This is a complex and rewarding book. It is not infrequently said that the Byzantine empire was in many respects a multicultural phenomenon, but what exactly this meant has not been dwelt on very much. In this book Philip Wood explores in depth what it might mean in the case of the part of the empire where Syriac was spoken – Syria and Mesopotamia. As he pursues his theme, he draws on a much broader conceptual palate than is common in studies of late antiquity, and in particular makes effective, though cautious, use of the kind of conceptual apparatus that has been developed to explain the emergence of nations in the modern period. Such concepts have been employed before to explain aspects of this period – notably the alignment of heresy and nationhood put forward by Llewelyn Woodward, and later by W. H. C. Frend, whereby an alleged emerging sense of nationhood in Egypt and Syria was attributed to their embracing Monophysitism. Wood's analysis is much more nuanced and satisfying. He also makes effective use of the notion introduced in early modern history of ‘imaginative communities’.

This apparatus of analytical concepts is applied to what is, on the face of it, pretty intractable material. Wood's main concern is with analysing the notion of political identity in Syria and Mesopotamia, which is only tangentially important to the texts with which he has to deal. Wood's argument is complex, and – it has to be said – not always presented in the most comprehensible way. Some of the conceptual apparatus already mentioned would have benefitted from being set out in a more extended form than the allusive treatment that we find here. In what follows, I am not always sure that I have grasped every aspect of what Wood has to say, though there is much that is fascinating in the rather complex undergrowth.

Wood begins by sketching in the way in which an overall sense of political identity was secured in the Roman Empire by the use of paideia, instilled by the educational system for the ruling classes, which imparted a sense of common values and identity, and goes on to suggest how the rise of Christianity all but obliterated that, by setting up a strongly centripetal form of authority, which was endorsed by the emperor, and how the growing importance of the local bishop and the rise of the cult of (mostly local) saints rewrote the sense of civic identity. Noting that the most prominent exception to this burying of any pre-Christian past is the Doctrina Addai, which Christianises, but does not obliterate, the pagan past of the city of Edessa, Wood prepares the ground for the rest of the book by introducing the discussion of nation-building. Out of this he takes the notion, to which he will return frequently, of an ‘ethnie’, which shares many of the characteristics of a nation – sense of identity and origin, shared myths, common language, territory – without being a fully fledged nation, with the sense of independence and relationship to other nations within an international community.

The sense of political identity as an ‘ethnie’ is now explored in relation to various texts. Theodoret's Religious history is seen as placing the Syrian ascetics in a kind of hinterland of official Nicene Christianity. A more independent sense of identity is found in the Doctrina Addai and various other Edessene texts, in which the Abgar legend and the sense of Syrian Christianity as having its own direct link with Christ and the Apostles through its own apostle, Addai (identified by Eusebius with Thaddeus, something not, I think, mentioned by Wood). The sense of identity seen developed here has two striking features: an insistence on the Christian duty to convert pagans, and, along with this, an anti-Judaic attitude that sees persecution of the Jews as a Christian duty. This sense of identity is pursued further in relation to the Julian Romance, in which these themes are treated in a narrative way.

The latter half of the book is devoted to exploring the way in which this sense of who the Syrians are unfolded as the schism between those who accepted and those who rejected the Christological settlement developed, especially in Syria, which became in many respects the intellectual hub of those who rejected Chalcedon, as well as developing a secure institutional structure. Wood finds a sense of Monophysite Christianity (he uses the fashionable, but barbarous, term ‘miaphysite’) that remained conscious of the empire to which it belonged, while qualifying this with the conviction that only an orthodox (=Monophysite) emperor could claim their allegiance. The notion of ‘ethnie’ provides a sufficiently flexible term to capture this monophysite/Syrian sense of identity. Wood picks up Fowden's use of Obolensky's notion of a ‘commonwealth’, in which imperial concerns and values reached beyond imperial boundaries, and speaks of a ‘miaphysite commonwealth’, which was marked out by its missions against the pagans and its own repertory of martyrs.

This is a difficult book to summarise, partly because to me the argument seems not always fully laid bare, but also because Wood does not shrink from the detailed examination of difficult texts that his argument requires. There is, however, no question but that it is a book that breaks new ground in understanding what was happening in the quasi-independent Syrian world on the fringe of the Byzantine and Persian empires. Wood uses a formidable array of intellectual tools, and enables one to see in much greater depth what was going on in that world between the spread of Christianity and the rise of Islam. Alas, it has to be said that the book is marred by poor proof-reading.