Elizabeth Clark is an important figure in the rise and rise of late antique studies. Her interest in this subject has been fuelled by a dual concern with the question of Christianisation in this period, seen in a number of contexts, not least in relation to the experience of women, and the related issue of the fate of classical culture, issues which reflect aspects of her own personal life as a communicant of the Anglican Church and a former student of ‘Greats’ at Oxford. These interests, and the various ways in which they have been expressed in Clark's career (not simply in publications and teaching, but the participation in important research projects, and the always positive encouragement of young scholars), are highlighted in the opening essay of the collection, entitled, ‘The discourse of Gillian Clark’, by Averil Cameron. The latter, in what is an appropriately generous and sometimes personal tribute (Cameron points up the personal dimension of Clark's own work, seen in her uncanny concern for details of what one might term human interest), also shows how important Augustine has been for Clark in her engagement with the problem of Christianisation, and also attempts to situate Clark in the complex historiography which has surrounded more recent discussion of late sntiquity, not least the extent to which the period following Augustine gave way to a narrower cultural world, what Robert Markus referred to vividly, as ‘the draining of the secular’.

The essays which follow Cameron's are divided into three parts, Part i is entitled ‘Being Christian through reading, writing and hearing’. Simon Goldhill produces a typically innovative discussion of the reasons why rabbis did not write biographies, attributing it to a concealed polemic, philosophical assumption and matters of cultural and religious identity. Tessa Rajak writes about 4 Maccabees, showing how this text is in some sense hybrid, providing matters of interest for Jew, Christian and pagan alike, and highlights the striking way in which the author has characterised the mother of the seven martyrs. Guy Stroumsa examines the status of books in early Christianity, highlighting the importance of the Christian adoption of the codex, the development of Christian libraries and Augustine's own contribution to the subject of Christian writing and reading. In all of this Stroumsa is keen to endorse the view of Christianity as a religion of books, in particular the Bible. His essay also engages with the way in which the use of the codex effected developing ideas of reading. Josef Lössl writes interestingly about Christian attitudes to what he terms ‘pagan memory’. Examining Paul's speech to the Areopagus in Acts xvii and its subsequent use by some Christian writers, including Clement of Alexandria and Dionysius the Areopagite, he notes that while pagans could be pagans without being Christians, Christians, unless they were Jews, could not be Christians without being pagans in the sense that they were drawing on a non-Jewish, pre-Christian, cultural heritage. In the last essay in this section, Caroline Harrison focuses on the similarities and differences between Augustine's analysis of how a listener ought to hear and a discussion of the same subject in Plutarch. This necessarily involves discussion of the role of a speaker and of rhetoric, and an attempt is made to show how both authors seek in perhaps complementary ways to exhort hearer and speaker to become ‘active participants in the process of communication’.

The second section is entitled ‘Being Christian in community’. Andrew Louth writes about the changing idea of conversion in the post-Constantinian era, showing how rites of initiation became more important and elaborate, though he doubts that ‘infant baptism’ was ever adopted as a policy but only gradually came to be the practice of the Church in this period. In the same essay he also discusses the way in which the martyr came to be variously used by different groups for different purposes in the post-persecution Church. In a suggestive piece Neil McLynn questions the extent to which Julian's apparent ban on Christians teaching classical literature was either a central plank in his political agenda or that it created immediate uproar. Against what he presents as a standard interpretation, he suggests a more limited context for the law, and shows how various cases relating to particular Christian teachers could be said to support his conclusions. Catherine Conybeare looks at the problem of how to interpret civitas in Augustine, comparing it, imaginatively, with that of Cicero and Hannah Arendt. For all these writers, and in different ways, their understanding of the concept is affected by ideas of exile: ‘The strain of peregrination is as real to Augustine as to Arendt and to Cicero. Against it, he asserts the beauty of the civitas – not just of the civitas dei, but the fragile and insecure beauty of the whole dynamic existence in the world.’ Karla Pollmann produces a stimulating discussion of changing notions of authority (‘auctoritas’) in antiquity, concentrating on Christian usage. The concept, she shows, was a dynamic one, and different forms of authority could stand in tension with each other in the same Church (the authority attributed to a charismatic and that attributed to a bishop might support both more conservative or more innovative positions). Christians, who did not oppose reason and ideas of authority, are seen to be the inheritors of a complex idea and to have contributed to its development in sometimes paradoxical ways. Ralph Mathisen's contribution on Gallic libri canonum shows that these documents give a lie to the view that there was a centralised authority in Gaul dictating what their contents should be. Gauls chose their authoritative documents on their own merits and without reference to Rome or the ecumenical councils.

The final part of the book is entitled ‘The particularities of being Christian’. Jill Harries writes perceptively on the changing role of the empress in the era of Constantine and beyond, noting that ‘the evolution of a less blatantly militaristic imperial ethos created a more benign institutional context, within which empresses could exploit their opportunities’. Dennis Trout comments on the metrical epitaphs of women found at the Coemeterium of St Agnes on the Via Nometana in Rome, showing how the epitaphs both reflect a man's world (they are written and commissioned by men), but also give voice to ideas of female agency, seen perhaps most spectacularly in Constantina's epitaph with which the essay begins. Oliver Nicholson, in a subtle and thoughtful piece, looks at Ausonius’ poem de Herediolo, examining the different ideals that it expresses, its influences and the complex interaction within it between place, and moral, even religious, self-presentation. Mark Vessey discusses the importance of Varro for a number of Christian writers, in particular Augustine, showing how as Latin writers of the empire came to engineer the canons and traditions in relation to which they saw themselves as Romans, ‘Varro's consummately bookish antiquarianism was still a force to be reckoned with’. In the final essay of the volume, Fergus Millar draws attention to the anonymous late sixth-/early seventh-century Life of Symeon the Younger, the Stylite, showing how in different ways it draws attention to the workings of ecclesiastical and lay society at the time.

This is a distinguished collection of essays, at whose quality my passing summaries can only hint. It is certainly a fitting tribute to Gillian Clark both in terms of the subjects covered and the quality of scholarship displayed.