As Rowan Williams states in his foreword, Henry Chadwick was, throughout his lifetime, ‘by common consent, the most distinguished scholar of the early Church in the English-speaking world’ (p. vii). He was immensely productive: eight monographs on early Church history and patristics, translations of Origen's Contra Celsum, Augustine's Confessions, a selection of Lessing's theological writings, an edition of the Sentences of Sextus, an apparently pagan work, demonstrated by Chadwick to have been thought Christian by Origen, at least, and many articles – sixty-five collected in three Variorum volumes, a further nineteen in a collection, Tradition and exploration (1994), only three of which reduplicate articles in the Variorum volumes. There are doubtless more. He was richly honoured in his lifetime: the revised edition of his Penguin volume, The Early Church, lists his distinctions and honours – Regius Professor of Divinity in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Head of House of colleges in both universities, honorary doctorates, Fellow (and one-time vice-president) of the British Academy, corresponding member of several learned societies in Europe and America, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The list ends on a demotic note (characteristic of Chadwick): ‘Several of his books on early Christian history are now in paperback.’ His distinction is certainly marked by the range of his work – two millennia of Christian history, in which he himself participated, notably through his membership of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission – but is mostly manifest in his immense learning and attention to detail; whatever he wrote about, he was in complete command of his material, both the primary and the secondary literature. For the most part he presented himself as a historical scholar of immense learning, but it would be a mistake to think that theology was of less importance to him; Rowan Williams, in the Guardian obituary, saw him as, essentially, an Anglican divine. This collection of Henry Chadwick's Selected writings, edited by William G. Rusch, is intended as an introduction to Chadwick's scholarly work. Both Williams in his foreword and Rusch in his introduction underline the enormous importance of history in Chadwick's scholarship, and outline Chadwick's approach to it. Chadwick certainly thought, as Williams put it, that ‘the Church suffered enormously when it allowed itself to forget its past’ (p. viii); sometimes I think Chadwick went beyond that and was inclined to believe that historical scholarship itself could solve the problems raised by the divisions of Christendom. Certainly, his participation in the ecumenical movement through his membership of ARCIC demonstrated how deepened historical understanding could solve many of the problems faced by the quest for Christian union. Perhaps the most notable example of Chadwick's scholarship showing how such thorny problems could be resolved is his article (not, alas, included here) ‘Ego Berengarius’ (JTS n.s xl [1989], 414–45; oddly not included in the Variorum volumes either, but to be found in Tradition and exploration), in which Chadwick disentangled the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation (without, alas, convincing all his fellow Anglicans on the ARCIC). Rusch's volume includes a fine selection of Chadwick's articles: several on the development of ministry in the Early Church and its role in the early centuries (including a hugely important article, ‘The role of the Christian bishop in ancient society’, and an equally important article, ‘Bishops and monks’); there are a number of articles on the œcumenical councils, Nicaea I and Chalcedon; several articles revolve around the development of notions of papal authority and the way in which the chief Apostles, Peter and Paul, were honoured in Rome (on the general issue, his inaugural lecture at Oxford, ‘The circle and the ellipse’; on the cults of Peter and Paul, his article on the Memoria Apostolorum ad Catacumbas). Many of these articles on bishops and the exercise of episcopal authority draw on his deep and extensive knowledge of Augustine, the subject of his Sarum Lectures in Oxford in 1982/3, which issued in two deceptively small books (one published postumously); there are several articles bearing on the great African saint included here, including his articles on the discoveries of new letters (by Divjak) and sermons (by Dolbeau), and more general questions in connection with Augustine – providence and evil, the attraction of Mani, ethics. Chadwick was intending a larger work on Christian ethics; a couple of articles here outline the direction that he would have taken. His article, ‘Pachomios and the idea of sanctity’, made an important, and still entirely relevant, contribution to the spate of scholarship on the saint in the early Christian world, inspired by Peter Brown's landmark article, ‘The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity’ (Journal of Roman Studies lxi [1971], 80–101); Chadwick warned against trying to understand Christian sanctity while ignoring its religious inspiration and used the example of Pachomios to demonstrate his case. Two further articles address a subject that occupied Chadwick all his life, the engagement between Christianity and classical culture: one article (‘Christian and Roman universalism in the fourth century’) explores the political dimensions of this engagement, another (‘Oracles of the end in the conflict of paganism and Christianity in the fourth century’) its more strictly religious aspects (these latter two articles constituted his contributions to Festschriften to two great scholars contemporary with him: G. C. Stead and André-Jean Festugière; there are many other contributions to such Festschriften not included here, for instance his sparklingly learned ‘Prayer at midnight’ in honour of Jean Cardinal Daniélou). All in all, this volume constitutes an excellent introduction to the range of Chadwick's interests, his patient concern for detail and, not least, his extraordinary capacity to recall relevant details from the most unlikely places. Curiously, though he is often described as one of the great scholars of ‘late antiquity’, my impression is that he never used this expression.