This elegantly-produced volume comprises some of the papers given at a conference in Zurich in September 2006. Five are in English, four (plus the introduction) in German. As usual with collections on the reception of the church Fathers in early modern Europe (a useful bibliography will be found in the editors’ introduction), most contributors are patristic scholars and/or theologians rather than early modern historians. As a result, those who are chiefly interested in the uses of the Fathers as part of the broader religious and intellectual history of the period will not find all contributions equally rewarding. Scott Mandelbrote provides an outstanding study, both impressively learned and genuinely historical, of the changing evaluation of Origen in connection with the developments of biblical scholarship. On the other hand, Hanns Christof Brennecke's survey of the reception of Athanasius testifies to an impressive knowledge of Athanasius and his manuscripts, but to rather limited notions on the seventeenth century: thus, the author failed to notice that Godefroy Hermant's 1671 Life of Athanasius (p. 151) was a transparent allegory of the French Jansenist bishops’ resistance to Pope Alexander vii's anti-Jansenist formulary. It should be stressed, however, that, although contributors are not equally successful in providing a context for their papers, they almost all offer useful information and interesting analyses: Ralph Häfner on the growth of ‘comparative study of religions’ and the crisis of ancient theology; Karla Pollmann on Alexander Ross's use of Augustine; Johann Anselm Steiger on Johann Gerhard and Lutheran confessional patristics; Silke-Petra Bergjan on Dutch and English sabbatarian controversies; Diana Stanciu on the reception of Augustine by Jacobus Arminius and Ralph Cudworth; Gareth Matthews on parallels between Augustine's De libero arbitrio and Descartes's Meditationes (the only exception is Irene Dingel's study of Pierre Bayle, which contributes nothing new, at least for those who read French). On the whole, the volume does not wholly fulfil the editors’ ambitious programme (p. viii: to study ‘in what way the transformed understanding of patristic texts was linked to the changed conditions under which they were read’), but it will be a valuable resource for specialists.