Contemporary Historiography on Christianity in Vandal and Byzantine Africa (1785-2020)

Abstract

The present chapter examines the historiography of Vandal and Byzantine religion from ca. 1785 to the present. Until relatively recently, extended studies of post-Roman North Africa were scarce. The works of Charles Diehl (1896) and Christian Courtois (1955) are striking exceptions within a field primarily interested in earlier periods of North African history. During the 19th century, the Vandals were primarily viewed for their military and political activity, rather than their religious policies, and Byzantine Africa was generally presented as a coda to Roman and early Christian periods of occupation. The dramatic expansion of archaeological and philological scholarship in the latter part of the twentieth century had an important effect upon the understanding of these groups, but it is only in the last twenty years that detailed scrutiny of the later periods of pre-Islamic North Africa have become widespread.