This is the kind of book for which the word magisterial was intended. I've been reading Brown's work on the late Roman Empire since undergraduate classes, and this is the culmination of immersion in the big ones--Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose as well as the many congregants, faction leaders, bishops, donors and well-educated widows of the imploding Roman world. This book traces the fascinating process by which a church founded on humble poverty came to be an Imperial religion and then a replacement authority over the course of three hundred years in the west. Pre-Christian status through civic service and donations to public games and temples guaranteed fame and Roman honor, which the new Christian ideas of donation to the poor and treasure in the next world significantly questioned. Gradually, as Roman law adjusted so that revocation of wealth took into account relatives, clients and standing obligations, becoming a monk or nun opened up new social and political leverage, especially for women and middling provincial nobles. Eventually, as the empire itself ebbed and the church accumulated property, bishops took on the administrative and authoritative mantle of Roman officials in the west, completing a process of cross-over unimaginable in the early centuries of the faith.