Compared with Flaubert's other works, La Tentation de saint Antoine has attracted only select critical attention, despite the fact that he called it the ‘œuvre de toute [s]a vie’. Mary Orr's new study of the final version of the Tentation, that is, the 1874 published text, adopts a significantly different approach from those taken by earlier critics. There have been sustained psychoanalytic studies (Jeanne Bem, 1979; see FS, XXXVI: 2 (1982), 217), and approaches based largely on genetic criticism (Gothot-Mersch's extensive critical apparatus to the Folio edition, see FS, XXXIX: 1 (1985), 90–91; or the only other English-language monograph on the subject, Mary Neiland's 2001 volume, which focuses on situating the Tentation in relation to Flaubert's other works, see FS, LVI: 3 (2002), 413–14). Orr approaches this text, which has often been seen as drowning under the weight of its own erudition, by tackling that erudition head on in order to situate it in its various intertexts. Indeed, Orr sees earlier approaches to the Tentation as being subject to various manifestations of what she calls ‘critical block’: many focus primarily on the author's psychology; others, perhaps more perniciously, pursue a very twentieth-century reading of the literature of the nineteenth century as a secular, post-Enlightenment narrative and thus seek to evacuate religious questions. The present volume, on the contrary, situates the Tentation in relation to contemporary nineteenth-century debates on religion as well as science, mapping them over the sectarian conflicts of fourth-century Egypt. Following the approach to Salammbô taken by Anne Green (see FS, XXXVI: 3 (1982), 343–344), Orr thus reads the Tentation as a book about nineteenth-century France. Egyptian institutions of learning in the early centuries A.D. map over contemporary French institutions; the key figure of Hilarion is seen as reflecting various French savants; the confrontation of the Sphinx and the Chimera in the last tableau is startlingly reinterpreted as an echo of the 1830 debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. A characteristic re-reading occasioned by this approach sees the Queen of Sheba no longer as an incarnation of the mediaeval sin of lust (the emphasis on the mediaeval deadly sins is significantly weakened in the last version of the Tentation), but rather as a female ‘Mage’, standing for knowledge and power, who thus forms part of the series of epistemological temptations. She is also described in terms sacrilegiously resonant of nineteenth-century French ‘apparitions’ of the Virgin. This example is suggestive of Orr's shift of emphasis away from genetic readings of the text and towards grounding in context. The new light shed on the Tentation by her volume is made possible by the impressive breadth and depth of her own reading within what Foucault called Flaubert's ‘bibliothèque fantastique’. As a result, her volume is not only an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Tentation, but also presents considerable interest to anyone working on nineteenth-century attitudes to scientific knowledge.