Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284-641. Blackwell History of the Ancient World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007

[...] it is consciously modernizing in the best possible sense, drawing lessons for the interpretation of the later Roman empire from the rapid collapse of political structures that had seemed destined for eternity until they were suddenly gone, which we have experienced in the modern world over the last twenty years. Religious developments, which occupy an enormous mass of the source material for the period, are also set happily into the political context that created them; and the relatively minor importance of religious affairs in the imperial priority-list before the time of Justinian, where governmental and especially military priorities always dominated imperial thinking, is adequately emphasized.