In August 1704 a young Kongolese woman named Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita rose from a sickbed convinced that Saint Anthony had taken up residence in her head and charged her with putting the Kingdom of Kongo back together. Thornton follows her from that vision into the movement she built, and sets both against a country split among rival claimants to a vacant throne.

The reconstruction rests on the reports of Italian Capuchins stationed in Kongo, Bernardo da Gallo and Marcellino d'Atri above all. Thornton is open about his own hand in the material: he restores reported speech to the first person so that participants speak directly, and he standardises Kikongo names on twentieth-century usage rather than seventeenth-century Portuguese spelling.

He rejects readings of the Antonian movement as early nationalism in a semi-colonial setting, placing it instead within Kongolese Christianity and dynastic conflict, and he writes the whole as narrative rather than argument, for readers outside the university.