This is a weighty book, not only because it runs to more than a thousand pages. The Greek text of the De anima, together with that of a shorter eschatological tract, In illud tunc et ipse filius, is edited and translated in the first half, with luxuriant annotation. The translation must be judged by native speakers of Italian; the Greek text is perspicuous to those who are sufficiently familiar with Gregory's style to emend for themselves the typographical errors (more than fifty, by my count) which the proof-reader has allowed to mar the labours of the editor. Missing aspirates, substitution of a false letter and failure to separate two words account for the majority of these, but they are not so inconsequential that they will not mislead an unpractised reader. Two long dissertations follow. The first compares the doctrines of apokatastasis, or the restoration of all things, in Gregory and in Origen, and finds that there is little to choose between them, either in cogency or in idiosyncrasy. Both teach that the end will be a return to the archetype, and both draw the corollary that, since the world came perfect from the hand of God, his purpose will be completed only when all its present evils and imperfections are expunged. Both doubt that matter, the cradle of imperfection in Platonic thought, is a necessary postulate of philosophy, although Gregory maintains this case with more conviction, and more of the apparatus of the Greek schools. Gregory holds, more candidly than Origen in his extant works, that all will at last be saved. Origen is sometimes thought to differ from him in envisaging a second fall from heaven, but as Ramelli shows with a catalogue of citations, this tenet is more easily illustrated from the writings of his critics than from his own, where it figures only as a deduction from false teachings. Origen, in Ramelli's view, differs from Gregory chiefly in teaching the pre-existence of the soul, and even here she is conscious that Origen's enemies made a dogma of a mercurial speculation. In a second excursus she addresses the Platonism of Gregory. While she cannot agree with those who have used the term ‘anti-Platonist’ of Origen, she notes with approval Dörrie's list of axioms which were never waived in ancient expositions of Christian doctrine. Although, therefore, reminiscences of Platonic texts, and particularly the Phaedo, are pervasive in the De anima of Gregory, he flies the distinctive colours of his own faith when he rejects the doctrine of transmigration, insists that reason alone cannot fathom the counsel of God and devises an ingenious scenario to permit the reconstitution of the body from its atoms as an everlasting garment for the soul. Ramelli also demonstrates that Gregory turns the higher dialectic of the Sophist against Eunomius, whose ‘subordinationism’ is often glibly characterised as a Platonisation of the Trinity. Here as elsewhere, her judgement is acute, her erudition cornucopian and the whole book a paradigm of good scholarship.