and elsewhere, including his relative Hilary, to take up the ascetic life at Lérins. Some years later, around 427 or 428, when the island monastery had become an unqualified success, Honoratus left to become bishop of Arles, although he died shortly thereafter in 430. His successor as bishop, Hilary, commemorated the first anniversary of Honoratus’ death in 431 with a sermon delivered to the Christian community of Arles on his life and virtues. Having only been in office for a year, Hilary used the sermon to provide a kind of apologia for his own episcopal leadership, presenting himself as Honoratus’ handpicked and personally trained successor. Hilary served as the bishop of Arles until his own death in 449.

Caesarius was born in the Burgundian city of Chalons-sur-Saône around 470. At the age of seventeen, he entered the island monastery of Lérins. But after a few years he was sent to Arles to regain his health, which he had ruined through intense asceticism. Aeonius, the bishop of Arles and a relative of Caesarius, ordained him to the diaconate and the priesthood, then appointed him the abbot of Trinquetaille, a monastery in the suburbs of Arles. When Aeonius died in 501 or 502, Caesarius succeeded him as bishop, a position that embroiled Caesarius in the politics of the area, in which the interests of the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Gallo-Romans were often in conflict. He became the most prominent bishop in the Gallic church when pope Symmachus of Rome confirmed him as metropolitan and papal vicar for Gaul in 514. He presided over a number of synods and councils in Gaul, the most important being the Council of Orange in 529, which condemned the teaching on grace that predominated in southern Gaul in favor of a modified Augustinian position.

The Roman conquests in the western Mediterranean saw the arrival of Roman coins, but in the east the local coinages at first remained and were manipulated.

Chapter 7 is focused on conversions in a family context, collecting and comparing evidence from Gaul, Hispania, and Italy. The starting point is an examination of the secular and ecclesiastical rules governing interdenominational marriages and the differences in church loyalty between parents and children. Then the conclusions drawn from the normative sources are connected with what we know about the social reality of ‘mixed’ families. Given the nature of our evidence, the chapter focuses primarily on marriages and conversions in royal contexts. It analyses the examples from the ruling house of Suevi, marriages in the Burgundian family of Gibichungs, and marriages between the Visigothic and Frankish ruling families.

Chapter 6 analyses how the re-emergence of Homoianism among the Visigoths, Vandals, and Suevi was interpreted in the Nicene church in Gaul and Spain and what this reception reveals about Nicene–Homoian relations in the region in the fifth century. It also examines the evidence for the development of the Homoian Church and the increase in the number of Homoians.

Chapter 8 is devoted to the ways in which some Nicene bishops attempted to persuade kings to convert, illustrated by the examples of Avitus of Vienne and Leander of Seville, and to conversion as a political project and as a theme of the ideology and theology of kingship in late sixth-century Visigothic Hispania. Conversion and royal rule in Gaul and Hispania were also linked to another important phenomenon: the cult of saints. Thus, in this chapter three cults that played an important role in Nicene–Homoian relations are analysed: the cults of the apostle Peter in Burgundy, of Martin of Tours in Gaul, and of Eulalia of Mérida in Visigothic Hispania.

Chapter 9 focuses on the processes of transition from a state of schism to Christian unity in Gaul and Hispania. The comparison of two councils, that of Orléans in 511 and Épaone in 517, show the lack of a uniform pattern to the organisation and enforcement of this change. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the transformation of the Visigothic kingdom begun in 589 and interpreted as a huge project, developed in close collaboration between the king and the secular and ecclesiastical elites, which laid the foundation for Christian culture in seventh-century Hispania and demonstrated the transformative power of conversion ideas in the early medieval West.

Hugeburc, an Anglo-Saxon nun who moved to Germany and became abbess of Heidenheim, undertook a biography of Willibald, who with his brother Wynnebald had travelled from England with his father on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Willibald eventually became bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The heart of Hugeburc’s biography is concerned with Willibald’s experiences in the Holy Land, where he visited many sites mentioned in the Bible: he told Hugeburc of his adventures and she recorded them in a kind of diary form, which contrasts with the more elaborate style of the Latin she uses in the non-dictated sections.

Caesar’s conquest of Gaul makes for a fascinating study in mass-violence in the ancient world. Caesar’s own narrative of his conquest, the Bellum Gallcium, provides us with one of our few first-hand accounts of conquest. Caesar’s keen political eye means that the narrative must be one he considered would resonate with a significant proportion of Romans. As such, it provides perhaps one of our best guides not so much as to what happened, but as to the place of mass violence within Roman thinking. Within the text, Caesar clearly states what can be regarded as a genocidal’ desire, namely that the ‘the stock and name of the tribe’ (stirps ac nomen civitatis) of the Germanic Eburones might be destroyed for their role in ambushing Caesar’s forces (Bellum Gallicum 6.34), as well as narratives of other acts of mass-killing. In addition, Caesar narrates several instances of mass-enslavement – an action that, although not readily caught by modern legal definitions of genocide, would have the same effect by dispersing a people, and causing the cessation of that people’s existence as a distinct group of people. However, Caesar’s text also shows a concern to portray such events as justified as within a retributive framework of wrongs done to Rome.

This chapter examines the changes in agricultural practices and the dispersal of new plants in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Gallic provinces after their incorporation into the Roman empire. It investigates the effects colonization may have had on agricultural practices. The provinces chosen as case studies were the object of large colonization programmes organized by Caesar and Augustus.Although the available archaeobotanical data for these regions is uneven, it is possible to detect in these provincial territories similar trends to those observed for Roman Italy: an increase, in the late first century BC, with notable peaks in the early first century AD, in the number and variety of horticultural produce available. The evidence from northern and northeastern France and the western Netherlands suggests a connection between the presence of the army and the import of new plant foods first, and the local cultivation of some of these new plants later. Such evidence offers a compelling picture for the diffusion of cultivation techniques and dietary changes that took place in the early empire.

Chapter 8 discusses the archaeological evidence for cultivation choices made on provincial estates, trying to establish when large-scale arboriculture was a viable and appealing choice for growers. The case study of two farms in southern France suggests that even for modest colonial famers cultivating the grapevine and making wine for the market were attractive commercial choices. The fact that these cultivated a combination of wild and cultivated vines might be indicative of the limited opportunities they had in accessing plant cuttings and young vines from nurseries. The chapter concludes by comparing the Iberian and Gallic evidence with that available for Roman Britain, a region for which rich archaeobotanical datasets exists. The Roman era increased the range of plant foods consumed and allowed the acclimatization of certain plants into Britain; here, large-scale fruit cultivation seems to have occurred on larger estates, whose proprietors had access to capital, technical knowledge and markets with sufficient aggregate demand. Roman Britain shows quite clearly that the overall pattern in the distant provinces was not so different from the heartland of Roman agriculture.

The question of Visigothic slavery has generally been treated in the context of larger studies on the Visigoths or of the Mediterranean economy rather than studies devoted to slavery. Even when it has been examined as a thing unto itself, it has tended to get folded into larger narratives of the development of social relations in the early Middle Ages. Marxist historians, such as Abilio Barbero, Marcelo Vigil, and Chris Wickham, have attempted to fit the evidence into a historical materialist narrative that posits a decline of slavery and slaveholding in the post-Roman world as states contracted and serfs or peasants replaced slaves as the primary agricultural producers. This narrative has been countered by French social historians, especially Georges Duby and Pierre Bonnassie, who argued that slavery continued to predominate in the early medieval West, giving way to serfdom only in the tenth century.

This chapter surveys the archaeological evidence for the period of the settlement of Brittany from Britain. The absorption of the Armorican peninsula into the land-based Roman Empire in the first century BC ended its long-standing role in prehistory as an important bridge for trade and cultural communication between the Atlantic Archipelago and the Continent. It was further marginalised by the concentration of resources in frontier zones under the late Empire. However, the political and economic decline of late-Roman Armorica was apparently gradual, in contrast with the sudden disruption of the relatively prosperous lowland zone of Britain in the early fifth century. Differences such as these may partly explain the absence of direct archaeological evidence for migration. The absence from Brittany of the high-status material culture seen in Britain outside the zone of English settlement in the fifth to seventh centuries (hill-forts, decorated metalwork, imported pottery) may reflect Brittany’s relative poverty but also the extreme diffusion of political power there, and a lesser degree of conflict. More modest, newly discovered archaeological evidence indicates Brittany’s continued connections to the wider world of north-western Europe in more basic developments in agriculture and rural settlement forms.

Caesar’s tumultuous first consulship in 59 is often regarded as the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Yet scholars have been too impressed with Bibulus’s and Cato’s obstructionist tactics, and too ready to concede that they were "correct" from a traditional republican perspective. A common modern perception of the year 59 is that by rejecting Bibulus’s attempted obstruction, Caesar demolished the constitutional constraints on executive and popular power that defined the Republic. But far from representing an established republican constitutional tradition, Bibulus, Cato, and those who followed their lead had pushed the obstructive devices available to them far beyond their customary limits. The notion that Caesar simply imposed his will in the assemblies through violence is also overly simplistic. Nor was the Senate reduced to a "rump" of Caesarian or Pompeian partisans. Caesar’s acta of 59 remained formally valid even while some senators, such as Bibulus himself, continued to try to cast doubt on their legitimacy.