LAUSR

forms of scholarly writing and explanation. Burrus, for example, uses poetry in places to distill her thoughts and draws on contemporary performance art as an alternative heuristic for reading saints’ lives. In this reader’s opinion, Burrus’s intellectual audacity succeeds, but some may not agree. It also will ultimately depend on whether you buy into Morton’s conceptualization of “the ecological thought” as a sort of cosmic hermeneutic. While Morton’s fractal interconnectedness and the neo-animism that underlies it work well when discussing relics and reliquaries, I do wonder whether they can as helpfully illuminate ancient Christian experiences of city walls or, more mundanely still, a random rock in the garden. Moreover, this is a book in dialogue with a wide spectrum of interlocutors, many of whom are not scholars of early Christianity, and which conveys a deliberately presentist message. For Burrus, “the ecological thought” is not just a lens for looking at the past; it is a necessary response to our own age of ecological crisis. Nevertheless, there is still a lot here for the historian of early Christianity and late antiquity. Ancient Christian Ecopoetics is a crucial contribution to the cultural history of materiality in late antiquity, representing yet another significant step forward along a scholarly path first forged by Patricia Cox Miller with her book The Corporeal Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Put simply: this is the kind of study that cultural historians of late antiquity interested in the material turn need to be undertaking. The recent spate of publications on late antiquity’s environmental history, many of which attract popular attention because of their dramatic claims to explain Rome’s “decline and fall” as a response to climate change and pandemic disease, collectively fail to consider a critical question that Burrus probes in this book: how did late Romans experience and relate to their physical worlds? While purposely narrow in scope, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics presents us with one possible set of answers as well as a framework for pursuing further research.