Stephen Davis has crafted an outstanding book. Few people could have written this study, and the scholarly community is indebted to Davis for his unique areas of expertise. “Coptic Christology” suggests a survey of historical theology in Christian Egypt. Davis, however, takes the reader well beyond traditional intellectual history by addressing how theologies were enacted in lay and ascetic piety and how they expressed particular political commitments and religious identities, which were forged in the diverse and complicated environment of Egypt.

The book employs methodologies from ritual studies and literary theory, particularly the work of the late Catherine Bell. It benefits from close attention to material culture, building on recent studies on textiles and painting. Davis's facility with Greek, Coptic, and Arabic literature is evident throughout, and his prior work on gender, asceticism, cultural memory, and Coptic history has contributed to this study.

Davis begins with an introduction to “Alexandrian Greek theology.” Davis summarizes Christology from the second through fifth centuries, presenting the most salient material from Basilides, Valentinus, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, and others. He focuses on two central questions: how was the act of divine embodiment accomplished in the person of Jesus, and what consequences did that act have for human salvation? In various ways, he argues, these Alexandrian writers understood the Incarnation as an event that facilitated humanity's own participation in divinity. This premise is the organizing thread for the remainder of the book. Cyril's influence on Coptic Christian religiosity is keenly felt. Although Athanasius usually looms large in a “church history,” in Davis's book, Cyril eclipses him.

Part 1, on “Coptic Literature and Liturgy,” contains a chapter on monastic leader Shenoute and another on Eucharistic liturgy. Davis considers several of Shenoute's sermons and shows that the monk incorporated theologies and biblical hermeneutics from Alexandrian patriarchs into his own heresiology and into a lay and monastic piety. The recitation of Jesus prayers, the realization of Christ's body in the sacraments, and the veneration of Mary as Theotokos are the ritual enactments of Incarnational theology. Chapter 2 demonstrates that compared to other liturgies, medieval Coptic liturgical texts emphasized the sanctification and consumption of the Eucharist in ways that ritually contributed to the sanctification and divination of the human person. Church buildings, icons, lighting, and incense provided sensory reinforcement of the liturgical references to the Incarnation and of the power of the sacraments.

Sacred space and material culture are the focus of part 2. Chapter 3, on pilgrimage and the cult of the saints, includes an analysis of a liturgical procession at Shenoute's monastery. Shenoute and the sacred space affiliated with his relics are conflated with Christ's Transfiguration and the holy family's sojourn in Egypt. The veneration of the saint becomes a medium for the pilgrims' own transformation and participation in the Incarnation. They “discover Christ in the process of encountering one who, like Mary, ‘bore Christ’ in his bodily labours—and who, like Christ himself, experienced glorification in the body” (125). Chapter 4 examines images of Christ in textiles and church wall paintings. In wearing garments adorned with images of Jesus, believers literally were clothed with Christ and closed the gap between themselves and the divine. Gazing on images of Mary nursing the infant Jesus allowed Christians to participate in the Incarnation because this act invited the viewers to imagine that they, too, were nourished by the vital fluid that fed Christ's body.

Part 3 turns to medieval Arabic Coptic literature written in the apologetic context of a dominant Muslim culture. Chapter 5 concentrates on the influential tenth-century author Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffa'. Sāwīrus adapted Alexandrian Christology using Islamic vocabulary and language. His work simultaneously explained and defended the doctrine of the Incarnation to Muslims and assured Christians (now a religious minority) of the “eschatological hope” (230) promised by the Incarnation. The final chapter concerns thirteenth-century writers in Cairo who used rhetorical strategies and theological terminology common to contemporary Islamic philosophical literature. They defended the Incarnation in the face of Muslim concerns for the complete unity of God and the utter incorporeity of God, among other issues.

A postscript traces the legacy of these Christological developments in two modern contexts: the refutation of European Calvinists by the patriarch of the church and a twenty-first-century monk's defense of the notion of deification. The latter argues that humans continue to experience deification through the Incarnation by participating in the Eucharist and by becoming monks whose bodies manifest religious transformation. Davis provides two appendices with translations of Coptic and Copto-Arabic texts used in this study as well as a thorough bibliography and index.

This excellent book provided only two disappointments. Part 3 does not attend as much to ritual contexts and material culture as the rest of the volume. Davis's argument about the physicality of the Incarnation as it is ritually and practically experienced fades as he shifts to more philosophical issues. The chapter needs either an explicit discussion of this shift—seemingly due to the nature of the most prominent Coptic Arabic sources, an interesting development in itself—or (since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a cultural renaissance in Christian Egypt) an analysis of elements of material culture with Christological significance (for example, the wall paintings at Saint Anthony's monastery, other icons, illuminated manuscripts) in addition to what is in this section. Second, the book needs more commentary about the extent to which ideas originating in the more “heretical” early writers (or even the orthodox but complicated Clement) influenced and survived in later Egyptian Christian religiosity.

Coptic Christology in Practice should be read by scholars interested in Christology, ritual studies, or the intersections of theology and material culture, as well as those working on Christian Egypt or Christian-Muslim encounters. This book is a model for scholarship because it exhibits both interdisciplinarity and the expertise of the specialist.