I explain the title and report the contents. ‘Companion’: this is not a patrology but ten essays on various themes with an introduction by Amy-Jane Levine summarising the scope of each essay; ‘patristic’: the literature involved is Christian in origin and inspiration, dates from the second to the mid-fifth century and was composed in Latin or Greek; ‘feminist’, because at issue are the functions, social roles and relationships of women mutually and often in contrast with men's. All the essays are worth reading. Three are reprints: Elizabeth Castelli (1986 and here with updated bibliography) on virginity; Elizabeth Clark (1994) on the idea of woman; and Carolyn Osiek (2005) on woman patrons. This last-named piece, dealing with women's property rights fundamental to status and power, is especially informative. Its excellent examples, however, are not drawn from patristic literature and could not have been: ‘patristic literature’ is too limited a field of evidence. That is a problem with the genre. It is identified by Ross Kraemar in ‘When is a text about a woman a text about a woman?’ Here the convincing conclusion drawn is that ‘stories about women are unreliable, though not entirely unusable, sources for the actualities of women's lives and experiences in the ancient world’: the reader, for example, should not be deceived by the apparent reportage of the passio of Perpetua and Felicitas; more instructive, it is claimed, are the contemporary sources from Gebrauchliteratur, funerary inscriptions, catalogues of office-holders and the like. This, I suggest fully justified, scepticism saps confidence in Virginia Burrus' discussion, drawing on that passio, of the idea of the suffering martyr. Barbara Bowe on Clement of Rome, Denise Buell on Clement of Alexandria, write not of women's experience but of how men ‘constructed’ women; Teresa Shaw of how Evagrius prepared them for the spiritual life. Robin Jensen illustrates with pictures of ancient fonts the trope of baptism as rebirth. Kathy Gaca offers a cheerfully flippant interpretation of Epiphanes the ‘Gnostic’ more favourable than usual. There may be little mileage in feminist analysis of patristic literature, it being of no value to the church historian to repeat male stereotypical ‘constructions’ of women in the absence of the authentic female voice; but these essays well exemplify the approach, and all the kinds of thing worth saying are said here in these essays.