The reader of this 1,000-page volume may wonder what has been excluded by the stipulation ‘Origen as writer’. It is prefaced by two elegant studies, one by Lorenzo Perrone on Origen's use of cross-referencing to consolidate his literary corpus, the other by Antonio Cacciari on his appropriation of the rhetorical term diastolê to express gradations in the scale of being. The other contributions are divided into eight sections: milieu, scope, hermeneutics, apologetic, commentaries, language, philosophical sources and disciples. The strange result is that many pieces of similar interest are widely separated. Sebastian Guly's argument that Origen could envisage a salvation of the devil which did not imply equality with the saints would have made a fine companion-piece to Gerald Bostock's daring thesis that the primordial serpent in Origen is not only Satan but the Egyptian Seth. So too would Piotr Scholz's inventory of other elements which may be of ‘Altägyptisch’ provenance. Sebastian Morlet on Origen's assiduous application of the principle of sumphônia prefigures, at a distance of 400 pages, Olivier Munnich's subtle examination of his recasting of the Scriptures from within in his Homilies on Jeremiah. Charlotte Koeckert concludes that Didymus innovates on Origen chiefly by abridgement and simplification, while Emmanuela Prinzivalli finds that he accords a higher value to the spiritual sense; they are not, however, brought into conversation by the editors. I applaud Giulio Maspero's demonstration that to interpret the seraphs in Isaiah's vision as representatives of the Son and Spirit does not imply that these persons of the Trinity are mere angels; I hope that both Catholic and Orthodox writers will take note of John Slotemaker's argument that the ‘primity’ of the Father is as salient a feature of Latin as of Greek theology; and I would have wished to see both placed somewhat closer to the article in which Samuel Fernandez tries to winnow the metaphorical from the literal in Origen's images of emanation. Joseph O'Leary's cautious essay on theodicy and the last things could have been juxtaposed as a corrective to Christian Hengesterman's peremptory reassertion of Origen's Platonism, by which he means the adoption of Plotinian tenets thirty years before they were promulgated. The section on the disciples of Origen is the most cohesive, though it is hard to believe that John Dechow's account of the fifteen anathemas falsely attributed to Jerome was designed to end so abruptly. The volume could have been shortened considerably by the abbreviation of Matthew Pereira's analysis of the letter to Gregory Thaumaturgus; his neighbour Leszek Misiarczyk, on the other hand, has more work to do if he is to prove that Origen relied directly on Justin and not on traditions common to both. Christoph Markschies writes with characteristic erudition on the scholia; Vlad Nicolescu offers a lucid epitome of the hermeneutic theories which he presents elsewhere in a more exacting idiom; Eric Junod on Origen's presentiment that his readers would misunderstand him ought surely to have been either the preamble or the tailpiece to this collection.