Hi there -- I'm not what you'd call an "official" Mudcatter but I follow some of the threads occasionally ... in the context of this one I was wondering if anyone (like maybe Okiemockbird, who seems to be pretty good about sources and scholarship and such) knows of any good scholarship on actual just-before-christianity culture and society in Europe, and what was going on in the conversion itself? I've been curious about this for a while, being unsatisfied with both the miracle-and-martyrdom stories you get from some Christian sources and the standard "well, they were all forced to convert on pain of death, weren't they?" that you tend to get if you ask your friends ... any good books taking both archaeological and historical evidence into account?

I admit to being too lazy, or maybe too busy or something, to really want to go looking at a lot of primary sources; I'm hoping someone has done this research and I can just read it :-)

JZG