Philippe Blaudeau is to be commended for this fulsome new presentation of Liberatus’ Breviarium. Copious insightful footnotes, a sprightly French translation (by François Cassingena-Trévedy) and over a hundred pages of introductory and bibliographical material now adorn Eduard Schwartz's critical edition of the Latin text (originally given in ACO ii.5). Posterity is grateful to Liberatus chiefly for his glorious failure to deliver on his own promise of ‘brevity’ – his lengthy Breviarium provides us with one of the few ecclesiastical histories of the mid-sixth century (composed in about 565). The studious deacon of Carthage, engaged in an energetic succession of journeys to defend the ‘Three Chapters’ from imperial condemnation, sought to demonstrate that the present controversy could only rightly be understood by reaching back to its distant origins, beginning with the rise of Nestorius more than a century before. Liberatus’ Brevarium is thus, inter alia, the earliest Latin witness to a documentary collection preserving some of the proceedings of the First Council of Ephesus. Liberatus is not always reliable on the precise details of fifth-century debates, but he offers a fascinating glimpse into the shaping of the conciliar reception of Ephesus (431) and especially of Chalcedon (451), in a way that foregrounds the quality of measured balance and irenic equipoise (viz. the condemnation of the Nestorians on the one hand, and the Eutychians on the other, via a moderate, almost pallid, interpretation of Cyril's theology), in order to argue for the continued inclusion (contra Justinian) of the Antiochene ‘Three Chapters’ within the bounds of orthodoxy. Other than a penetrating series of articles from 2010 in the Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum xiv, it is therefore surprising that the rich resources of the Breviarium have not received more sustained recent scholarly attention. With this edition, Blaudeau, already a distinguished authority on the ecclesiastical politics of the period (see, for instance, his fine study, Alexandrie et Constantinople [451–491], Rome 2006), fills this lacuna with aplomb. In his hefty introduction, Blaudeau carefully sifts what can be known about Liberatus’ life, sketches with clarity the complex episcopal manoeuvrings of the fifth and sixth centuries and dissects the variety of sources that Liberatus had at his disposal. Blaudeau's analysis of the ‘genre’ of the Breviarium is particularly illuminating, demonstrating a keen awareness of the kaleidoscope of influences on the composition of the text. The volume is rounded off with a series of helpful tables, maps and indices.