The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa

W. H. C. Frend was a historian of the early church, and this Clarendon Press book is his long-standard monograph on the Donatist schism, the fourth and fifth century North African Christian movement that rejected clergy it viewed as having compromised under Roman persecution. Its strength is that it remains the fullest single treatment in English of the movement's history and sources, decades after publication. Its limit is one this atlas notes wherever the book is cited, Frend's particular social reading of Donatism, as substantially a movement of native African protest against Roman authority, is itself now argued with by later historians who read the evidence differently, so a claim resting on that specific interpretive framework should be flagged as one reading among others rather than settled fact.