New angles of vision and careful research make this book important for scholars of Christian history and of Late Antiquity, but it may not have the influence that it deserves because of its clogged style. Professor Kalleres is a better historian that she allows herself to be: rather than constantly summarizing other contemporary historians’ works, she could have thoroughly digested them and presented a fully synthesized book in her own terms. The frequent historiographical riffs in the text are more suited to a dissertation than to a published book. Still, the undoubted virtues of Kalleres's thought lead us to be confident of fine work from her in the future.

Successfully placing herself both intuitively and critically in fourth-century Christianity, she focuses on the work of three crucial thinkers in three cities: John Chrysostom in Antioch, Cyril in Jerusalem, and Ambrose in Milan. In each case, she investigates the influence of the physical and imagined urbanscapes on the thoughts and deeds of these theologians; she also places each of them within the strong intellectual currents and countercurrents of their places and time. She vividly shows how the numerous non-Nicene buildings that a Christian would walk by in their daily business had to influence them, just as the various “temples” of secularism—shops, banks, universities—in the modern city influence Christians today toward materialism. Even where the physical cityscape is not evident, as in Cyril's Jerusalem, the bishop constructs for himself and his followers an imaginary city based on his historical imagination.

Along the way there are many important insights. One is into John Chrysostom's attitude toward Jews. Standard scholarship for centuries took his Against the Jews as evidence for his—and Christianity's—antisemitism, or at least anti-Judaism. Over recent decades, this judgment has been mitigated by the understanding that his work was directed not at Jews as such, but at Christians turning to Judaism, although the unhealthy reliance upon him by Christians in subsequent centuries is fully admitted. Certainly John was concerned with the temptations posed by the many synagogues and evident, public Jewish festivals, and he was naturally worried that his Christian flock might diminish as a result. Yet there is a deeper level: John's characterization of the Jews as a whole, not just Judaizing Christians. Jews are, in his eyes, possessed by demons, or at least obsessed by them, and thus tools of Satan. The tendency to demonize opponents is still common, but in the fourth century, demons were not metaphorical, but real. Kalleres also investigates a fourth level: John's demonization of Jews extends to “pagans” and to Christian heretics. In a way, these last are worst because their distortion of Christianity could most easily infect true Christians, which for John meant Nicene Christians, those accepting the Nicene Creed and incorporating it into their spiritual lives.

With Ambrose, heretics are even more of a problem than for John, because of the tendency of contemporary emperors to Arianism, especially dangerous as Milan became a capital of the Roman West. The dangers of schism were realized as an Arian bishop disputed the see with a Catholic (Nicene) one. Here again the physical environment was deeply influential as some buildings housed Nicene churches and others Arian ones, and the amphitheater and other public structures were under the emperor's control. The accusation that heretics were demonic turned directly to the claim that they were tools of the Antichrist and heralds of the end of the world. In 386, Valentinian II's support of the Arians provoked a conflict that burst out at Easter; it was “not simply one of church possession, but a battle involving sacramental ritual practice, orthopraxy during the holiest time of the year” (216). The materiality of some of the practices centered on the relics of the martyrs, which were effective in exorcisms. Demons, Ambrose argued, were more successfully exorcized or resisted by Nicene than by Arian Christians. Kalleres makes the point that the traditional interpretation of the conflict between Ambrose and the emperor Theodosius as a struggle between church and state, fails to understand that there was no such thing as “church and state” in the ancient world, that the deeper struggle was over control of ecclesiastical buildings, that this struggle was a material expression of the opposition between Nicene and Arian theology, and that, finally, this opposition was underlain by the question of where the deepest roots of spirituality were.

In Jerusalem, Jewish and Christian monuments had been dismantled or reduced to rubble when the pagan emperors reconstructed it as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina. Nowhere more than in Jerusalem was the work of demons more obvious and the threat of apocalypse more immediate. It was understood that Christ would soon come again, but meanwhile the Devil was hard at work manipulating pagans, Jews, and heretics in order to ruin as many souls as he could before the Last Day. Heretics were often his favorite targets, since they burrow within the Body of Christ and poison it.

The author succeeds in showing the interrelation of buildings and demons in the struggles between orthodox Christians and their opponents, struggles that were much less political in nature than they were spiritual: cities could open themselves to the demonic or to the divine, a choice that had the deepest, most real, consequences both for the present and for the Kingdom of God.