For the conference of which this is the proceedings, ‘speakers were asked to consider the production and use of books, including the Bible, between the third and seventh centuries ad’ (p. ix). The resulting essays, arranged in no discernible order, embrace a wide range of approaches and methodologies and range well beyond this already-broad brief. Thus, at the ‘theoretical’ extreme, Mark Vessey devotes much of his thirty-four pages to twentieth-century, mainly French, philosophical conceptualisations of ‘the book’ in general, before in his final paragraph posing the (unanswered) question: ‘theory has a preoccupation with the Bible. But what if the Bible in the sense taken for granted by theory were in fact absent and yet to come?’ (his italics). In dense language Catherine Chin evokes ways in which Jerome conceived reading as travel and could ‘locat[e] the quality of ‘Christianness’ within the space of the book' (p. 116), while Daniel Boyarin compares and contrasts the literary strategies of early Christian Fathers and of Talmudic Judaism, perceiving that ‘in both cases there results what might be called a certain apophatic theology of the Divine Voice’ (pp. 84–5). Various ‘readings’ are offered of particular texts: Gillian Clark stresses the bookishness behind Augustine's City of god; Catherine Conybeare argues that Prudentius' Hamartigenia demonstrates ‘how a truly generative hermeneutic may be established by reading the Jewish and Christian scriptures in integrated form’ (p. 239). Kim Haines-Eitzen points out how different versions of the Acts of Paul and Thecla vary in their treatment of the erotically-charged episodes, while Catherin Burris argues that the presentation of this tale alongside those of Ruth, Esther, Susanna and Judith within a sixth-century Syrian ‘Book of women’ was another means of ‘tam[ing] this potentially troubling story’ (p. 98) – though if such were really a prime concern, omitting it altogether would have been a simpler and more effective solution. More firmly grounded in fact, Caroline Humfress demonstrates how ‘the placing of gospel-books within Justinianic courtrooms … ensured that the place of judgement and the legal participants were animated by the Holy Spirit, but the cases themselves were still judged according to the letter of “Roman” law’ (p. 158); while Daniel Sarefield tracks from the pagan Roman empire to its Christian successor the practice of burning sacred books. The stars of the collection, based on careful consideration of large bodies of challenging evidence, are John Lowden's meticulous study of the decorated covers of early Christian codices, Chrysi Kotsifu's exploration of the practicalities of book production in the monastic communities of Byzantine Egypt, and Claudia Rapp's probing of the spiritual qualities that were perceived to pertain to holy scribes and books. These empirical studies are more successful in capturing the elusive essence of the early Christian book and in evoking something of the motivations of its creators and users than are the theoretical discourses and speculative readings that dominate the volume. In sum, this collection has something to inform and to baffle readers of every persuasion; correspondingly, it is doubtful whether anyone but a reviewer will ever consult more than a handful of the essays.