demotic education has the potential to show how Graeco-Latin paideia may have shaped or been shaped by practices from a pre-Christian Egyptian context. In incorporating multiple subfields, the volume does suffer from a lack of consist- ency in how disciplinary standards are adhered to. While the editors address this (p. X), the lack of conformity with papyrological standards, for example, means that many named texts are missing from the Index Locorum (for example, in ch. xiv, the authors use papyrological sigla only for Greek papyri, not Coptic texts, meaning that the latter are not incorporated in the index). Consequently, the utility of the volume will be affected for some users. Yet, this is a relatively minor point, and these collected studies will be of interest to scholars of early Christianity, monasticism, late antiquity, the Classical world and its reception, and ancient education. This volume emphasises continuity and the persistence – even in adapted forms – of established traditions across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The rise of monasticism was not an abrupt and radical change, but one that existed within a cultural continuum. JENNIFER CROMWELL MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY Christian reading. Language, ethics, and the order of things. By Blossom Stefaniw. Pp. x + . Oakland, CA: University of California Press, .£. JEH () ; doi:./S This book takes up an important and understudied topic, the lectures on the Psalms and Ecclesiastes uncovered in among the Tura papyri which appear to be transcriptions of classroom sessions, complete with student questions that occasionally interrupt the flow of a lecture. The scholarly consensus since their dis- covery has been that these lectures should be attributed to Didymus the Blind, the late fourth-century Alexandrian teacher, heir of Origen and sometime ally of Athanasius. The present study of these texts is divided into five chapters. The first is a partly fictional, partly historical narrative of the fate of the Tura papyri including accounts of episodes in Stefaniw’s personal and professional life up to the writing of this work. Chapter ii includes fourteen pages of translated passages from these lectures and introduces the book’s main argument, namely that these lectures show Didymus to be providing lessons in grammar based on the Bible. Chapter iii examines Didymus’ attention to the ‘textual patrimony’ organised under the topics of knowledge, language and reading, while chapter iv considers the ‘intellectual patrimony’ consisting of ethics, logic and ‘the order of things’. Finally, chapter v takes the inductive approach of ‘grounded theory’ by highlight- ing synthetic categories under which Didymus’ work can be analysed, including patrimony, curatorship, mimesis, oikonomia, cosmos and the reading Christian as object-subject. The purpose of this exercise is to determine whether these themes can be found in other late antique, ‘knowledge-producing texts’ (p. ). The answer seems to be yes, though the chapter works at a highly abstract level and includes almost no citations or references to other primary sources. The book’s central contention is that Didymus was a grammarian (p. ), who was not merely using ‘grammatical skill’ to perform biblical exegesis but was instead offering ‘instruction in grammar’ based on the Bible (p. ). Some version of this claim is undoubtedly true and bringing this into focus is a useful REVIEWS