Petitions have always received particular attention on the part of papyrologists but K. brings us the first comprehensive historical study of petitions involving disputes in Roman Egypt during the Principate (30 b.c. – a.d. 284). Combining a theoretical approach with analytical rigour, K. also brings – always with caution – statistical results based on a corpus of 568 petitions (Appendix 1) and 227 reports of proceedings (Appendix 3). As he states in his introduction, his goal is to assess ‘the role played by petitioning and litigation in social control in Roman Egypt’ (p. 34). He argues that their contribution was minimal because the system was too complex with numerous stages increasing delays and diversions, and that there were too many overlaps between the jurisdictions of the different adjudicative officials. Rather, he emphasises originally the input of petitioning and litigation to ‘informal control’.

K. starts in medias res with the description of the legal tergiversations of an Egyptian priest, Satabous, in a village of the Fayum and moves nicely from what may look like anecdotic to a theoretical approach for analysing the documentation, going beyond legal history stricto sensu. K. summarises three approaches: (1) a history of crime, which he convincingly shows is not possible for Roman Egypt in view of two major problems, the definition of crime and the rhetorical imperative of the available documentation; (2) a dispute resolution approach, more promising and comprising a comparative approach between pre-industrial societies: K.'s study aims at testing hypotheses emanating from such work, especially Hobson's conclusion that courts were used as a last resort;Footnote ¹ (3) a social control approach that explores ‘how the legal system of Roman Egypt fitted into various systems of social control, formal and informal’ (p. 16).

The second part of the introduction will be illuminating to historians not familiar with the problems related to the representativeness of the papyrological documentation. K also conveniently sketches the administration and legal institutions of Roman Egypt. He argues for a mixture of continuities and innovations between the institutions of Ptolemaic Egypt (323–30 b.c.) and the period under investigation and cautiously avoids extreme positions in the debate about the representativeness of Egypt within the Roman empire: for him Egypt was not more special than any other provinces but sources from different places should not be used to fill evidentiary gaps (cf. p. 331).

In Chapter 2 K. demonstrates that it is possible to use petitions to reach some historical conclusions on the legal culture of Roman Egypt. He distinguishes two types of categories of information: (1) those that are trustworthy because the Romans kept records about individuals' statuses and landholdings for taxation purposes; (2) those that are unreliable because they can easily be distorted, like narratives of what happened and social positions of offenders.

Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate the capacity of the judicial system to achieve its goals and describe its users. In Chapter 3 K. argues that besides the lack of jurisdictional boundaries (table 3.1. with statistics) and the steps before judgment, adjournment of cases was the biggest hindrance to the system. K. also provides a fresh view of enforcement: the problem was not so much the lack of ways to threaten or punish recalcitrant defendants, as Hobson argued, but the difficulty of activating such mechanisms. K.'s conclusion that judges contributed little to social order constitutes a basis for his new understanding of the effect of the system in Chapters 7 and 8. There is no need, in K.'s opinion, to explain the number of petitions by people's trust in their rulers despite the weakness of the system. Yet, K.'s discussion of the ideals visible in the administrative culture of Roman Egypt such as care and trust could be used in support of the common view.

In Chapter 4 K. renounces a systematic analysis of the economic statuses and ethnic backgrounds of plaintiffs and defendants because of the nature of the sources. Instead he uses five family archives to investigate the status of plaintiffs as well as details given in passing in petitions. He makes three negative propositions: no major ethnic group is absent, the poorest did not engage in litigation (against Kehoe's thesis, see p. 126), and not all petitioners belonged to an economic elite. Plaintiffs belonged to villages and metropoleis' middling strata and were involved in complex economic transactions: the percentage of literate individuals is higher than in the census returns, so the system was somewhat socially exclusive. Finally matters not brought to court such as sexual misconduct or accusations of magic also indicate what was not thought fit for petitioning and litigation. Therefore there were areas where the legal system had little impact on social order.

Chapters 5 to 7 turn to the ancillary role of the legal system in ‘informal control’. Chapter 5 focusses on political ideologies and assumes that the rhetoric of petitions and of the courtroom articulates and reinforces an idealised view of how state and subjects interact. Yet the rhetoric of petitions could also undermine social control when petitioners threatened to flee because of heavy fiscal requirements. K. interprets this topos as a way to force the hand of the administration mainly interested in collecting taxes; one wonders if the topos of the beneficent officials was not also a way to convince the officials to help through flattery. Chapter 6 turns to the role that small groups played in social control. K. argues that petitions and litigation reinforced social hierarchy through patrons acting on behalf of their employees or slaves and that the legal system strengthened gender hierarchy; it reflects the patriarchal system that prevailed in Roman Egypt (as in most ancient societies). Chapter 7 turns to one of the main arguments: legal and private processes of dispute resolution should not be considered as separate: many private settlements occurred in the ‘shadow of the law’ – an expression borrowed from legal sociologists. The threat of petitioning or litigation was a means of pressure for reaching a settlement. Hence K. demonstrates that Hobson's interpretation of the Roman legal system used only as a last resort solution is misleading. Not only is there no linear progress from private to public resolution mechanisms visible in the sources but the number of petitions presented to the prefect at the conventus is so high and the interval between offences and petitions is so short that this does not support a general avoidance of the legal system.

Finally, in Chapter 8, K. explores how courts in Roman Egypt could be used for ‘vexatious litigation’, expressed in the sources by the word sykophantes and its cognates. There is little evidence for professional informers but delation existed in relation to fiscal issues. But K.'s original contribution is to analyse the legal documentation from family archives as weapons in the context of feuds and to conclude that in some cases, the legal system could be used in a way that affected the social order negatively.

K. makes a remarkable contribution to the social history of Roman Egypt that is clearly summarised in his conclusion. His methodology is exemplary: not only does he provide enlightening discussions of the representativeness of the material (e.g. pp. 63–73) but he is well informed by social theories and aims at testing plausible models against the evidence rather than applying them to the sources. He uses statistical analysis very carefully, asserting that in ancient history, our aim ‘can only be a typology of patterns, not a genuine quantitative analysis of behaviours’ (p. 268). Throughout the book, he works with two assumptions familiar to social scientists: individuals' self-interest and the idea that pre-industrial societies share many features, hence the resources of ancient states limited the success of their legal system. K. shows that the legal system also had unanticipated impacts, for instance by perpetuating the Roman imperial ideology or by reinforcing gender roles. The formal legal apparatus, like petitioning and litigation, in fact supported informal methods of control (e.g. private settlement) whereas the reverse process is usually emphasised. The reader will be stimulated by two key ideas, first the interactions between formal and informal resolution processes in Roman Egypt and second the disruptive impact of the judicial process on social order when petitioning and litigation were used as means of revenge.