This latest collection of articles by Professor Frend brings together a further set of his papers on the history and archaeology of the Early Church. Eight of these relate to St Augustine and his times, and deal with the politics and thought of the Catholic and Donatist Churches in North Africa. Other groups are concerned with martyrs, and in particular the cult of martyrs in Byzantine North Africa and in Nubia, and with the reasons for the relative failure of Christianity in Roman Britain, while the final essay is devoted to the greatest of historians of Late Antiquity, Edward Gibbon, and his views on early Christianity.