Glancing over the disciplinary parapet, students of the later Latin historians have recently had cause to envy their colleagues in other fields when it comes to fragmentary works. For those who labour away at Greek, there are the seemingly endless riches of Jacoby Online, with its texts, translations and extensive commentaries. For those interested in the Roman historians up until the third century a.d., there are the monumental volumes assembled under the direction of T. J. Cornell. For those, however, wishing to investigate the historians who wrote in Latin between Diocletian and Heraclius, there was long no single collection or work of reference that offered much aid — the material had to be ferreted out from disparate scholarly literatures and a broad overview of it could be obtained only at the cost of considerable time and effort. In remedying this very obvious deficiency with The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity, Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen — the prolific Ghent-based impresarios of things late-ancient — have performed a magnificent service to the subject. Every student of later Latin literature and the later Roman Empire will wish to consult this volume regularly. Those interested in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages more broadly will discover in it much to reward them, while those who work primarily on earlier periods of classical historiography now have a clear, accessible and expert introduction to a field where they will discover that a great deal is still to be done. The appearance of FHistLA (the authors’ preferred abbreviation) ought to be greeted with very considerable enthusiasm.

V.H. and V.N. open with a substantial introduction, setting out the scope of their project and its methodology, before offering an analysis of the genre of the works they consider, their circulation and the social and political context of their composition. There is much good sense in what they say and a refreshing willingness to point out bluntly where received opinion is misguided. Their insistence on distinguishing between authors whose works survive in fragments that are explicitly attributed to them and hypothetical texts to which scholars have assigned material is entirely correct and particularly welcome. The same can be said of the firm reminders they offer that ecclesiastical history was a less popular genre in later Latin than its reputation would suggest and that the conflict between Christianity and Paganism rarely offers a convincing explanation (or indeed any explanation at all) for why this or that author set out to write history. After the introduction, there follow fragments of twenty historians, from Carminius (rather murkily located before the fourth century) to Maximus of Zaragoza, the contemporary of Isidore of Seville. Each is given a careful introduction, sketching biography, context and issues of debate. The testimonia and fragments are then provided, in both their original language and English translation, accompanied by generous commentary. Three authors to whom works of history have been wrongly or very doubtfully ascribed are included, equipped with the same scholarly aids. A bibliography, a usefully full index locorum and a disappointingly spare index nominum et rerum round out the volume.

The sheer utility of making so much so easily available would attract praise in its own right, but V.H. and V.N. are far more than mere compilers. They offer expert guidance to the material assembled, with a grip on the bibliography (in multiple languages) that is seriously impressive. They are also pleasingly sceptical in interpretation. When confronted by fragmentary works, there is always a temptation to inflate their importance and magnify their influence — a temptation that scholarship on later Latin historiography has rarely resisted. V.H. and V.N. have little truck with any of this and not a few figures who have assumed an over-large role in scholarly debate are cut down to size. The calm and patient demolition of Nicomachus Flavianus is one highlight, though connoisseurs might savour still more the elegant filleting of Symmachus the younger. If at times the authors are perhaps a little too sceptical, then that is a salutary correction in a field where hypothesis has often been presented as fact, and fantasy as hypothesis.

Any collection as multifarious as this will inevitably provoke some disagreement from readers. Outright errors are few: Festus wrote his breviarium in anticipation of Valens’ Persian campaign, not Constantius II's (26); Tascius Victorianus was a vir clarissimus, not a vir consularis (51, n. 82 — a delightfully medieval mistake); the Histories of Gregory of Tours do not end in 584 (99); the De situ Hierusolimitanae of Eucherius of Lyons (c. 450) provides the true terminus ante quem for the work of Hegesippus (78); Julian was not a ‘loyal, Christian subordinate’ of Constantius II for all of 355–361 (263, n. 9). The only broader flaw that strikes me as serious is to do with editorial technique. V.H. and V.N. present the volume as offering an edition of the fragments, but in almost all cases they limit themselves to listing variant readings given by editors — the manuscripts are usually absent. Sometimes, this makes relatively little practical difference, but in other cases (the opening of Hegesippus’ Histories, e.g.) the key questions hinge on what the text actually says — without a proper apparatus, progress will be difficult. Similarly, V.H. and V.N. reproduce the fragments of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus in the orthography of Gregory of Tours, which Bruno Krusch did his best to misrepresent as hopelessly medieval in the regrettably still standard edition. Both Alexander and Frigeridus clearly wrote what we might call ordinary elevated Latin of the late fourth and early fifth century — an edition of their fragments ought to reflect that. The same could be said of Symmachus the younger, who appears here with the quirks of Jordanes.

These quibbles might seem like criticism of the work that V.H. and V.N. have done here, but the salutary debate and disagreement that FHistLA provokes is in truth a tribute to their achievement. Browsing in the volume, I noticed that Isidore of Seville closes the entry on Maximus of Zaragoza in his De viris illustribus with precisely the same formula that Jerome used for Nummius Aemilianus Dexter, the dedicatee of his foundational DVI. Was Maximus similarly honoured by the bishop of Seville? Lacking (as we do) a proper preface to Isidore's work, it is very tempting to think so. Questions like these — new avenues of inquiry and new thoughts — fly off every page of FHistLA, a volume that will offer aid to generations of scholars and revivify the study of fragmentary Latin histories.

Not content with their very considerable achievement in FHistLA, V.N. and V.H. have also assembled the Clavis Historicorum Antiquitatis Posterioris, or CHAP as it will surely be known. This massive new work of reference assembles basic information on historical texts written between 300 and 800 a.d. ‘in all cultures that experienced classical influence and hence can be legitimately called late antique’ (xii), which means in practice all works of history from that period written in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian or Coptic, as well as a handful composed in Aramaic and Middle Persian. An introduction sets out the purpose and scope of the collection and offers a succinct but wide-ranging overview of the historical genres of Late Antiquity (as well as some of their near neighbours). Few other topics are likely to provoke quite so much wrangling amongst scholars and there will inevitably be criticisms of CHAP's delineation of genre, but V.N. and V.H. are always careful and considered in what they say. They are usefully explicit about their criteria and their approach, which inevitably balances genres native to Late Antiquity with categories of later scholarly invention. Lest that make the introduction sound more eirenic than it in fact is, V.N. and V.H. are not afraid to identify what they see as basic errors in discussion of generic questions and there is some amusingly blunt polemic against medievalists.

After the introduction, there follows the exhaustive inventory of historical works from Late Antiquity, assembled by a larger team of scholars whose labours V.N. and V.H. have directed. The entries are ordered alphabetically by the commonly used form of the ancient author's name, with a very long section at the end (514–745) for anonymous works, sorted by title. For each author and anonymous, we are given a date, confession and social status, then a numbered notice for each of their works, which gives its titles (ancient and modern) and then itemises its genre, language, state of preservation, date and place of composition, length (in books), coverage, and finally the sources and users of the work. For most entries, some brief ‘remarks’ follow, then lists of the manuscripts, editions and translations, and finally relevant secondary literature. The layout of each entry (and the generous quantity of white space on each page), make CHAP a pleasure to browse. It is difficult not to admire a volume which assembles so much useful information in such a convenient format, especially at a time when the work of building this sort of scholarly infrastructure is not hugely in favour. CHAP will certainly help to make late-ancient historiography much more legible to scholars and it ought to make comparison between historical writing in different languages much easier. It is particularly welcome that V.N. and V.H. chose to include the lists of manuscripts and that they have taken seriously the titles by which works were known in antiquity, information too often overlooked or dismissed in the scholarly literature.

Like any other vast compilation, CHAP's entries inevitably include mistakes, inconsistencies and infelicities, and their true value will emerge only through long use. Some points, however, stand out from perusing a very large number of them. In general, the entries are accurate and helpful, the outright errors few relative to the size of the project. In the areas I know best, I noted only the reference to the Epitome de Caesaribus being part of the so-called Corpus Aurelianum (they are transmitted separately, but have been edited together) and the identification of De breviario rerum gestarum populi Romani as the title of Festus’ Breviarium, rather than a crucial part of its preface (see Reeve in Gnomon 69 (1997), 508–9). There were a frustrating number of misprints in some of the bibliographic information I followed up, but nothing that is likely seriously to impede the curious. The brief commentary included on each work varies from the completely gnomic to the very helpful. The way that state of preservation is recorded seems to me occasionally slightly misleading. Besides ‘full’ and ‘partial’, which are self-explanatory, V.N. and V.H. use the category ‘fragmentary’. In this, they include both works of which actual fragments have been transmitted and those which are simply mentioned by a later author. In contrast to FHistLA, hypothetical works are here admitted. The entries for these are often reassuringly sceptical, but it is hard not to feel that including them in a work of reference at all might solidify the existence of some phantoms long overdue for exorcism (like Enmann's Kaisergeschichte).

These are minor blemishes on a such a colossal work. Scholars of Late Antiquity will wish to consult CHAP whenever they begin working on any late-ancient historical text. The hefty price of this hefty volume will certainly deter private purchases, and even some institutions might balk at it. It is welcome, therefore, that much of the information is also freely available online at https://www.late-antique-historiography.ugent.be/database/. Users of that database should be aware, however, that its entries seem generally to omit the lists of manuscripts, the date and place of composition and the length of the work, as well as the social status of the author. That most late-antique of things, the physical codex, remains the indispensable format.