The Alexandrian theologians of late antiquity have been extensively studied, not least because they were at the centre of the biggest Christological controversy of early Christianity. However, later Egyptian theological production has been largely neglected, and is arguably one of the least known today. If only for this reason, Stephen Davis has written a very important book, bringing to the fore a body of texts virtually ignored by most theologians and historians of the Church. The book covers a very long time span, from the fourth to the thirteenth century, and has no ambition to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Instead, Davis concentrates on ‘a collection of vignettes or case studies’ that can ‘convey something of the distinctiveness’ of Egyptian Christology through time, and in different contexts and parts of the country. He attempts to do this through what he describes as ‘a new path in the study of early Christian Christology’, namely one that uses traditional theological analysis in combination with social history, the visual arts, discourse theory and ritual studies (p. vii). This interdisciplinary approach is very successful, and Davis is to be thanked for bringing it into this field of study. What reservations I express below should not lead one to underestimate the significance of his achievement. The very extensive introduction is a text-based study of Alexandrian Christology, with a strong stress on Athanasius and Cyril, presumably because they are central figures for later theologians, as the last short section shows. Part i on ‘Coptic literature and liturgy’ combines Christological writings with an analysis of liturgical ritual so as to understand how the Christological principles of the Egyptian Church were set out in its liturgy. A first section studies the writings of Shenoute on the incarnation and on ‘incarnational practice’, i.e. on prayers and sacraments as they were practised in his monastery. Davis then examines ‘Coptic eucharistic liturgies’ and the way in which they exemplify the Christological elements described previously. Part ii on ‘Bodies, practice and sacred space’ is where Davis's ‘new path’ takes up centre stage, as he investigates how Christology informs the rituals of the cult of saints, and in particular those of ‘Coptic pilgrimage’. For this he returns to the writings of Shenoute and to legends concerning the passage of the Holy Family in Egypt, identifying re-enactments of and symbolic participation in the incarnation by pilgrims. Davis then turns to Coptic art, in particular textiles and architecture, and investigates the role of dress in ‘fashioning a divine body’, especially through ‘putting on Christ’, i.e. wearing clothes with Christological images, and the symbolic relationship between buildings and the body, relying on extensive textual metaphors comparing body and Church. Part iii is entitled ‘Arabization and Christian-Muslim encounter’, and focuses first on the work of the tenth-century polygraph Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffa' (known in earlier literature as Severus of Ashmuneyn), the first Egyptian Christian author to write in Arabic whose works we possess. Sāwīrus was a controversialist who debated with the Muslims at the Fatimid court, and his integration and appropriation of Muslim notions and vocabulary in his defence of Christianity are well studied. Davis takes up and develops this theme specifically in relation to Christology, and in doing so makes an important contribution to the more general question of Christian-Muslim controversy. He then continues with an account of Egyptian Christology in Arabic during the ‘Golden Age’ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The main body of the book is followed by a postscript on modern Egyptian Christology, two appendices with translations of Coptic and Arabic texts, an extensive bibliography and a detailed index. One important focus of Davis's analysis from the introduction to the end of part ii is the body, its conceptions and the way it is constructed in commentaries on the incarnation and in the development of the doctrine of co-corporeality with the divine as Davis puts it (to translate Athanasius's σύσσωμoι) – a question central in later eastern theology of theosis, ‘divinisation’, or human integration with the divine. Given this interesting and unconventional focus, it is rather a surprise not to find any reference to the work of Caroline Bynum on the theology of the body (especially her The resurrection of the body in western Christianity, 200–1336, New York 1995, and the essays collected in Fragmentation and redemption: essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion, New York 1991). Davis succeeds very well in bringing out the organised Christological discourse of the Egyptian Church and its variations through a millennium, and in showing that it was broadcast through a variety of media other than texts, intimately involving the average Christian through ritual practice and its spatial and visual environment. There is much work along those lines by art historians working on the medieval west, and it is refreshing to find this approach applied to east Christian studies. This, however, is only the case for the period and cultural environment of Shenoute: nothing is said of ritual practice or material culture either for the period preceding Shenoute or for the medieval period, for both of which Davis's working base is essentially textual. Thus, although the book does give a diachronic overview of Coptic Christology, it does not give one of Coptic Christology in practice as the title claims. Finally, Davis dwells very little on post-Chalcedonian ‘Alexandrian Greek Christology’, which he clearly dissociates from the ‘indigenous’ Christology he studies through the writings of Shenoute and the later ‘Copto-Arabic’ theologians. There is here, to my mind, an important definitional problem. Why should one not consider Egyptians from Alexandria who spoke Greek, the commonly accepted language of theology in the fourth century, as ‘indigenous’? Especially when, later in the book, Egyptians from Cairo who spoke and wrote in Arabic are not treated in the same manner and their writings are described as ‘Copto-Arabic’? There is a subtle shift in Davis's use of ‘Coptic’, from describing the language at the beginning of the book to describing the Egyptian Monophysite Church in the book's final part. This is very common in the study of Christian Egypt and has contributed towards creating a vision according to which Greek-speakers in Egypt, even a thousand years after Alexander's conquest, were ‘Greeks’ and not ‘Egyptians’, i.e. ‘foreign’, not ‘indigenous’ – a distinction not applied to the Arabic-speaking Christian Egyptians, presumably because they still exist as a community and claim their ‘Coptic’ identity. In a book of such theoretical sophistication, at least a discussion of this question might have been expected.