"Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, a recent Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1996), and a current assistant professor for Roman history at McGill University in Montreal, proffers an interesting and controversial analysis of the Divine Institutes of Lactantius in The Making of a Christian Empire. Historians of early Christianity will welcome this detailed treatment of the Institutes of Lactantius in the English language, and will appreciate this thorough assessment of that work within the religious debates of the fourth century. However, as is often the case with dissertations expanded into first books, the author overlooks some important questions and sources, and pushes her thesis further than the evidence allows. "

Book Review of Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius & Rome. Cornell University Press, 2000, published in The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 87, 3 (2001), pp. 479-81.