This is a history of Montanism, an ‘imaginative history’ which its author tells us is not fictional narrative. Its approach is ‘novelistic’ but it is not a novel. It is constructed of vignettes ‘based upon solid evidence’ and as the author of studies about opposition to Montanism and about its epigraphy and archaeology William Tabbernee is well qualified to present its troubled history. Prophets and gravestones began life, he writes in the preface, as tales he told of Montanist Christianity to the archaeological team at the site of ancient Pepouza, which was the geographical hub of Montanism. It is an unusual project, however, and premised on the expectation that the book might provide ‘depth and fullness’ and a resource for those (students, discussion groups and others) studying wider Christianity in its first six centuries. To that end the publisher's website carries a downloadable file of cost-free study material to guide the reader chapter by chapter and to encourage engagement with contemporary as well as historical issues. This is available at http://www.bakeracademic.com/Media/MediaManager/TabberneeStudyGuide.pdf. Significant questions about the Church, about authority and power, gender roles, orthodoxy and heresy intersect easily with Montanism's history and Tabbernee's sources are cited and commented on at the end of each of the thirty-eight chapters. The miles he writes of are Roman miles; the imagined routes taken by real people match possible routes, the descriptions reflect actual topography and the author's knowledge of conditions in the second–sixth centuries. There are maps and illustrative plates. Indeed there is much for the student of early Christianity to learn from Prophets and gravestones of the context in which events took place and of the implications of geographical setting. Tabbernee's intention is an admirable one. Nevertheless such a work represents a daring move on the part of a serious scholar and one which will doubtless raise concerns among some other scholars that boundaries are being blurred and that readers will not always know where the content of a source ends and informed invention begins, with that source also being used as a vessel for carrying other pieces of the history into focus. Only William Tabbernee has the stature for such daring where Montanism is concerned. I found the book an enjoyable read.