In a review of this size, it is sometimes difficult to give a rounded account of the whole. Of immediate significance is the theme, and this is an important one, splendidly presented. The significance operates at several levels, all noted to a degree by the editors.

First, there is the well-rehearsed suspicion that education and religion in the period concerned did not go well together. No one in these pages believes that, and their skepticism is richly illustrated and convincingly defended. It is a pity that there are still some who underestimate the crucial role that education played in the expansion of Christianity. The doctrina Christiana may have been different from traditional paideía, or at least greatly adapted, but it still depended on what we would call “learning,” on serious scholarship, on the investment of time set aside, and on venues preserved or constructed. The apparatus of formation, in those senses, was still a visible and vibrant feature of the late antique landscape.

Second, we still find traces of the view that levels of education suffered from the general “decline” of the age, that religion as such—the Christian religion specifically—was inimical to the skills and insights of schooling. The church, it might almost be supposed, thrived on ignorance by inducing credulity and superstition. Again, the contrary is here rightly asserted.

Third, we have the robustly defended view that, while the eastern provinces and peripheries of the empire—Greek- and Syriac-speaking—might for a while have held their own culturally, the western regions, overwhelmed by intruders from “outside,” presented a sorrier sight. This in the world of Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, and Gregory the Great! While none of those cultural giants receives a portrait of his own, they lurk between the lines, and the withering of the west has its antidote in detailed chapters devoted to sanctity in Rouen (Peter Gemeinhardt), conciliar forensics in Christian Carthage (Peter van Nuffelen), and the lively culture of Vandal Africa (Konrad Vössing).

Against passé prejudice, therefore, the editors mount their argument. The greatest strength of the book may be its territorial breadth: the theme is examined in multiple settings. There is scarcely a province or a major tongue that is left untouched. Where I found the work less successful was in its apparent structure. There are three elements to the subtitle, which the editors explain (rather briefly) in their introduction: “reflections” really refers to Christian self-awareness, as they understood that they were reorienting an ancient system to a new educative purpose; “contexts” reminds us that the adjustment took different forms in different places; and “genres” implies that different types of texts will express the adjustment in different ways. Yet the book is then divided into four sections: “Monastic Education” tackles (largely in Egypt) our second rejected supposition (above) about the increasingly “uncouth” Christian (Larsen, Timbie, Watts); “Gnomic Knowledge” is concerned with the moralizing vade mecum that allows well memorized aphorism to govern habituated behavior (Papadogiannakis, Rigolio, Stenger); “Protreptic” widens that lens by placing didacticism in its urban, rhetorical, textual, and pedagogic settings (Gemeinhardt, Van Hoof, Krueger); and “Secular and Religious Learning” asks whether that phrase represents a progression or a substitution—that is, just how much of a past was being left behind, and was “learning” guaranteed a future (Van Nuffelen, Vössing, King).

These different divisions do not involve contradictions; rather, they point to necessarily fuzzy boundaries and inevitable—indeed, fruitful—overlaps. Nor do they detract in any way from the quality and scholarly detail of the individual chapters. But they do illustrate the lingering difficulty we have in spotting “learnedness” in the post-imperial world, assessing its novelty and conscious purpose (not to mention the deliberate initiatives it represented and the schooling of its audience), and, above all, folding its various manifestations into a single image of “Christian culture” across old hegemonies that we still too easily allow to lapse into “the barbarian West,” “Byzantium,” and “Islam.” Perhaps it is too soon for such a book, in which case collections of essays with this degree of detail, flair, and shared authority are part of the needed prolegomenon.

Let me comment more fully, therefore, on a small selection of the papers, to underline that point. Lillian Larsen in “Early Monasticism and the Rhetorical Tradition” (13–33) is characteristically leery of exceptions that have become the rule—the unlettered Antony and the impressively lettered Evagrius and Arsenius. Here, she convincingly argues, we have been deliberately beguiled by the creators of those portraits themselves. Such famous vignettes are belied by evidence in other narrative sources, which betray a lively learnedness in monastic circles, allude to matching archaeological evidence for the material supports of that learnedness, and bear abundant witness to its nature and proliferation. The material support is particularly telling (and splendidly illustrated)—ostraca and papyri especially, of course. Gnṓmai and chreíai find their place, but I was especially taken by Larsen's unpacking of what was meant by lógos, the maxim typically demanded of a “holy man.” These “sayings” could be adapted to circumstance, consciously modified, and, above all, developed or combined into extended mini-catecheses—a clear sign of how they became immersed in an endlessly exploitable literary tradition that became the basis for moral formation and scriptural exegesis of considerable complexity. (Her extensive notes are chock-full of “classical” antecedents.)

Peter Gemeinhardt's “Christian Hagiography and the Rhetorical Tradition” (103–115) surprises us, perhaps, with a presentation of Victricius of Rouen. But here is a text (De laude sanctorum) entirely built upon adventus and associated panegyric, which is already (in 396, before the death of Ambrose or Martin) busily redefining what a Christian city is founded on and how its ceremonial evolves and absorbs new meaning. Victricius's question is how (in that context) should we honor saints and how should we talk about them. I was immensely struck by the way both Gemeinhardt and (I suspect) his audience have passed beyond the “cult of the saints” in its older historiographical guise: there is here one laconic reference to a Peter Brown footnote and none to The Cult of the Saints (University of Chicago Press, 1982). We are invited to look in hagiography for new things.

Derek Krueger, in his “Scripture and Liturgy in the Life of Mary of Egypt” (131–141), makes his characteristic point that the writer's purpose governs much of the content in hagiography. But here he is more specific, stressing that the narrator has a special connection to defend: liturgy forces participants to interpret the sacred text in a particular way. Krueger describes the process thus: a hagiographical text can “slip seamlessly” from its own narrative to the biblical text (132). At least one of the ways we should read a Life like that of Mary, therefore, is as an adjunct to liturgical practice. Krueger bolsters his view with a succinct but perceptive set of points about education among believers, its acquisition and retention especially. He is particularly exciting, however, in pointing out that many of the connections made in the liturgical context understood in this way do not always appear in more formal works of exegesis. The hagiographer, in other words, is here the pedagogue, “extending the language of the liturgy into the lives of the saints” (140).

So, these are some small dishes from a splendid feast in which we can all find delight, nourishment, companionship, and energy—and perhaps the readiness to write that bigger book.