This short book is a greatly expanded version of the plenary lecture entitled “Religion and the End of the Roman West,” which was delivered at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies on May 14, 2016. I am very grateful to the organizers for the invitation to deliver a plenary, and in particular to Simon Forde, who asked me to turn the lecture into the present publication. I am also very grateful to an old friend, Professor Thomas F. X. Noble, who acted as chair at the lecture.

The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan provided me with the opportunity to examine a subject that has long troubled me: how is one to keep in balance at least a sample of the numerous rewarding approaches to the period from the fourth to the seventh centuries, when many of them, it seems to me, have followed differing, sometimes seemingly mutually exclusive, trajectories? The most obvious rift is between socio-religious history on the one hand and socio-economic history on the other. The solution that I offer here is to present the Church, which is usually treated from a religious or social viewpoint, in terms of numbers, following a largely empirical line of argument: for me the idea probably derives from a sadly unpublished paper by Anthony Bryer, in which he provided a spell-binding analysis of the Byzantine Church as an economic institution.

I am indebted to numerous friends, and an even larger number of students, who have discussed aspects of the topic with me over the years: I think in particular of friends in the “Bucknell/Woolstone” group, of peers involved in the “Transformation of the Roman World” project, colleagues and students associated with “Texts and Identities” and “Networks and Neighbours,” as well as Robert Wiśniewski's team working on “Presbyters in the Late Antique West,” with whom I debated often during a fellowship at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies. Many of them appear in the footnotes, and to name them all would take up a very considerable number of lines. who have commented on the book in one of its drafts: Stanisław Adamiak, Ann Christys, John Haldon, Pawel Nowakowski, Helmut Reimitz, Mark Stansbury, Jerzy Szafranowski, Chris Wickham, and Robert Wiśniewski; as well as Adrien Bayard, who very kindly tracked down a citation that had eluded me.