This long-awaited book, the fruit of some decades of research, is truly wonderful. It opens up a whole new dimension of early Christian cultural history. What Susan Ashbrook Harvey has done is to focus on the different ways in which the sense of smell is employed in patristic accounts of experience and salvation. Central to her concerns is the Christian liturgy, which soon came, after the peace of the Church under Constantine, to make plentiful use of incense. Already, however, Christians had envisaged ideal worship as taking place amongst clouds of incense – see the account of the heavenly liturgy in the Apocalypse, the elders with bowls full of incense and the angel with the great censer – but in the days of persecution the earthly use of incense was associated with pagan worship, and would not have been suitable in clandestine worship. As soon as the Church gained its freedom, however, incense took its place in Christian worship. Even in the days of persecution, the sense of smell had played an important role in accounts of martyrdom: as the flames consume Polycarp, the watchers were aware of a ‘delicious fragrance’. Harvey draws on an immense range of sources, and her expertise in Syriac comes into its own, as she demonstrates how frequently in the Syriac tradition much is made of smell and incense: for instance, in the elaborate ceremony of the blessing of myron, or chrism, the blending of olive oil and balsam, together with many other fragrances. There are other smells: the stench of disease and corruption, which was often enough courted by the ascetics. In a wonderful section, Harvey explores how stench and fragrance come together in the accounts of the Stylites, with the reek of the suppurating sores of Symeon combining with the sweetness of the clouds of incense that rose up around the pillar. Harvey gently probes the significance of the place of smell: it is ‘transgressive’, not easily confined, but breaking through separation; the knowledge it conveys is participatory rather than objective. This could perhaps have been pushed a little further. Harvey notes how the classical philosophical tradition makes more of sight and sound, rather than scent or taste or touch; as epistemological models these different senses suggest very different ways of knowing. She notes this, but does not explore it; perhaps because her sources do not either. Right at the end, she observes that ‘[h]oly fragrance carried the Christian memory for the breath of life received from God by his first creation’ (p. 239). The mention of memory seems to appear from nowhere, but Harvey is absolutely right. It is striking how smells evoke memory (cf. Baudelaire), and also how taste and smell coinhere. There are the resources in this magnificent book for an exploration of ways of knowing yielding something very different from the ‘clearness and distinctness’ offered by the analogy of sight. In a sanitised world, where scent is often concealed under plastic wrapping, the rediscovery of ‘scenting salvation’ may be much more than a fresh scholarly line of research.