Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender. Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography by John Kitchen (review)

which his immediate sources refer to by its differing Hebrew (n. 135) and Septuagint (n. 136) numbering. One could perhaps excuse an ancient historian— even a very good one—for missing this kind of technical, patristic detail, for using Migne or Mansi when newer and better editions exist, or for confusing Pope Leo with a usurper of the previous century (n. 6 on p. 162, where the pope "absent from"—actually not given a separate entry in—the New Catholic Encyclopedia is not "saint and bishop Leo," but the antipope Felix II). But it is precisely because Late Antiquity must be studied with disciplines that have traditionally had little to do with one another that problems like the relationship of paganism and Christianity in the fourth through eighth centuries still far elude our understanding. MacMullen's book brings much to the surface: a careful reading will repay any reader interested in the subject.