The relationship between Christianity and classical culture is by any measure a well-worked field. The main questions are well-known, the main texts notorious, the main paradoxes still paradoxical. In the near future, the most progress is perhaps likely to be made through the study of documentary texts, which reveal the detail, insofar as we can recover it, of individual Christian lives and the practices of communities. Peter Gemeinhardt makes an important contribution to that project in this learned, wide-ranging and incisive study of Christianity and ‘pagan’ culture in the (mainly) Latin-speaking west.

Gemeinhardt takes as his focus those aspects of culture which are expressed and reproduced in education, specifically in enkyklios paideia, and within that, in the study of literature, grammar and rhetoric. These, he argues, are what ‘pagan culture’ – or at least the problematic part of it – largely meant to Christians. After summarising current trends in scholarship on Christianity and paideia, he sketches recent developments in the history of education, which have tended to stress that education was highly socially functional, often in practical ways which have little to do with appreciating language or literature for their own sake. This view of education forms the background to Gemeinhardt's own argument and fits nicely with his approach.

Gemeinhardt re-examines the evidence for the literary culture of pre-Constantinian Christian writers in the west (including those writing in Greek), and explores the diverse ways in which they used it – as an intellectual tool, as a weapon in polemic against both non-Christians and alleged heretics, and as a basis for rapprochement between Christianity and secular culture. So far, so conventional, but Gemeinhardt follows this with a detailed investigation of the documentary evidence for Christian teachers in schools before Constantine (a period less well-investigated than the later fourth century). He then discusses the Christianising of the upper classes in the fourth century, showing that there was more discussion and conflict between Christians and non-Christians, over a longer period, than we have realised, and exploring how culture was used in those debates. Returning to the literary culture of Christians, he uses the evidence of epigraphy (mainly gravestones), letters and hagiography to show how widespread literary culture was among ‘ordinary Christians’ (i.e. not bishops and theologians, and not necessarily the very rich). The theme of all these sections is how warmly a wide range of Christians embraced classical culture, and how widely they advertised their cultural accomplishments.

Moving back to the post-Constantinian era (and demonstrating that Constantine is not to be taken for granted as an equally decisive turning-point in every aspect of the development of Christianity and its relationship with the wider culture), Gemeinhardt takes a fresh look at the number of Christians teaching in schools before and after Julian's legislation, and discusses late fourth- and fifth-century views of the usefulness of grammar and rhetoric. In conclusion, he argues that Christian thinking about Graeco-Roman culture went through a number of phases, and was seen in many ways, from something which Christian identity required one to reject, to something which could be a marker of Christian identity, to something which should be protected even as the Roman empire disintegrated.

Gemeinhardt's approach and argument are part of a growing trend in scholarship on Christian, and late antique, culture and identity, which stresses that culture was used in diverse ways, identity is a complex and moveable feast, and the ‘triumph of Christianity’ in the fourth century was neither so swift nor so complete as some contemporary Christian authors would like us to believe. The particular strengths and the major contributions of Gemeinhardt's work lie in its emphasis on the west and in his juxtaposition of masses of documentary and literary material. The result grounds high-level Christian debate firmly in a wider context of actual Christian practices, and gives readers a sense, not just of what was being talked about, but of what was being done by individuals and communities. This is very illuminating in its own right. It also allows us to compare Christian culture in east and west more closely than we often have been able to do, and to see that the breadth and depth of the culture of western Christians compares better with that of easterners than we might have expected. The inscriptions that Gemeinhardt discusses are well in line with the evidence of papyri from Egypt, for instance that ordinary Christians went on acquiring, enjoying and advertising secular education and culture throughout the period when theologians were agonising about its appropriateness and value.

Gemeinhardt rightly observes how often life outruns thinking in achieving a reconciliation between Christianity and classical culture. Many of the figures he studies – notably Tertullian and Augustine – show in practice how productively it was possible to combine the two, even while they worry about doing it. Ultimately, Gemeinhardt argues that Christians came to accept and make use of classical education and literary culture for two main reasons, one practical and one theological. Education and culture were simply too central to ignore in the world in which Christians lived. And embracing them was a way of embracing that world as the place where God's word was made flesh. With this, Gemeinhardt reminds us that one way or another, and whatever other considerations were in play, theology was always central to early Christian thinking. It makes an apt and satisfying conclusion to his history.

By focusing on literature, grammar and rhetoric, which were only part of secular education, Gemeinhardt (like other scholars before him) probably underplays, if anything, the extent of education's influence on early Christianity. I suspect that there is more work to be done, too, on the practical, social reasons for Christianity's debt to high philosophy; an analogy with grammar and rhetoric suggests itself. And Christian treatments of other aspects of non-Christian culture – notably the visual arts – are clearly related to Christian attitudes to literary culture and deserve more exploration and connection with literary debates than they have yet had. But any or all of these themes may be taken up in the future. This study, within the boundaries it sets itself, is to be congratulated for throwing a good deal of new light on a familiar topic, and will be much valued by all those who work in the field.