This volume grew out of a one-day conference convened by the editor at the University of Sydney in 2004. Most of the twenty contributors are literary scholars or historians. The didactic literature under review ranges in date from the fourth century to the early eighteenth. The texts considered belong to a variety of genres, and some of them combine other ingredients with the didactic. For example Kathleen Olive describes the fifteenth-century Florentine Codex Rustici as a ‘confused pilgrimage tale’. Ostensibly concerned with the Holy Land and Egypt, it also contains a beautifully illustrated description of Florence and some basic religious instruction. Jason Taliadoros remarks that the Liber contra multiplices et varios errores addressed by the distinguished twelfth-century English jurist Vacarius to his friend, the heretic Hugo Speroni of Piacenza, contained apologetic and polemical elements. John O. Ward's analysis of glosses that preserve ‘the textual remains of, or notes on, oral lectures given at Monte Cassino Abbey in the second quarter of the eleventh century, on Cicero's De inventione’ leads him to an exploration of the relationship between orality and literacy in eleventh-century schooling, and a concluding suggestion about the possible role of rhetoric as a ‘kind of “master training”’. Most contributors are concerned with the audiences addressed, and with the messages conveyed, as much as the nature of the medium employed. Louise d'Arcens is exceptional in focusing on Christine de Pizan's ‘migrant didactic voice’ and the ways in which she exploited her status as a noblewoman born in Italy but settled in France to offer advice to powerful people in her adopted country.

In her introduction, Juanita Feros Ruys considers ‘Approaches to didactic literature: meaning, intent, audience, social effect’. She explains her title, a quotation from Seneca, who argued, against the Stoic Aristo, that even a person naturally inclined to goodness needs advice ‘because Nature does not teach what ought to be done in every specific circumstance’. The association of the medieval and early-modern periods in the book's title represents, according to Feros Ruys

A few contributors consider the longue durée. Feros Ruys examines parental advice to children written between the mid-ninth and the early seventeenth centuries. Her chief conclusions are that her mainly royal or noble parents only gradually came to draw on their own experience as distinct from authoritative precepts and examples in various texts, above all Scripture, and that men did so more readily than women. Steven J. Williams considers the life of the ‘quintessential secular didactic text of the Middle Ages’, the Secret of secrets, ostensibly written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great, in reality compiled in the Islamic Near East between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Surviving in nearly 1,000 complete or partial manuscript copies in Latin and twelve vernacular languages, repeatedly adapted, cited and quarried, and quite frequently printed until the 1530s, it then rapidly fell from favour because its authenticity was questioned and its once respected scientific content was discredited. Catherine England bridges the conventional division between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ in her assessment of a wide range of evidence concerning the upbringing of children in Renaissance Florence. Alexandra Barratt briefly describes English translations of didactic literature for women between the late Anglo-Saxon period and 1550.

Much of the didactic literature of the period covered by this volume was naturally concerned with the inculcation of Christian duty and guidance in leading a virtuous life. Stavroula Constantinou discusses the lives of two Byzantine saints renowned as teachers, written in the fourth and fifth centuries. Maria Nenarokova analyses two letters written by Vladimir Monomakh (1053–1125), Great Prince of Kiev, later combined in one didactic treatise, which drew heavily on the Bible, church services and some Fathers, as well as conventional secular wisdom of a traditional sort. Albrecht Classen demonstrates that the writers of two of the most popular Middle High German didactic treatises of the thirteenth century ‘clearly perceived that men and women had to collaborate closely to achieve a balanced, peaceful, and virtuous life’. Anne M. Scott argues that the Gilbertine canon Robert Mannyng skilfully addressed the needs of a growing and receptive lay readership literate in English in Handlyng synne, his famous early fourteenth-century treatise concerning doctrine and morals. Philippa Bright's investigation of the religious and codicological contexts of forty-one late medieval Anglo-Latin Gesta romanorum stories leads her to the conclusion that their primary role was to provide the clergy with vivid didactic material. Julie Hotchin shows that the fifteenth-century monastic reformer Johannes Busch brought considerable experience and insight to bear in the careful advice he gave to men involved in the pastoral care of religious women in his Liber de reformatione monasteriorum. Ursula Potter suggests that The instruction of a Christian woman (1523) by Juan Luis Vives, widely considered a highly influential conduct book for Englishwomen, actually presented ideals seriously at odds with much English practice. Shakespeare and other playwrights challenged southern European ideals of controlled and secluded womanhood.

The last four chapters in this volume ‘explore the role of the classical Latin didactic tradition’ during and after the Renaissance. Frances Muecke and Robert Forgács suggest that the ingenious attempt by the Czech humanist Philomathes to convey musical instruction in Latin hexameters (1512) was not entirely successful. In his essay on sixteenth-century manuals of mining and metallurgy, Anthony Miller draws attention to the confident assertion by Vannoccio Biringuccio and Georgius Agricola of modern technical superiority over the ancients. Finally, Emma Gee and Yasmin Haskell consider the enduring concern, manifested by writers as different as the Scottish Protestant George Buchanan in 1584 and the Italian Jesuit Tommaso Ceva in 1704, to combat a perceived ‘Lucretian influence on early-modern cosmological theory’.

Juanita Feros Ruys has adopted a broad definition of ‘didactic literature’ in bringing together a large collection of essays greatly varying in their originality, scope and interest. Some of them range widely; several deal with one or two texts and their immediate context. Feros Ruys has worked hard to provide a thematic framework, and to direct attention to connections between individual contributions. This is a volume that many readers of this Journal will consult with profit. Sadly it includes no index or bibliography. Fortunately, however, it contains numerous substantial footnotes.