Miracles were not a constant feature of ancient Christianity, and de Nie's subject in this ambitious and thought-provoking book is their reappearance in the Latin West in the late fourth century after a long period of abeyance, and the emergence of new symbolic and imagistic modes of description for them. She focuses in particular on miracles of healing, and explores the experiential, affective and transformational dimensions of their narration by Latin bishops, ascetics and poets from the late fourth century to the mid-sixth. After an ambitious methodological survey which touches on philosophical and psychological approaches to perception and imagination, she outlines the Church's decreasing interest in and even suspicion of miracles in the second and third centuries. The first chapter then explores the re-emergence of miracles in the Latin West, starting with the cures effected by the relics of Gervasius and Protasius at Milan in 386, and the range of responses to them – not all positive – by western contemporaries. The next two chapters focus on the narration of miracles by particular authors: Sulpicius Severus on Martin, and Paulinus of Nola on Felix. De Nie is particularly lively in her discussion here of the shamanic dimensions to Martin's experiences, and to Sulpicius' dream-like patterning of his miracles. Chapters iv–vi take us to North Africa, and show how Augustine's initial resistance to contemporary miracles seems to have been transformed by his experiences of Stephen's miracles at a shrine at Uzalis. Chapter vii discusses Sedulius' Paschale Carmen, and the final chapter tackles Martin's miracles again, through the later lens of Paulinus of Périgueux. Throughout, de Nie tackles big questions of perception and imagination, and the transformative possibilities of both. She makes productive use of an impressive range of scholarship, historical, philological, anthropological, psychoanalytic and other, and although she generally eschews the more functional approach to the cult of saints which has typified much work on the subject, she is well aware of the importance of political and social contexts, as in her discussion of the canny Ambrose. She also makes stimulating use of broad historical comparisons, adducing stories such as those told about Padre Pio to illustrate the longevity of some of the visual patterns that she identifies. De Nie does not always fully explore the influence of form and genre on a text's symbolic mode; it is odd, for instance, not to investigate the register and dynamics of Sedulius' prose Opus paschale, a work he tells us was composed as a prose version of his verse epic. More could be said, too, about the influence of Greek stories and ‘eastern’ experiences of miracles, on the Latin imaginary; de Nie often makes references to Greek texts known to have been in circulation, whether in translation or not, in the West, but it is not always clear how she conceives of the relationship between these spheres and literary traditions. Overall, however, these are minor cavils. This rich and imaginative book has much to offer scholars of late antiquity, and indeed of other periods.