How did late antique people react when they heard about a wonder-working saint? What sort of reality did authors hope to communicate when they recorded a holy man's miracles? How should we conceive of the relationship between holy man, biographer and audience? These are some of the questions that Peter Turner tackles in his study of the saints' Lives, miracle and conversion narratives of late antiquity. Ranging primarily across the fourth and fifth centuries, Turner considers a wide selection of both Christian and traditional Roman (‘pagan’) texts, including Hilarius of Arles, Life of Honoratus; Eucherius of Lyons, In praise of the desert; Eugippius, Life of Servinus; Porphyry, Life of Plotinus; Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean life; Augustine of Hippo, Confessions; and various writings by Julian the Apostate – to name only a few.

Part i of this book is a compelling exposition of the expectations late antique people entertained that made the supernatural possible. These, Turner finds, were predicated on a paradox that should lead us to attribute greater truthfulness to the period's spiritual literature accounts – or at least a greater degree of ingenuousness to those who authored them. Late antique people expected miracles to authenticate the special favour of God/the gods that some individuals found. Yet this did not entail a willingness to credit any unusual occurrence with supernatural quality. On the contrary, miracles were believed to be rare and criteria were applied to test the plausibility of other explanations. This is why, Turner argues, miracles were often accompanied by corroborating evidence – first-hand observation, a reliable chain of witnesses, literary precedence. The power of the latter was particularly strong, conditioning expectations in such a way that the miraculous was almost willed into being when it was needed.

Turner's greatest achievement lies in part ii, where he exposes, from the inside, a spiritual frame of mind that strained for external confirmation of inner realities, actively looking for remarkable outward events that might authenticate inward spiritual developments. To delve into the inner workings of the mind of the holy man is an ambitious undertaking and one of the book's highlights. Turner relies heavily on the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo and his handling of a number of key episodes in Augustine's life is skilful and persuasive. By interrogating the supernatural expectations that Augustine may himself have entertained in the lead-up to many of his life's formative events, Turner delineates the contours of what he calls a ‘late antique spiritual’ lifestyle, one defined above all by an attitude of intense but critical expectation of supernatural confirmation of events that took place very much at the natural end of the phenomenological spectrum. Precisely because, however, the stakes were so high and the authenticating wonders so ambiguous, Turner convincingly demonstrates that doubt was as essential a component of this lifestyle as the willingness to believe.

Truthfulness, realism, historicity is an ambitious and rewarding attempt to explain the thought world that stands behind much of late antiquity's literary production – more the careful unfolding of a mentalité in the French tradition than social history on the Brownian model. It is also a difficult work, requiring the reader's engagement not only with a broad range of pagan and Christian works in both Greek and Latin, but also a rich and eclectic array of modern literary theory and continental philosophy. Yet Turner's insights repay the intellectual effort. Late antiquity has often been represented as a distinctively, even excessively, spiritual age. As Turner shows, however, the period's sources are more complex and more imaginatively demanding than a purely positivist approach allows. Late antique people maintained a highly ambivalent relationship with the world around them, where the supernatural could, even should, happen but was rightly and properly interrogated whenever it purportedly did.