For scholars of late antiquity, Gaul has always been a favoured field of research, both because of the relatively large number of available sources and because of the undisputed importance of the region in the political and cultural history of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe. In recent years, moreover, against the backdrop of the remarkable growth of late antique studies, this interest seems to have increased still further.

Alison John's book is therefore the latest in a long series of monographs and conference proceedings on late antique Gaul to have appeared in recent years. To name but a few, one might mention Lucy Grig's important Popular Culture and the End of Antiquity in Southern Gaul (2024) - Grig was, not coincidentally, John's doctoral supervisor at Edinburgh -; the volume edited by Tabea Meurer and Veronika Egetenmeyer, Gallia docta? Education and In-/Exclusion in Late Antique Gaul (2023); and, more modestly, the present author's own Santi e sciamani: Una lettura storico-religiosa della Gallia tardoromana (2022). Whilst Grig and I have focused primarily on religious phenomena, seeking to trace the 'popular' and 'barbarian' components of Gallic Christianity, John follows Meurer and Egetenmeyer in making the Gallo-Roman educational system the central theme of her study - a subject to which she had already devoted several publications, including a chapter on the knowledge of Greek in Sidonius's circle that appeared in the very volume edited by Meurer and Egetenmeyer.

John's argument is simple: the end of classical education in Gaul in the sixth century was not brought about - as has generally been believed since the publication of Henri Marrou's influential Histoire de l'éducation dans l'Antiquité (1948) - by the economic decline and crisis of the urban system that are said to have afflicted the region in the wake of the fifth-century invasions, but by the profound shift in attitudes and priorities brought about among the more affluent classes by the settlement of barbarian peoples and the emergence of the Church as a political and cultural institution. These elites were no longer willing, as they once had been, to invest substantial resources in the education of their children. For whilst under the Empire a solid literary education and the ability to write and speak well were not only fundamental elements of aristocratic identity but also indispensable prerequisites for those aspiring to positions of power within the imperial administration, this was no longer the case in post-Roman Gaul. The values and priorities of the new holders of power - the barbarian aristocracy and the Church - had changed, and grammar and rhetoric, which had occupied such an important place in the socio-political culture of the Empire, were gradually relegated to the background, contributing within the space of a few generations to the decline and eventual disappearance of the traditional educational system.

The starting point of John's book is a prosopographical study of the teachers and students attested in Gaul between the fourth and sixth centuries, comprising a total of 52 teachers and 22 students (Chapter 1; a complete list is provided in Appendix I). According to the author, the disappearance of such attestations at the beginning of the sixth century - when only Cesarius of Arles and Pomerius can be identified with certainty - clearly indicates that, compared with the ages of Ausonius and Sidonius, traditional classical education had by then definitively lost the privileged position it had once occupied within Gallo-Roman society. The causes of this loss of centrality, as already noted, were not, in John's view, economic or fiscal - a deterioration in living conditions, the impoverishment of the aristocracy, or the decline of the cities - but rather ideological. In the second chapter, therefore, the author sets out to demonstrate that material conditions in Gaul continued largely unchanged for a considerable period of time, even under the rule of the new barbarian elites. The same, she argues, was true of the functioning of the schools of grammar and rhetoric. In the third chapter, John accordingly challenges the notion that the dissolution of imperial power in Gaul brought about the rapid disappearance of the classical educational system through the withdrawal of state funding. Although imperial authorities frequently provided financial support for teachers, she argues, such contributions never constituted their principal source of income: teachers of grammar and rhetoric depended primarily on fees paid by their pupils' families and on municipal funding. The reason for the demise of the traditional educational system in Gaul, therefore, lies in the fact that the new holders of power came to value other qualities - such as military prowess - more highly than paideia and eloquence.

This does not mean, of course, that rhetorical education disappeared altogether within the space of a few years. Many families continued to value traditional literary education highly and wished their children to receive a classical education. Yet such an education was no longer as indispensable as it had once been for attaining positions of power and social prestige. Rather, it gradually shifted from being a publicly recognised means of social and political advancement to becoming an increasingly private and personal value - a means of asserting one's identity and social status and of distinguishing oneself from the rest of society through the cultivation of a select circle of friendships (Chapter 4). Finally, John turns to the role played by the Church in this cultural transformation. Challenging the conventional view that ecclesiastical institutions took over the functions of traditional classical education, she argues that the Church, whilst not actively contributing to the demise of traditional paideia, nevertheless played an important indirect role. Its members, in general, were no longer expected to possess any particular rhetorical training; what was required instead was a more elementary level of education, sufficient to enable them to read the sacred texts and preach in church (Chapter 5).

John's extensive knowledge of the sources has enabled her to produce a well-researched and well-informed book that is both very clear and a pleasure to read. One question, however, might have received fuller treatment and, in my view, constitutes the principal limitation of the book. In seeking to demonstrate that the end of Roman rule in Gaul and the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms did not entail major changes either in the economic system or in the resources available to the aristocracy, John relies heavily (53-55) on Walter Goffart's well-known arguments, according to which the settlement of foreign populations did not involve the confiscation of land from Roman landowners, but rather the diversion to the newcomers of the tax revenues previously paid to the State. This is, of course, a highly controversial question that has generated an enormous scholarly literature, and a more extensive and independent discussion by John would therefore have been highly desirable, particularly given its importance to the overall argument of the book. This reservation notwithstanding, John's book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the cultural and political transformations that characterised a region as crucial as Gaul at the end of antiquity.

Carlo Ferrari