An accessible and authoritative overview capturing the vitality and diversity of scholarship that exists on the transformative time period known as late antiquity.

• Provides an essential overview of current scholarship on late antiquity – from between the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the end of Roman rule in the Mediterranean
• Comprises 39 essays from some of the world's foremost scholars of the era
• Presents this once-neglected period as an age of powerful transformation that shaped the modern world
• Emphasizes the central importance of religion and its connection with economic, social, and political life
• Winner of the 2009 Single Volume Reference/Humanities & Social Sciences PROSE award granted by the Association of American Publishers