ABSTRACT
The roving bands of armed men and women, who wandered through the north African countryside in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, known as circumcellions, engaged in violent assaults on their sectarian enemies. These circumcellion bands were a characteristic element of the sectarian violence that rent the two Christian churches, the Catholic and the “Donatist,” into which the Christian community in Africa had come to be divided in the post-Constantinian age.1 The aim of this inquiry is not to describe these violent men and their activities yet again, but rather to begin a process of questioning the standard claims made about them by modern historians.2 The essence of the modern project of identifying the circumcellions and their activities has been to apply all available data in order to produce a general picture of a social movement. In the rush to sketch this picture, however, the nature of the data has never been fully and rigorously interrogated nor has the historical context of their production been 1 This paper is based on the oral presentation made at the Shifting Frontiers V Conference. The arguments and the evidence are a much abbreviated forms those found in a longer paper entitled “Who Were the Circumcellions?” in A.H. Merrills (ed.), Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique Africa (London, 2004). In this paper I have deliberately left the term “"circumcellion” uncapitalized whenever possible in order to avoid the inference that there was an objective, well-defined group known by this name. 2 A full list of standard works would be prohibitive. For our purposes, it is sufficient to consult W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford, 1952 [rev. edn 1971]); J.-P. Brisson, Autonomisme et christianisme dans l’Afrique romaine de Septime Sévère à l’invasion vandale (Paris, 1958); H.-J. Diesner, Kirche und Staat in spätrömischen Reich: Aufsätze zur Spätantike und zur Geschichte der Alten Kirche (Berlin, 1963) chs 4-5; and E. Tengström, Donatisten und Katholiken: Soziale, wirtschaftliche und politische Aspekte einer nordafrikanischen Kirchenspaltung (Göteborg, 1964). Between them, these authors cite most of the earlier relevant bibliography. A number of Frend’s papers in which he continues the same line of argument that he began in the early
carefully considered. This uncritical marshalling of all possible evidence has understandable psychological roots. In their overwhelming “desire for evidence,” historians of the circumcellion question have grasped at whatever data are available. Because the data for this particular problem are not very numerous, historians have tended to cobble together all statements as if they are all of more or less equal value.3 What I propose here is an exploratory foray into the nature of the evidence. The results will be entirely negative.
