One can confirm only enthusiastically the judgment of John Baldovin, SJ, that this book by Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson, brilliantly combining as it does the knowledge and wisdom of two top scholars writing at the top of their game, “will remain a standard for scholar and student alike for years to come.” The book is unique in its magisterially comprehensive presentation and liturgical-theological analysis of Christian eucharistic liturgies from their origins in the meal practices of the pre-Christian Jewish and Greco-Roman world, up to the eucharistic liturgies of our own day, and across the many and varied liturgical traditions and practices of both East and West. Scholars, who often have to spend their time examining this or that particular aspect of liturgical studies, will find this work helpful in filling out their sense of the whole picture. Students, at least those beyond the most introductory levels, will find here the happily now available, indispensable basic map for the study of the history and theology of the rituals of the Church's central sacrament. No library pretending to serve the needs of a college, theology major, or religious studies major can afford to be without this book.

There are eight fairly dense chapters, each of which—with the student, and even the time-pressed scholar, in mind—concludes with a list of some half-dozen summary points: (1) origins; (2) the second and third centuries; (3) the fourth and fifth centuries: historical context and rites; (4) the fourth and fifth centuries: questions in anaphoral development and eucharistic theology; (5) the Christian East; (6) the medieval West; (7) the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; (8) the modern period.

A special feature, well suited to a work that could become a textbook for graduate and even doctoral courses and seminars, is the extensive quotation of the eucharistic liturgies, which are presented and analyzed in their historical-theological contexts. For example, most of the texts found in Jasper and Cuming's highly valuable Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (1975) are taken up and studied here, along with many other texts, especially from the East and the modern period.

Another highly valued feature is the calm and undefensive ecumenical sensitivity with which Bradshaw, the Anglican/Episcopalian, and Johnson, the Lutheran, both professors of liturgy at the (Roman Catholic) University of Notre Dame, ply their trade. This sensitivity is clear not just in the even-handedness with which they present the various rites and liturgies, but also and most especially in their treatment of the eucharistic theology that is explicit or implicit therein, and of the various nuances of the interplay of lex orandi and lex credendi. Necessarily selective in a work as broadly conceived as this one, Bradshaw and Johnson usually focus their theological analysis on two issues that have often been neuralgic or controversial, especially from the time of the Reformation: eucharistic presence and eucharistic sacrifice.

What could be improved? The suggestions that follow stem from my awed and grateful awareness of the extraordinary value and potential of this book as a textbook, a handbook, a gap-filling handy reference work, and a guide to further study. With the potential of this book in mind, the table of contents could be much more detailed. There could be a bibliography, or at least a full index of authors (since many of the authors mentioned in the footnotes are not included in the index). Then, speaking as a theologian, I much appreciated the—à la Edward Kilmartin—trinitarian view of Eucharist and sacrifice with which the book ends; that said, my appreciation would have been increased by mention of Kilmartin's suggestion that Odo Casel's notion of re-presentation, which has been so fruitful in modern ecumenical theology, can be deepened, or even corrected, by thinking not of the past, historical Christ-event being made present to us, but vice versa, by thinking of us being made present to it.