ABSTRACT
The study of Late Antique religion has been transformed in recent decades by a wide-ranging reassessment of long-held views about the ‘triumph of Christianity’ and the demise of paganism. Nevertheless, certain traditional generalizations have persisted which, when applied, as they are, to the empire as a whole, obscure the diverse ways that the pagan-Christian encounter unfolded from one region of the empire to the next. Such is the case, for example, when scholars treat the Christianization of the late Roman countryside. This development is conventionally represented as a process of coercion in which a relatively passive and simple-minded peasantry was pressed into conformity with ecclesiastical norms through the agency of legislative threats, grass-roots iconoclasm, and the coercive powers of bishops and landowners.1 Yet, when one considers the process of Christianization in the rural communities of late Roman Africa, one discovers a situation that is far more complex and interesting than the conventional narrative of Christian intolerance and coercion will allow.
