This is the first of two volumes on the rituals and theologies of baptism and takes their history up to the Council of Trent (excluding the Reformation, which will begin the next volume). Bryan Spinks is a master of clear, concise summary. The history of 1,500 years is compressed into little more than 150 pages; a great deal of erudition, scattered through a host of learned journals and monographs, often difficult of access, is summarised in these pages. This book will be hugely valuable, both to the student seeking to orientate himself and to the scholar needing to refresh his or her memory. The work is divided into two parts, the first summarising what little is known about the early history of baptism, up to the early fifth century; Spinks presents what we know, and is candid about what we can no longer determine. The second part surveys the different families of liturgical traditions of baptism: first the Syrian traditions, then the other eastern traditions – Byzantine, Armenian, Coptic and Ethiopic – and finally the western traditions, first tracing the story up to the beginning of the second millennium (and giving particular attention to what we know of the Anglo-Saxon Church), and then looking at the later medieval developments, ending with the Tridentine Reform. Throughout, Spinks seeks to go beyond the traditional descriptive phenomenology of liturgical scholarship to bring out the varied theological ideas expressed through the baptismal rites. For the most part this is a matter of interpreting the prayers and ceremonies of the initiation rite, but, in the western high Middle Ages, theology becomes detached from liturgy and develops its own conceptual sacramental theology (something already anticipated in the west in the Pelagian Controversy). Spinks is keen to warn one off from trying to find something corresponding to the sacrament of confirmation in the eastern rites, in contrast to some earlier western liturgical scholars, but he does rather labour the point. He also avoids the tendency of liturgical scholars to take for granted details that have become familiar to them, save once when he tells his readers that a peculiarity of the Ordo of Alcuin is that the creed used is the Apostles' rather than the ‘Nicene’, for he never let on that the Gelasian Sacramentary makes clear that at some point in the sixth century (presumably) the Roman Church abandoned its use of the Apostles' Creed (and earlier the Old Roman Creed) in baptism and substituted the œcumenical Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. But this is a rare lapse from remarkably consistent clarity in an area of scholarship that often seems to set store by an inclination towards the arcane.