Following in the footsteps of Peter Walker (Holy city, holy places? Christian attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the fourth century, 1990) and Robert Louis Wilken (The land called holy: Palestine in Christian history and thought, 1992), Katharina Keyden seeks to understand the transformation of Palestine into the Holy Land in the imagination of Western Christendom in the post-Constantinian era (p. 335). The book is composed of four extensive chapters, each of which could be read as a discrete research project. In the first chapter, Heyden explores the significance of Jerusalem for pre-Constantinian theologians: most notably, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen. The second chapter traces the ascription of sanctification to sites in Jerusalem in the ecclesiastical and imperial policies of the fourth and fifth centuries. Chapter iii addresses the most abstract aspect of the author's research, and that is the reciprocal relationship between the perceived saintliness of the ascetics and pilgrims attracted to Jerusalem and the holiness communicated to these saints by virtue of their time spent in Jerusalem. The author constructs her case for this chapter primarily from the Itinerarium Egeriae and epistolary evidence from Melania, Paula and Jerome. In chapter iv Heyden examines the influence of several cities in the Holy Land on the development of Christian art in the West. The author's analysis of the ‘Bethesda Sarcophagi’ (a collection of fourteen sarcophagi that feature Jesus’ healing of the paralytic at Bethesda) is exemplary in its appeal to art in order to elucidate literary sources (pp. 252–73). In the book's conclusion, the author reflects profitably on the appropriateness of the concept of the ‘Holy Land’ in light of Christianity's central doctrine of the incarnation. The text is a revised edition of the author's Habilitationsschrift from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and accordingly discusses secondary literature extensively.