The fame of Origen's tract on the Witch of Endor was enhanced by the rejoinders that it elicited from Eustathius of Antioch and Gregory of Nyssa. This volume contains editions and translations of all three, together with notices of the episode in Justin Martyr, Tertullian and the Martyrdom of Pionius none of whom concedes, as Origen did, that the text of 1 Samuel means what it says when it recounts the evocation of Samuel's ghost from the nether world. Such a compilation, which has no precedent in English, cannot fail to be of value to the student of patristic exegesis, although it would have been even more so had it been free from error and stronger in analysis. The introduction usefully gathers classical antecedents for the hermeneutic and rhetorical practices of these early Christian writers, but the appendix on the ‘rhetoric of allegory’ is not so much elementary as misleadingly schematic. The reader is left to imagine (p. ci) that a reading cannot be literal, and must therefore be allegorical, when it surpasses the intention of the author. But Origen seldom purports to read either literally or allegorically, and the deduction of a general truth from its temporal evidences – here, for example, of the soul's immortality from the presence of Samuel in Hades – is an incipient form of anagôgê, or upward reasoning, characteristic of all theologians in the presence of Scripture. The assertion that anagôgê is Origen's synonym for allegory (p. xcvii) simply obscures the question that it begs. The renderings from the Greek are for the most part lucid and accurate, but Tertullian seems at times to have defeated his translators. On p. 12 ‘ut anima corporis iusta sustineat’ means ‘that the soul should receive the rites due to the body’, not ‘that the soul of the body accepts due ceremonies’; on p. 16 ‘aliquem se ex parentibus hominis sui affirmat’ means ‘declares itself one of the ancestors of the man [whom it possesses]’, not ‘claims that the person it possesses is one of the ancestors’; on p. 24 ‘competit eam priorem pensare merces cui priori debeantur’ means ‘the first to receive the deserts should be the one to whom they are first owed’, not ‘the soul should be the first to receive the deserts owed to it because it is the first’. The epithet ‘enormi’ on the same page would surely be better rendered ‘inordinate’ than ‘great’; the translation of ‘inferi’ (‘nether regions’) as ‘hell’ throughout the treatise is acknowledged but not explained; on p. 6 ‘privatum aerem’ should read ‘privatum aere’ if it is to mean ‘deprived of air’. While, then, it is gratifying to have these texts in such a well-spaced and elegant edition, one could justly complain that the names on the cover seemed to promise more.