According to its author, the primary purpose of this book is ‘to describe how Christian hagiography began in the second century as the commemoration of martyrs, but became a vehicle for deliberate ction in the fourth century and then a normal mode of literary composition’ (xi). This perhaps overstates the coherence of these seven chapters, which are connected in fairly broad fashion by a range of questions arising from the growth and development of Christianity in the Roman Empire from the rst to the sixth centuries A.D. At the same time, however, it understates the extent to which Timothy Barnes here sets out to be argumentative more than descriptive. In place of a single overall thesis, the book offers the meticulous demonstration of a method: essentially, the application of the historian’s technique of prosopography to the study of the lives and actions of martyrs and saints.