Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil here offer the fruits of a three-year research project into crisis management in late antiquity. A range of environmental and social crises are examined (viz., population displacements, natural disasters, religious disputes, social abuses and the breakdown of structures of dependence) through the evidence afforded by episcopal letters. Letters, it is claimed, were the primary means for wielding episcopal authority in a crisis, as bishops sought to maintain and extend their own networks of influence – at a time when they were increasingly assuming roles previously assigned to imperial officials. The chronological boundaries of the study have been set to exclude, at one end, the epistolary corpus of John Chrysostom, and, at the other, that of Gregory the Great – both of which have already received significant scholarly attention.

The research is organised clearly and systematically. After some introductory remarks, a chapter is given over to methodological questions, and then the types of crisis listed above are analysed in turn. Each of these studies comprises a broad survey of the relevant evidence, and a number of more in-depth case studies. A brief conclusion attempts to bring the threads together, and is followed by a set of potted episcopal profiles, and a (very) thorough bibliography.

This is a book which manages both to say much and to say little. There is a wealth of description, but a dearth of analysis – a set of learned studies in search of an argument. For instance, the lengthy chapter on religious disputes is an admirably clear narrative of the key events from Ephesus I to Constantinople II, but contributes not at all in the way of fresh insights or perspectives. Conversely, the detailed case studies appended to each chapter are nicely focused and often rather penetrating, but are not convincingly incorporated into a wider thesis or set of contentions. Moreover, the choice of letters as the object of study becomes increasingly questionable the further on one reads – indeed, by the conclusion, Allen and Neil themselves concede that ‘crisis in the fifth and sixth centuries is reported much more frequently in works of history, rhetoric, apologetics and philosophy than in letters' (p. 194). In the end, we are not left much further forward than when we started: there were many crises in late antiquity, sometimes bishops wrote letters about them, and in most cases they tried to solve them.

One also wonders, finally, whether a basic aspect of these episcopal letters has been largely overlooked in this study: their authors were Christians, who understood the many crises that confronted them within a biblically-informed framework, and so stuffed their letters with quotations, allusions and solutions all derived from the Scriptures. They may also have been, as it happens, wily political operators, but we do violence to the historical record if we privilege the latter entirely at the expense of the former.