Early Christians who used Latin as the language of prayer used a language that lacked the antiquity of Hebrew and the prestige of Greek and that had long been used in pagan cults. But its presence among Pilate's inscriptions on the cross gave it a place among the sacred languages and its privileged position in the Roman empire also helped to assure its use in the liturgy of the Church in the west in late antiquity and during the Middle Ages. The abandonment of Latin in favour of vernacular languages by Protestant Churches in the sixteenth century compromised a supremacy which was eventually removed by the Second Vatican Council. La Prière en latin de l'antiquité au XVIe siècle presents twenty-six discussions, all of a very high standard of scholarship and written in French, of discrete aspects of prayer in Latin and of its vocabulary, rhetoric and theology. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the quantity and the diversity of the material that lies open to investigation and that includes, besides the vast evidence of private and public spoken and silent prayer, drama, song, gesture, posture, dance, inscriptions and notarial documents. No overall synthesis emerges from these piecemeal studies. But both singly and together they succeed in pushing forward frontiers of study and several do point in similar directions. Familiar distinctions, such as those between petition and thanksgiving or between private and liturgical or ritual public prayer crumble in the light of overlaps or of changing contexts. Questions about continuity or its antithesis are put and answered. The studies offered here of Etruscan and other early Italic and Roman forms of prayer demonstrate a precision in the use of formulas and in the performance of gestures which underlie and helped to mould the forms of Christian prayer in Latin when pagan prayer was ‘converted’ to Christian use. Ten studies are devoted to this and they are followed by fourteen studies spanning the patristic, medieval and Reformation periods. Among these is an essay by J.-P. Weiss on fifth-century debates about what makes prayer possible: desire or grace? P. Henriet relates the questions raised during the ninth century about the efficacy of prayer to similar questions raised at the same time about the efficacy of sacraments. He also traces changes in the understanding of the mass away from being seen as a communion of the faithful gathered in prayer and towards being seen, by the twelfth century, as a penitential act of intercession performed by priests. Another point that is well made by B. Petey-Girard for the Reformation period is that the consequences for Catholic prayer of Protestant innovations with vernacular languages have not yet been fully explored. In a masterly concluding chapter, which focuses on words and performance, N. Bériou summarises some of the findings presented in this impressive volume.