Questions and answers appear as a basic type of reasoning and as a format of learned discussion in numerous ancient texts, Christian and pagan. Ten contributions to a conference held in Utrecht in 2003 collected in the present volume attempt to map out its literary usage mainly in fourth- and fifth-century Christian literature. The conference aimed to gather the evidence and prepare the ground for the scholarly definition of Erotapokriseis, or Quaestiones et responsiones, as a literary genre – a task made difficult by the fact that questions and answers occur in so many otherwise very different texts. Accordingly, the contributions introduce and examine a wide range of material in a variety of approaches. A.-L. Rey and B. ter Haar Romeny survey the Erotapokriseis-literature in the Byzantine (pp. 165–80) and Syriac literatures (pp. 145–63) respectively. Others discuss individual authors. C. Zamagni examines Eusebius of Caesarea, the classical example for the usage of the genre and technique in commenting on Scripture, with two contributions. One is designed as an ‘introduction méthodologique’ (pp. 1–24), the other examines his ‘terminologie technique’ (pp. 81–98), which allows him to point out a much more assured employment of the format in the second part of the work. A. Volgers analyses Ambrosiaster (pp. 99–125), the first Latin example of exegetical quaestiones, pointing out in particular his tendency to allow for only one acceptable solution to exegetical difficulties. R. Teske considers whether several Augustinian letters should be considered exemplars of the genre, and – somewhat unrelated – describes in some detail three further works commonly accepted as quaestiones (pp. 127–44). C. Neri on Thuycidides (pp. 71–9) and P. van der Horst on ‘Philo and the rabbis on Genesis’ (pp. 55–70) are specialist contributions to work on these authors: the latter in particular is of interest principally for the theological and philosophical topics discussed in Philo. Moving away to some extent from a definition of genre based on formal characteristics, C. Jacob's contribution (‘Questions sur les questions: archéologie d'une pratique intellectuelle et d'une forme discursive’, pp. 25–54) draws attention to the various social contexts of the intellectual operation, inquiring into the roles and rules of interaction and into its effects on the body of knowledge thus examined. Jacobs's innovative approach may inspire exciting new lines of research.

The conclusion, by M.-P. Bussières, ‘Questions (encore) sans réponse’ (pp. 181–9), indicates how far scholarship still is from solving the overall puzzle of the genre. Indirectly it confirms the familiar difficulty with many discussions of genre, specifically when applied to late antique Christian texts, which seem to have a frequent tendency to amalgamate them or cross over between them. This volume thus primarily highlights the need for further examination and provides a number of helpful suggestions for opening new lines of inquiry, the relation to other modes of exegetical engagement with ‘text’ being the most obvious and potentially the most promising.