This collection of essays takes a straightforward claim as its starting point, stated succinctly on the first page: ‘Christians encompassed, reorganised, and reoriented existing bodies of knowledge and conceptions of the process of knowing’ (p. 1). Such a statement hardly requires a defence in view of the contributions Christians made to literary and material culture in the ancient world and beyond; however, as Christianity expanded within diverse contexts from its New Testament locale, these contributions did not remain monolithic. Some contributions were a recapitulation of non-Christian teachings or sources, while others were a resuscitation of prior Christian practices. Beyond these, there lies a third category: contributions that were innovative in their perspective (i.e. their Christianness) and creative in their practice (i.e. their cultural acts). As such, accurately situating early Christian intellectual practice requires an inherent embrace of this dichotomy – casting an eye toward both totality and localisation, recognising both tradition and innovation and embracing the tension of both continuity and discontinuity. While many edited volumes fail to do so, such a task is well accomplished by the editors of The intellectual world of late antique Christianity. This volume offers a helpful series of case studies engaging these themes in several communities and contexts stretching from the second century through the eighth century, and one of its strengths is its commitment to this double approach. Taking Foucault and Hadot as initial points of departure, this project contributes to the broader emergence of new horizons within patristics and early Christian studies and offers a welcome overview of intellectual practices, exercises and cultures within the Early Church and its contexts.

As an example of this, one need not look beyond the editors’ framing of the volume as exploring ‘how epistemology affects social action and agency’ and describing Christian interactions with groups in ‘discursive, institutional, and material formations’ (p. 20). They are interested in modes of knowledge and the ordering of knowledge in antiquity as twin themes to guide the work, but they include recent scholarly interests like Christian expression within discourses, institutions and material forms. Further, instead of leaving the essays as self-sufficient historical studies, the editors have invited Teresa Morgan's reflection on the volume in a pursuit of further questions, offering compelling examples like, ‘How do we negotiate the relationship between authority and reason?’ or, ‘Can we borrow other people's ideas without being shaped by their values?’ in the epilogue (p. 755). As such, the work's list of contributors and their theses reflect their editorial commitment to both warps and woofs within Christian intellectual practices, and Morgan's response to the volume reflects their desires to pursue deeper inquiry into the communal, intellectual and spiritual experiences of the human being.

Given the tome's inclusion of nearly forty chapters, an extensive analysis of every contribution would exceed a tolerable word count for a review such as this one; however, several essays beyond the introductory chapter were helpful, noteworthy, insightful or even provocative.Footnote ¹ Jane Heath begins the rest of the volume with a helpful study of spiritual senses in and before Origen, engaging the scholarship of Rahner, Gavrilyuk and Coakley. Heath's essay is particularly stimulating in its ability to bring historical theology into conversation with contemporary theological concerns and readings.Footnote ² Matyáš Havrda explores ‘how the [ethics, physics, and epoptics] scheme is adapted for Christian use in Clement's programme of Christian philosophy’, while simultaneously placing it against the backdrop of Clement's Christian interests and cultural context (p. 92). I am encouraged to see the representation of historically understudied subfields throughout the volume – especially Andrew Riggsby's survey of tabular organisation (which builds on recent scholarship concerning the organisation and presentation of knowledge in Eusebius and in Origen's Hexapla) and Matthew Crawford's essay on the use of artistic imagery in Eusebius. Paired with Andrew Radde-Gallwitz's survey of creeds as expressions of knowledge and Cilliers Breytenbach's study of Amphilochius of Iconium's homilies, the editors’ inclusion of these kinds of essays implicitly shows that literary and material elements should not and cannot be separated from their prospective theological impact(s). Additional essays that piqued interested included Jeffrey Wickes's ‘Imagining Ephrem the author’, Sarah Gador-Whyte's exploration of liturgy as a mode of knowing in ‘Liturgical modes of knowing’, and Bronwen Neil's study of Gregory the Great on ‘Ordering emotional communities’. The volume is a well-rounded example of how to contextualise the presentation of knowledge throughout epochs of the ancient world while emphasising distinctly Christian expressions of intellectual practice.

Despite being more or less ordered chronologically, the nature of this project includes such a wide set of focuses, emphases and approaches that essays can, on occasion, feel siloed from one another. For example, how exactly does Jared Secord's investigation of health, medicine and philosophy in Justin Martyr relate to the survey of creedal formulae offered by Andrew Radde-Gallwitz or Paul Blowers's study of the ‘cosmopolitan visions’ of George of Pisidia and Maximus the Confessor? Despite this occasional sense of siloing, the editors have given the field a valuable resource that ought to be on the serious scholar's bookshelf. An edited volume of this size gives the impression of a handbook on the surface, and the essays included here avoid the kinds of overt generalisation present in many academic handbooks – something that ought to be commended. In publishing this volume, Ayres, Champion and Crawford have accomplished a difficult task: they have traversed several eras and several disciplines to craft a volume worthy of attention.

On the whole, I recommend The intellectual world of late antique Christianity as a helpful guidebook to the current methods of investigation into classical Christian practices of intellectual activity. This volume, paired with Ayres and Ward's 2020 The rise of the early Christian intellectual, published by DeGruyter, offers students of early Christianity and patristics a clear point of entry into contemporary discussions of Christian intellectual identities in antiquity, and future studies will certainly benefit from the foundation laid by their work.