Theodore de Bruyn makes the case that amulets—charms for healing and protection, inscribed on papyrus and other media—are natural extensions of the culture of early Christian scribality and liturgy, and, in that sense, they should be considered as artifacts of early Christianity as much as ascetic literature and exegesis. Amulets also drew on what he calls “customary practices”—techniques of magical writing shared broadly among Jewish, Christian, and ancient priestly scribal traditions around the Mediterranean. But the interests of the Christian scribes in de Bruyn's telling were very much part of ecclesiastical and monastic cultures. This argument is not unique, advancing as it does a growing consensus among scholars of early Christian magical texts, but he lays out this new “internal” Christian context of amulets both lucidly and systematically, informed through the perspective of papyrology.

Making Amulets Christian comprises six chapters, along with a substantive introduction and conclusion. The “introduction” clarifies terminology—“amulet,” “scribe,” and so forth—and provides a review of the basic corpora. De Bruyn admits here to sidelining materials written in Coptic, an unfortunate decision given the somewhat different picture of “magic” that the Coptic materials provide for the same period that this book covers (roughly third through seventh century). While the Greek texts de Bruyn covers cleave closely to Christian scripture and Gospel lore, the Coptic materials evince a striking eclecticism in their variations on liturgy, their functions (including curses), and even references to old Egyptian gods. Yet these texts, too, are now properly situated in the kind of social world de Bruyn lays out: Christian scribes familiar with scripture and liturgy, especially in monastic contexts.

Chapter 1, “Normative Christian Discourse,” reviews the early (pre-fourth century) and subsequent discourses by which Christian authors framed protective and healing rites and materials—sometimes as “magic” and other times as merely suspect. Chapter 2, “Materials, Format, and Writing,” reviews the features of the amulets according to papyrological standards, such as the hands and visual elements—like charaktēres, nomina sacra, and carmina figurate—which both endowed potency and might show the writers' deliberate adherence to ecclesiastical conventions. Chapter 3, “Manuals of Procedures and Incantations,” relates the Christian amulets to the major “magical” corpora discovered and edited in the last few centuries. Chapter 4, “Scribal Features of Customary Amulets,” addresses the nature of the Christian amulet. Here, de Bruyn tentatively distinguishes Christian scribes who practiced closer to the institutional “center” from those who operated on a periphery, using as criteria the amulets' adherence to scriptural wording and nomina sacra conventions. But for most people in late antiquity, this center/periphery distinction probably meant little. Chapter 5, “Scribal Features of Scriptural Amulets,” examines a phenomenon of increasing interest in New Testament studies these days: scripture passages and Gospel incipits written and folded specifically for protective or healing purposes (especially the Lord's Prayer, Psalm 90, and the Letter to Abgar).

Chapter 6, “Christian Ritual Contexts,” is in many ways the most important part of the book, looking at the various indications of liturgical performance behind these materials and “the role of the liturgy not only in establishing the value of the acclamation but also in determining its wording” (195). In the conclusion, de Bruyn delves even further into social models for Christian scribes: their creative autonomy, their status in villages, and their shared culture of incantation.

This book conveys exemplary familiarity with ritual theory and social history, and its attention to institutional contexts is extraordinarily helpful in situating “magic” in culture. But for all de Bruyn has achieved in this book, it must be said that he still labors to resolve a dichotomy that some readers may find artificial: that is, the broader cultural customs of amulet-crafting versus the intra-Christian scribal conventions of liturgy and scripture writing—or, in the words of the title, the “making Christian” of “amulets.” To be sure, de Bruyn must be congratulated for moving this dichotomy away from older pagan/Christian or magic/religion schemes. And yet those schemes still hover over the relegation of voces magicae and charaktēres to a “customary tradition” anterior to Christian scribality, to notions of institutional center and periphery in the locating of the amulets' scribes, and to de Bruyn's own attention to “completeness” in scriptural quotations as a gauge of institutional centrality. Christianization did not involve the “conversion” of older conventions so much as the full-scale adoption of those conventions to articulate Christianity itself, such that charaktēres, voces magicae, and the very phenomenon of the amulet became techniques of Christian scribality itself, not survivals. Notions of center and periphery seem anachronistic when the Christianity of many parts of Egypt comprised the teachings of a particular abbot or holy man, and new currents of text criticism are casting doubt on the idea of original or complete texts.

This is not to say that these “customary traditions” of amulets did not exist before Christianity entered Egypt or that holy men, shrine attendants, and independent literati did not have a more traditional sense of the efficacy of the written word for diverse functions. Nor can we deny that some scribes developed a peculiar sense of propriety in writing scriptural or liturgical phrases in amulets, for how could Christianity, in all its diversity, not have inspired criteria and customs in the preparation of magical writing? But we must be careful to approach these various subcultures of Christian scribes and their conventions as representative of the complicated and inconsistent process of Christianization overall, not in terms of distance from a center or of “making Christian” some ancient amulet customs that go back to the compilers of the Greek Magical Papyri.

Still, de Bruyn has done an enormous service to the study of late antique Christianity—not the least in almost entirely avoiding the term magic as quite simply irrelevant to his topic.