David Frankfurter has set out a generous and humane assessment of what Christianity may have meant to late antique individuals and communities in Egypt (a.d. 350–700). In doing so, he sets out to remodel Christianity, not as ‘a historical achievement or monolithic cultural institution’ (6), but as a syncretistic process, ‘on-going and historically contingent’ (257), a ‘cluster of authoritative strategies … and sensational forms’ (260). Foregrounding agency, he invokes Lévi-Strauss's concept of ‘bricolage’ to describe the diverse range of materials from which local Christianity might be assembled (16, 48–54). F.’s syncretism is active, assertive and dynamic, with an emphasis on individuals as part of communities (72), thus complementing other recent appraisals of group identity.

In some ways, the book is the converse of F.’s Religion in Roman Egypt (1998), with the benefit of twenty years of further scholarship. At the core of both studies are corpora that F. has actively produced, e.g. editions, translations and studies of apocryphal and ‘magical’ texts. His ability to guide the reader through these sources, and his selection of useful interpretative frameworks are especially welcome. Ch. 1 defines his subject and introduces some of the theoretical approaches that will shape the work; an appeal to comparative religion in the postscript reads like a direct response to editorial comments. The subsequent chapters are organised by ‘social site’, defined as ‘configurations of activity and personal engagement, social bonding, social identity, and movement through fixed spaces’ (24).

The domestic sphere (ch. 2) is the centre from which other social sites radiate. Domestic space and time are ordered by family concerns such as protection, and continuity with the past (ancestors) and the future (children). In addition to amulets and curses, F. discusses lamps, bread stamps, female figurines, eulogia/smou, literary texts reproducing aspects of lullabies and legal documents affecting votive dedications. The (living) holy man (ch. 3) and the (dead) saint's shrine (ch. 4) are conceived as locations of efficacy connected to domestic and institutional spheres by festivals, processions and pilgrimage routes. Holy men and saints are convincingly argued to reorder, rather than replace, earlier traditions (such as oracles). In particular, ‘beneficial aspects of spirits from the old order’ are ‘demonized in the new’, so that people might ‘seek out alternative, familiar spiritual powers apart from Christ and the saints, but within the framework imposed by the evangelists’, therefore preserving their value (86). So too thusia (traditionally rendered ‘sacrifice’) is reordered in the service of rural feasting to serve the poor (120). A chapter on the workshop (ch. 5) argues that ‘pagan survivals’ were instead effective solutions to problems that had stood the test of time. Relying on synthetic scholarship, largely in English and French, F. does not control all this evidence as well as he might. The discussion on textiles is focused on the wearer, but illustrated in some cases by elements from soft-furnishings, and a motif identified as a cross is a rosette (fig. 11). The ‘veritable explosion in the design and manufacture of’ terracotta figurines in the Roman period (162) has now been re-dated to the Hellenistic period, and, in order to argue for the diversity of female figurines available to individual buyers at Abu Mina (164), one would have to confirm they were indeed of contemporary manufacture. Back on solid ground, ch. 6 identifies ways in which writers, especially clerics and monks, were mediators of Christian institutional and scriptural authority, integrating regional customs and traditional compositional forms (185). Thus the Land of Egypt Oracle and the visual world of Amente persisted, while ‘magical’ texts could take on elements of Christian liturgy (185). A final chapter on landscape (ch. 7) seeks to locate creative regional responses and selections of components ‘built (or performed) differently’. While theoretical approaches are borrowed from sociology and anthropology, reference to theoretical archaeology is surprisingly absent.

Throughout, F.’s thematic approach allows him to self-consciously disavow time and place, unless it is useful to a particular argument (xiv). Texts and objects dating from very different temporal and geographic contexts are set side-by-side. Although this may frustrate archaeologists, papyrologists and epigraphers among others, it is a wise choice given how insecure and/or controversial some dating is. While F. respects the chronologies (mis)assigned to objects in museum and archaeological catalogues, he adroitly avoids depending on them for his arguments. Instead of direct continuity, he invokes memory and, more useful still, efficacy. Accordingly, a historiola concerning Horus and Isis set between others about Jesus is not a ‘pagan survival’, but employed because it was perceived to work. Happily, direct continuity between Isis lactans and Maria lactans is rejected given the ubiquity of the generalised image of the nursing mother from the Bronze Age on (166). Still, a disregard for dating sits uneasily in a book fundamentally about Christianity as a process. The approach also minimises political developments, not least the Persian occupation (c. 619–629) and Muslim conquest (c. 641) of Egypt, for reasons that are implicit to a work on social rather than institutional history, but to my mind require an explicitly stated rationale.

While F.’s work is revered in Religious Studies circles, specialists have sometimes criticised him for playing fast and loose with the evidence (inter alia Smith in Perspectives on Panopolis (2002), 245–7), being prone to mistakes or a sloppy bibliographer. In this volume, some statements do not pass a sense-check. Apa Pisentius was indeed a holy man (86) and a monk (313), but he was foremost a bishop. The ‘Alexandrian patriarch Sophronius’ (135) is actually the patriarch of Jerusalem; Cyril of Alexandria is inexplicably labelled as ‘the early fifth-century Chalcedonian bishop’ (134), when the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was not convened until after his death. Among ‘recent’ archaeological sites (71), the ‘Monastery’ of Epiphanius was excavated over a hundred years ago. A request for a sphragis is not, as stated, from Epiphanius’ mother (96), but is appended by John, whom she commissioned to write the letter. I do not recognise the ‘great numbers of funerary stelae …, especially from the region of Thebes’, to which in fact only up to six belong (161). Mortuary practice in P.Lond. 1.77 does not ‘reflect the author's ecclesiastical status’ (179), but is paralleled in the wills of contemporary men and women. Apollo is not a ‘gratuitous heathen God's name’ (242), but the Greek version of Abydene Osiris; Bes's status and authority derive precisely from his position as his protector (see also Strabo 17.1.42). A lack of consistency in the use of place names and manuscript citation may also irk some specialists. An index of papyri, inscriptions and other primary sources cited would have been useful and perhaps avoided this latter issue. Finally, just a few typos mar the text, and the last chapter retains some characteristics of informal writing, which, one suspects, is residual from an oral presentation.

Mischaracterisations and errors are to be expected in such a wide-ranging study seeking to control material culture usually covered by different disciplines (if determinedly not archaeology). The work nicely demonstrates the extraordinary range of objects, including texts, uniquely preserved in Egypt, and draws together the evidence for study in a compelling and highly readable exposition. F.’s systematic reappraisal of what it was to be Christian and his deep and critical reading of material sources are especially laudable.