Although some New Testament works are discussed, this book mainly focuses on the much less well-known and often overlooked texts of the Apostolic Fathers, with Justin Martyr's work serving as the chronological endpoint. Christine Trevett offers the first comprehensive historical analysis of the lives of early Christian women based on this particular body of evidence. Her study is informed by Roman history and she adopts a selective geographical approach in an attempt to capture early Christianity's diversity. The volume is divided into three main parts: i: Clement, Cor (usually known as 1 Clement) and Corinth: ‘Not little women, not good wives: the politics of disorder in Corinth’; ii: ‘Rome and The Shepherd: Rhoda, Grapté, and the virtues: church-building in Rome’; iii: ‘Asia Minor: Ignatius, Polycarp and others: Ammia, Alcé and the goddess Artemis: Asia Minor’. Trevett reconstructs the worlds of the named women and of the women who figured in the conflicts and daily struggles reflected in these documents. Women are sometimes presented as agents of change, such as in the discussion of the Corinthian situation. But their existences, particularly as slave women and women married to nonbelievers, are also examined in light of the hostility of society and the early Church response. Echoing the pejorative reference to [literally] ‘little women’ (gynaikaria; NRSV: ‘silly women’) in 2 Timothy iii. 6, Trevett highlights the shared Christian and pagan proclivity to address the weakness and vulnerability of women; throughout the book she makes thematic use of the concept of ‘little women and good wives’, which also reflects those ‘“classics” of reading for schoolgirls of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries’ (p. 2). Her style of writing is engaging and she employs creative comparisons throughout; picking up on B. H. Streeter's 1929 description of Hermas, for example, The Shepherd is compared to Alice in Wonderland (p. 110). Not surprisingly, given her previous work on women and Montanism, her analysis of the women prophet-teachers of Asia Minor (pp. 233–47) is especially impressive. In the face of debate about the true existence of particular female figures (for example, Grapté in The Shepherd, pp. 158–9), or the reliability of witnesses concerning the women of this period (for example, Eusebius on Ammia, pp. 240–3), Trevett usually comes down on the side of historicity. She certainly realises that the evidence is disparate in terms of genre, but some readers will no doubt wish for more extensive literary analysis of the sources with respect to their portrayal of women. On the other hand, her historical study – with clear attempts to speak to the concrete circumstances of women – comes as a refreshing change from much recent work which has explored the lives of women as the literary constructs of male authors and has been highly reluctant to draw conclusions about real women. Her bold reconstructions, such as the imagined content of Grapté's oral proclamations (pp. 159–60), will do much to advance our understanding of the roles of women in early church communities.