Dialogues are a significant—and understudied—genre within the early Christian literary corpus, and Alberto Rigolio's Christians in Conversation: A Guide to Late Antique Dialogues in Greek and Syriac will be useful for those interested in exploring not only the genre's literary environment, but broader questions of literary composition. The book's temporal limits run from the genre's second-century beginnings to the sixth century, just before the seventh-century collapse of the Roman order dramatically shifted Christian Roman cultural priorities. The book mostly consists of 60 extremely useful Handbuch entries that include the best edition, a translation (when available), a summary, historiography, and a bibliography. In the best Handbuch generic tradition, it is not necessarily intended to be read cover-to-cover, but it is a reference work that not only presents the dialogues, but whose introduction raises important questions that apply to all late antique Christian literature.

The introduction discusses the genre's debt to classical forms, its evolution and intersection with genres such as “Questions and Answers,” symposia, and biography. And it provides a brief but valuable survey of contemporary literary culture and how it affected generic construction. Over time, “The use of Biblical citations, of patristic florilegia and of legalistic proofs gradually became a characteristic common to most Christian dialogues, thus pointing to an increasing formalization of the argumentative strategies they employed” (25). This increasingly mimetic construction means that the dialogues “may not be reflections of historical debates on the ground, but might also have been themselves designed, at a different level, as culturally contingent tools of opinion formation within the society that produced them” (11). Far from records, “The vast majority of Christian dialogues are best understood as designed as tools of persuasion” (12), so that even in cases where verifiable historical debates took place, editors would invariably edit texts to suit their own viewpoints (13–14). At the same time, whether the dialogues are drawn from attested, possible, or fanciful events, they all “attest to the debating and rhetorical culture of the period and to the refinements that the readers expected from religious debates” (24). This rhetorical and structural approach underpins Rigolio's objection to previous typologies that divided dialogues along topical lines because they “[run] the risk of failing to do justice to the overall similarities of the texts and of overlooking important aspects of their form, rhetoric, and argumentative structures” (26). Instead, he offers an interesting alternative typology based on formal elements, such as narrative voice, speakers, whether the “loser” converts or explicitly acknowledges defeat, and the audience's role (if any). And he includes an extremely useful chart (34–36) that lists which formal elements are or are not included.

But although Rigolio proposes a typology of the “tools of persuasion,” he does not address a critical methodological issue that this raises: namely, who is being persuaded and to what end? Having cogently argued that formal elements link dialogues across topics, he makes no effort to align these with potential audiences. As he insightfully observes, readers had expectations, and it might have been useful to consider how formal elements met those expectations, even if, as is surely the case, expectations varied or evolved. For example, does the dialogues’ increasingly stylized composition imply an increasingly educated audience with mimetic expectations? The entries’ historiographic sections often include efforts to identify audiences, but the introduction might have discussed, at least in general terms, how his typology applied to audience identification. An antagonist (of whatever stripe) fulsomely acknowledging defeat has implications for audience expectations and, beyond that, community and identity formation. As tools of persuasion, were the dialogues primarily intended to reinforce community identity rather than engage outsiders? Or, if the dialogues were intended to reach outside the authors’ communities, are there formal elements that might indicate an effort to persuade a hostile audience? While there is no simple or single answer to these questions, given his interesting recasting of the dialogues’ typology, it is disappointing that they were not directly addressed.

The sectarian dialogues (which are the majority), for which there is clear evidence for public debates (sometimes even at court), might be recast according to community rather than theological topic based on this typology. So, for example, the distinct structural elements of an anonymous, fourth-century, anti-Arian dialogue (#24), Theodoret of Cyrrhus's fifth-century Eranistes (#44), and Leontius of Byzantium's sixth-century dialogues (#50, 51) incorporate significantly different formal elements that, following Rigolio's taxonomy, might shed considerable light on their audiences and their audiences’ literary expectations, their place in the broader cultural discourse over orthodoxy, and their role in community formation. An even more critical case is the anti-Jewish dialogues. Unlike the sectarian dialogues, which on occasion might well reflect actual debates and been read by oppositional elites, Rigolio acknowledges, “Scholars now agree that adversus Iudaeos dialogues are not to be taken as stenographic transcriptions of real debates,” and, “All surviving adversus Iudaeos dialogues from late antiquity are written from a Christian perspective and may not allow us to identify an authentically Jewish voice more easily than do dialogues directed against other heterodox groups” (15). But it is difficult to see how to reconcile this with his view “that they may nonetheless contain more or less distorted echoes of historical debates and real confrontations with contemporary Judaism” (14). Perhaps Rigolio's formal typology might be useful in unwinding this knotty problem. At any event, formal analysis and its potential for audience identity and community formation could have extremely useful applications for this subgenre for which the historiographic issues of historicity and audience are particularly contentious.

In sum, Christians in Conversation's strengths outweigh its weaknesses. Rigolio provides the reader with an extremely valuable catalogue of early Christian dialogues with an introduction that offers an innovative methodological approach. It is to be hoped that other scholars will build on his foundation.