Readable books on liturgy are rare, and rarer still is such a book with a decipherable thesis. One purpose of Paul Bradshaw's latest study is to illustrate the mutability of liturgical practice in the early Church, and thus to forestall the quest for a pristine type that could serve as a template for the defence or reform of modern usages. Noting in the first chapter that extracanonical records of eucharistic practice in the second century often make the cup precede the wine and make no reference to breaking of bread or words of institution, he surmises that the Pauline account is only one of two discrete traditions, which have crossed in Mark and coalesced in Luke. In chapter i he contends that daily communion was a common metaphor but an infrequent custom outside the monasteries, and that even protracted abstinence would often go uncondemned. Chapter iii shows that the Apostolic tradition which is commonly attributed to Hippolytus is not a primitive document but the product of accretion over centuries, the prototype being now as elusive as the female statue on which the form and bibliography of Hippolytus were subsequently imposed. An early profession of faith is found in chapter iv to have been the original overture to baptism in some quarters. In chapter v Bradshaw argues that the initial goal of this rite was to transfer the allegiance of the baptised to Christ, and that it may have been the Latin Church that first adopted the practice of eliciting from the candidate a confession of the Trinity. He questionably assumes that faith in a ‘Trinitarian godhead’ must be ‘abstract’ (p. 73); more cogently, he urges that a ceremony based upon the Roman law of contract cannot dictate the formularies of modern worship. Chapter vi collates liturgies in which rites of unction, initially of different provenance, have been combined: various genealogies can be proposed, and even Gnostic precedents may not have been despised in catholic circles. Christian prayer, in Bradshaw's view, was subject to perpetual innovations, only a few of which were prefigured in any Jewish order of service. Thus chapter vii describes the codification of prayer and psalmody in monasteries, which appears to have prompted the imposition of fixed hours on the laity. In chapter viii we learn that the penitential use of Psalms supervened upon the appeal to their prophetic content. Penitence and eucharistic ceremonies are found in chapter ix to have developed separately, perhaps because the laity was apt to receive the eucharist only on Sundays, when kneeling and fasting were proscribed. It is unfortunate that Gregory Nazianzen should twice be called Gregory Nazianzus (pp. 35, 83), and that the hypocrites of the Didache should be summarily identified on p. 141 with real Jews rather than dissembling Christians. But these are small complaints against a book which rescues so many lost antiquities from the flotsam of bombastic anaphorae, mobile epicleses and superfluous chrismations.