In 2005 the Theological Faculty of Aarhus University decided to coordinate its research and focus on issues of religion and normativity. This has resulted in a trilogy, of which the work under review is the first volume. (The others are entitled Reception and transformation of the Bible and Religion, politics and law.) Jacobsen's volume contains thirteen essays, divided into two sections (five on theoretical perspectives; eight on specific texts). All the authors are in one way or another connected with the faculty, as staff, visiting professors or PhD students. Authority and normativity are key concepts in many of the essays, as are canonicity and, from a certain point on, orthodoxy. Most deal with ways of defining and creating identity over against other traditions, Judaism, the Graeco-Roman world, or forms of (perceived) dissent within the own tradition. Among the more substantial essays is the one by A. Klostergaard Pedersen on defining the format and purpose of a canon, J. Engberg on Tertullian facing dissident opinions (chief among them Marcion's) on authoritative books, and G. Lonstrup on the motif of ‘the city built on seven hills’. The mere listing of the topics gives an idea of the variety of issues that are tackled. Thus the reader will encounter essays on the tension between canonical and non-canonical (J. Hyldahl), the relation between normativity and ideology (K. Pollmann), the prophet Jeremiah (E. Kraglund Hilt) and the reception history of the Song of Songs (B. Vanden Auweele), the Gnostic Sophia Jesu Christi (R. Falkenberg), the dispute between Justin and his (fictive) interlocutor Trypho on the status of Moses and the Old Testament prophets (J. Ulrich), structuring patterns in Origen's exegesis (Jacobsen) and the significance of Athanasius' famous 39th Festal Letter for the consolidation of the New Testament canon (N. A. Pedersen). And it does not stop with antiquity. J. Hart studies the influence of Islam and its concept of a sacred and canonical text on the formation and status of a written tradition among the Mandaeans. The final essay, by C. Cvetkovic, on the reception of Augustine, leads us even into the twelfth century. Such a diversity of topics within one volume may scare away some readers, but may be appealing to others, because it is a helpful way of illustrating the complexity of a specific issue and also an elegant way of inviting the reader to look beyond his or her own specific field of interest and maybe discover a motif or argument that may help to clarify other topics as well. This said, such volumes do not make for easy reviewing precisely because of their diversity; but that is a minor problem. For a critical comment I picked out the essay by Klostergaard Pedersen. The author rightly points out that the phenomenon of compiling a canon is widely known and makes a comparison with current attempts at constructing a literary canon of ‘must-read-novels’. This may be helpful, but only on condition, I would add, that it does not obscure the specific purpose of these compilations. All literary canons deal with ‘sacred’ books, but it involves various degrees of ‘sacredness’ and this in itself does have an impact on how a canon is handled.