This hefty monograph is based on a thesis supervised by Wilhelm Geerlings and accepted by the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Bochum (Germany) in 2004/5. The author, Bärbel Dümler has tried to incorporate secondary literature up until 2012. Invoking the opinion of K. Baus (p. 3), Dümler justly observes a lack of monographic studies which would allow us to reconstruct in greater detail the (inner) history of Christian mission in late antiquity. Dümler contributes to filling this gap by focusing on a collection of ninety-two sermons which the manuscript tradition ascribed to Zeno, bishop of Verona between 360 and 380 ce. After an introduction dealing with, amongst others, the sources, the history of research and the scarce information about Christian beginnings in Northern Italy and Verona (pp. 1–64), Dümler proceeds in two steps: first she exhaustively analyses Zeno's view of pagan ‘Kultur’. Although she is alert to the difficulties of using this term, she favours it for two reasons: it is etymologically connected to ‘cult’ (a term with which she readily associates with paganism) and it belongs to the discourse of defining one's identity over against a constructed ‘other’ (pp. 11–13). She structures her account according to the well-known concept of ‘theologia tripartita’ (pp. 65–387): She deals, for example, under the heading of ‘theologia civilis’, with Zeno's comments on subjects such as pagan places of worship, pagan idols, pagan prayer, divination and the cult of the dead. She concludes that Zeno's critique of pagan culture focuses on attacking private practices and on ridiculing an abstract concept of paganism. In this way the bishop preaches ‘negative Christian doctrine’ and ‘negative Christian ethics’: Paganism is here little more than the ‘other’ of Christianity (pp. 219–24). In the second part Dümler analyses the concept of Christian ‘Bildung’ with which Zeno confronts the pagan ‘culture’ of his time and place (pp. 389–594). Although Dümler is fully aware of the fact that the German term ‘Bildung’, with its roots in the language of medieval Christian mysticism, is not ancient and hence somewhat anachronistic when applied to Christian exhortation in late antiquity (pp. 14f, 19), she seems inclined to leave it to her readers fully to realise that it may also carry a considerable cargo of (German) cultural connotations, especially if contrasted with the term ‘Kultur’. Again, Dümler's treatment, which details the presuppositions, media, methods and goals of Christian ‘Bildung’ as articulated by Zeno, is nothing if not thorough. She concludes that, according to Zeno, the goal of Christian ‘Bildung’ is to enable the baptised to preserve, first, the knowledge and the consciousness of being made in the image of God, and, second, the wisdom to live and act according to that knowledge. The final goal is immortality, that is beatitudo and felicitas, the ‘elimination of all vital fear and anxiety’ (p. 594). I warmly recommended this book to all assiduous students of Zeno of Verona and the processes of the Christianisation of culture in late antiquity.