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of the evidence, it is the “pragmatic and flexible manner” in which members of the church hierarchy acted (438): attention to the spiritual needs of Egyptian Christians often took precedence over the theological divisions that entrance modern scholars, above all, that between proponents and opponents of Chalcedon. The author’s approach to every problem is similarly flexible and pragmatic; if she exhibits any theoretical or methodological perspective, it is a low-key Weberian interest in how bureaucracies work and are sometimes challenged by a “charismatic figure” like Shenoute, the monastic leader (363). Wipszycka’s focus on institutional history means that the book does not address some major topics that interest historians of early Christian religion. For example, she does not consider Alexandrian Christianity when it had no formal institutional church, that is, before the emergence of Demetrius (189– 232) as the first known bishop, and so the reader will find no treatments of the enigmatic origins of Christianity in Alexandria or its philosophical, possibly “heretical” character in the second century. And in general, she does not study the symbolic or ideological dimensions of the church, such as theology and liturgy. Here the book contrasts sharply with Stephen J. Davis’s The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and its Leadership in Late Antiquity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), which offers a discursive history of the patriarchate, showing how it was rhetorically and socially constructed, and in which the patriarchs’ theological commitments figure prominently. Studies of theology, worship, and rhetorical selfpresentation abound for early Christian Egypt, however, and so the absence of such in Wipszycka’s book is not to be lamented. Rather, church historians of all stripes can be grateful for the evidence that Ewa Wipszycka has gathered and the transparent, critical analysis that she brings to it. This book is essential reading for scholars of early Egyptian Christianity, but should command the attention of all historians of the ancient church.