The love of rhetoric and philosophy, as well as their importance to establishing social status, was one of the enduring cultural traits that preserved the links of late antique elites with the past. Regardless of religious affiliation, an educated man, a scholasticus, would aim to keep alive his intellectual pursuits even in adverse conditions. During and after the era of Gothic invasions and the disappearance of Roman rule, the Gallic scholastici endeavoured to continue to exchange eloquent letters and to circulate each other's literary works. Although the survival of ancient learning among Christians is a familiar subject, Alciati's book presents new questions and observations about a constellation of topics related to education in southern Gaul, based on texts ranging from Sulpicius Severus' Dialogi to the Vitae patrum jurensium. He examines how old traditions of argumentation and the close ties between students and teachers survived in new settings: Christian intellectual circles based in monasteries and/or episcopal courts. The refinement and dissemination of their arguments (as well as learned banter) still occurred through tried and true methods of learning – namely, through dialogue and disputation.

Instead of approaching the subject of ‘schools’ in terms of particular institutions or places, Alciati focuses on the relationships between teachers and students. As the centre of education shifted from the traditional schools to the monasteries, ‘[l]o scenario cambia sensibilmente, ma l'importanza della relazione resta immutata’ (p. 8). Much of the book focuses on the relationships among certain Christian teachers and students, most of whom were monks, priests and bishops, and possessed credentials from the traditional schools of grammarians, rhetors and philosophers. Although scattered across southern France and beyond, these churchmen-scholars remained well connected through the texts that they shared and their discussions of these texts.

The questions and duties that Christian scholastici faced added new dimensions to the tendency of educated men to discuss and examine their forms of learning and the best way to interpret authoritative texts. As highly educated rhetors they carried on the ancient tradition of attacking rhetorical ostentation and claiming not to be writing in a rhetorical fashion. At the same time, however, these scholastici claimed, implicitly or explicitly, that rhetorical training and methods of philosophical inquiry were useful for Christian theology and pastoral care. After two short chapters providing overviews of related historiography and the standing of traditional schools in late antiquity, the lengthy third chapter, ‘La rete della litteratura: contesti e relazioni’, details a number of specific student-teacher relationships, piecing together prosopographical information from the prefaces and dedications of various texts. This chapter presents late antique Gallic churchmen discussing the value of their literary skills in relation to themselves, as Christian authors and teachers, and to the canon of Scriptures and authoritative commentaries. Alciati presents the continuity of old methods as well as new problems posed by Christian intellectual life: for instance, Martin of Tours was remembered (and revered) as being inlitteratus, like the Apostles – an image that Sulpicius constructed in the form of a dialogue among three highly educated men. Their discussion of Martin repeatedly touched on the problematic role of rhetorical skill for a monk. Likewise, the learned monks of Lérins applied skills learned in rhetorical and philosophical schools to theological texts, but also worried about the old danger of rhetorical display overshadowing the content of the argument. Pomerius, a man renowned for his secular learning, writes what amounts, in Alciati's words, to a ‘manifesto dell'anti-retore’ (his De vita contemplativa) because of concerns that the sacrifice of content over style would be detrimental to the pastoral mission (p. 166). In the cases of Salvian and Vincent of Lérins, who wrote theological treatises under pseudonyms, Alciati argues that their effort to deflect attention from themselves as authors was not just a topos of modesty (‘professio modestiae’), but was related to the ‘problema del rapporto autore-testo e alla didascalia apostolica’ (p. 95). This chapter, which spans more than 130 pages, ends abruptly without any final comments to tie together the different strands of inquiry.

The final chapter, ‘Filosofi e quaestiones’, turns to the survival of philosophical disputations based on reason and good dialectical methods in theological disputes. This transition from teacher to theologian is made clear in a remarkably gentle theological reprimand, when Faustus corrects the heretical speculations of a deacon who wrote to him, not as a theologian in combat with enemies of the Church, but as a ‘maestro benevolo’ pointing out errors in argumentation (p. 192). Alciati argues that many of these disputations were not, ultimately, about heresy, much less about politics, but that rather the disagreements hinged on proper method and argumentation.

Alciati's study shows us that concerns about the complex relationship between texts and authors and notions of textual communities are not new. It remains somewhat unclear, however, whether concepts drawn from contemporary literary theory help us to understand the concerns of the Gallic intellectuals or vice-versa. In either case, we see that the careful analysis of texts formed the core of these teacher-student relationships and that these men were acutely aware of problems arising from adding to authoritative texts. Some of these authors deserve more attention in discussions of intellectual life in late antiquity. Even here, it is sometimes unclear why certain authors are not examined more closely: for instance the writings of Hilary of Arles and Sidonius Apollinaris are mined for information about other authors, but are not discussed in their own right. Likewise, there is a short section on Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, but much more could have been done to connect this study to work done on education and intellectual life in the east.