This volume, peopled by a number of distinguished students of ancient Egyptian Christianity, is a Festschrift for David W. Johnson, whose research and teaching interests encompassed a wide range of subjects of which Egypt was the focal point. The essays are divided into two parts. Part i deals with language and literature and consists mainly of discussion of some Coptic texts (Tito Orlandi on the Coptic History of the Church; Monica Blanchard on the identity of those monks known variously as ‘remnuoth’ or ‘sarabaitae’; Janet Timbie on some preserved manuscripts of Shenoute's I am amazed; Mark Sheridan on a number of Coptic sermons; Leo Depuydt on some theoretical issues to do with the Coptic language). Part ii concerns what the editors have called ‘social context’. Here there are contributions by Birger Pearson on ‘Earliest Christianity in Egypt’, Daniel Boyarin on ‘Philo, Origen and the rabbis on divine speech’; Robin Young on ‘Cannibalism and other family woes in letter 55 of Evagrius of Pontus’; Philip Rousseau on ‘The successors of Pachomius and Nag Hammadi codices’; James Goehring on ‘Keeping the monastery clean: a cleansing episode from an excerpt on Abraham of Farshut and Shenoute's Discourse on purity’; and David Frankfurter on ‘Illuminating the cult of Kothos: the Panegyric on Macarius and local religion in fifth-century Egypt’. The volume reflects its origins as a Festschrift insofar as it consists of an intelligent and stimulating medley of essays, some quite specific, others more general, on a good, but very broad, theme. The concentration on Coptic sources is in particular to be welcomed; and a number of the authors attempt to highlight the importance of the texts they discuss and the unfortunate fact that they have often been overlooked. Notable in this respect is Tito Orlandi who states that the failure to examine the Coptic History of the Church, if it arises out of ignorance of the Coptic language, is excusable but is not so for any other reason, a point his essay admirably demonstrates. Essays in the second part will perhaps, for the reasons Orlandi has hinted at, interest students with a more general concern for Egyptian Christianity. Notable in this respect is Boyarin's vivid piece on the differences between Christian and Philonic allegory, and subsequent rabbinic interpretation. For Boyarin the deficit in Philo's interpretative enterprise lies in his failure to explain why he can understand God's truth in the Scriptures better than Moses. Christians overcome this deficit by their insistence on the fact that Jesus is the incarnate Logos, a point with heavily hermeneutical consequences. Their flight into allegory, however, is not reflected in Rabbinic midrash which, while sharing some things in common with allegory, is more attentive to the character of biblical events. Rousseau's contribution, drawing on the work of Michael Williams on the structure of Gnostic thought, shows why it was that Pachomian monks could take up the Gnostic material at Nag Hammadi, or something like it, and use it for their own purposes: ‘Comparable habits of exegesis and catechesis make it entirely likely that the Nag Hammadi documents could have taken their surviving form within Christian ascetic society. That could have been the case, not because Christian ascetics thought like gnostics, but because they could turn the material to their own use’ (p. 137). David Frankfurter's piece is a subtle investigation of the Panegyric on Macarius, a work originally edited by the honorand of the volume (David Johnson), showing how it preserves genuine information about late pagan veneration of an Egyptian god called Kothos, and while its many details conform with hagiographical descriptions of Egyptian gods and their ‘wicked’ cult practices, its historical importance lies in what it tells us about the evolution of a religious landscape: ‘the disruptions in cult that it involved and the persisting features … that had to be negotiated’ (p. 188).