After the Gothic wars, significant areas of the Italian peninsula were taken by the newly arrived Lombards. Chapter 5 discusses how convincing Lombard leaders, vacillating between Nicene and Christian Christianity, to embrace one of the available versions of the Christian faith became the goal of the representatives of various sides and how the Lombard religious ambiguity created a special environment in which different doctrines could coexist and compete.

Chapter 3 discusses the process by which Vandal Africa was transformed under Justinian’s reign into a province of the Roman Empire in which the Homoian presence declined and is no longer traceable in the sources. Our understanding of this development depends on two main aspects: the role of religious conflicts before and during the East Roman offensive on Africa and the measures (political, legal, ecclesiastical) taken to change the religious situation in Africa after the defeat of the Vandals.

Chapter 1 provides the broad context of Nicene–Homoian interactions in Africa, including those that preceded the Vandal conquest. It examines the involvement of the African church in the Trinitarian controversy of the fourth century and its intertwining with the Donatist crisis as these experiences explain the later attitude of the African clergy toward Vandal Homoianism.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

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 4 deals with Nicene–Homoian conversions in Italy under Ostrogothic rule. First it discusses the religious history of the Goths from the fall of the Hunnic empire to their triumph in the war with Odoacer, allowing us to better understand the nature of Gothic Homoianism in Italy and its relationship with the Nicene church. Then it examines conversions under Amal rule and the role of tolerance in their politics and ideology, and finally conversions between the Nicene and Homoian faith in the period of the Gothic War (535–54) and its aftermath.

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.

Violence in Nicene–Homoian relations is abundantly attested in Africa and attracts most scholarly attention. Chapter 2 attempts to place the problems of violence and coercion in a larger context and examine issues such the role of wealth and political power in the establishment of the Homoian church in Africa and its ability to spread throughout African society and compete with the Nicene church.

The Introduction presents the main topic of the book – the role of conversion and competition between Nicene and Homoian churches in the post-Roman West – and the methods applied. It explains terminology (Nicene, Homoian), theorises the concept of conversion as a tool of historical analysis, and presents the purpose of the cross-regional comparison that follows.

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.

Chapter 12 shows that the Covid-19 emergency and the ensuing suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and its sanctioning mechanisms in 2020 led to crucial changes in the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime. For example, the transnational distribution of EU funds, institutionalised by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) Regulation in 2021, meant that the post-Covid NEG regime no longer mimicked the divisive beggar-thy-neighbour tools that transnational corporations use to steer their subsidiaries and workforce. Even so, EU executives continue to direct the post-Covid NEG regime without much participation by national parliaments and the European parliament or unions and social movements. Instead of using the financial sanctions of the suspended SGP, EU executives use the policy conditionalities attached to RRF funding to reach their objectives, which are in keeping with the overarching commodification script.