Published to a high standard in the Italian collection of late-antique studies and texts, authoritatively directed by F.E. Consolino, the present book constitutes a welcome addition to the many previous studies on Sibyls and Sibylline literature – a theme that has enjoyed a certain fortune in the last decades, thanks also to the important role played by Italian scholarship. Besides the seminal study by A. Peretti dedicated to the so-called ‘Babylonian Sibyl’ and Hellenistic tradition (1943), it is sufficient to note here the miscellaneous volume edited by I. Chirassi and T. Seppilli (1997) and the richly annotated Italian translation of the Oracula Sibyllina by M. Monaca for the ‘Collection of Patristic Texts’ (2008) which provides a useful tool for non-specialist readers. This book is complementary to the inquiry on the so-called Sibylline books tradition that Monaca investigated in La Sibilla a Roma (2005). Generally speaking, secondary literature on this topic is lavish, as witnessed by the present book of more than 400 pages. B., an insightful scholar of late-antique poetry, has written a solid monograph, equipped with painstaking erudition and a wide-ranging knowledge of the complex intermingling and multiple crossing of Sibylline ancient traditions. It is possible to add only a few titles – strangely omitted – to an otherwise extensive bibliography. When dealing with the Magi (p. 316), Cumont's classical work on the subject would have been worth a mention; at p. 21 the discussion on Plutarch and the failure of oracles would have been improved by including the results of some papers from I. Gallo (ed.), Plutarco e la religione, Atti del VI Convegno plutarcheo (Ravello, 29–31 maggio 1995) (1996); at p. 85 the reader should be aware that P.F. Beatrice's hypothesis about the identification of Porphyry's Philosophy from the Oracles with his anti-Christian work has been questioned by other scholars. However, these are minor trifles that do not affect the excellent quality of the work.

Chapter 1 provides a clear, if not original, survey of Sibylline literature, namely the formation of a corpus transmitted under the name of this prophetess, who herself underwent many developments and transformations during the centuries, including a multiplication of the different figures to be identified with or referred to as the Sibyl. Chapter 2 investigates the employment of Sibylline texts and oracles by the Fathers of the Church, especially in the Greek speaking world, at greater length. These two chapters function as an introduction to the main bulk of the monograph, whose aim is to investigate how Latin Christian authors dealt with the prophetess. Unsurprisingly, considerable space is given to the age of Constantine, when, as is well known, Lactantius and the emperor himself, in the wake of some trends already perceivable in Greek literature, understood the Sibyl (and other prophets of pagan religion) as forerunners of Christianity. Chapters 3 and 4 offer a reconsideration of the Greek Oration to the assembly of the Saints allegedly written by Constantine – a work that transmits, together with the messianic interpretation of Virgil's fourth eclogue, some Sibylline acrostics, to be likewise interpreted in a Christian sense (I am not convinced, however, by the arguments put forward by Pizzani and referred to by B. [p. 193] about a supposed polemic against the Gnostic sect of the Ophites to be detected in the interpretation of ‘the serpent’ that ‘shall die’). Similar verses are extensively cited by Lactantius as well, even though he ignores the acrostic and his purposes differ from those of the author of the Oration – a fact that leads B. to offer some hints to the vexata quaestio of the ‘dualistic additions’ in the Divinae Institutiones. B. also discusses at greater length some Latin poetical texts, often characterised as centos, and pursues their different traditions, from Augustine to Hiberno-Latin literature. These verses appear as a sort of compendium of the larger and richer Greek collection of the Sibylline Oracles. Augustine cites them mainly in de Civitate Dei 18, when he refers to and questions the pagan charges against Christian writers of forging oracles. It is rather meaningful, however, that already in a juvenile work such as the Unfinished commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Augustine mentions the Sibyl in connection with the famous quotation of Aratus in Paul's speech on the Areopagus (Acts 17.28: see p. 75). Six rich appendices complete the book, allowing the reader to follow the intricate catalogues of Sibyls in ancient sources and to enjoy prima facie the poetical examples discussed in the text. In some cases a critical apparatus is provided, in order to offer a demonstration of the continuous re-elaboration they underwent and their Protean character (as stated on pp. 135 and 145). It is worth, for example, noting the anti-Jewish interpolation in one of these verses (p. 258).

B. is primarily concerned with philological questions, which are often treated with perceptiveness and with fine results, such as in the case of the relationship between Lactantius and the so-called Theosophy of Tübingen, which seems to presuppose an intermediate link (pp. 146ff. and 179), or between Lactantius and some of the aforementioned poems, some verses of which might have arisen from the Latin interpolation of the Greek verses quoted by Lactantius himself (p. 262, where B. is right in criticising Kurfess' hypothesis that antedates the redaction of these poems; pp. 297ff. on the manuscript transmission of these centos); the idea that some of these verses originated in Canterbury (p. 246 and the discussion of a possible integration); the comparison put forward (p. 292) between the textual variants in the Christological acrostic of the Erythraean Sibyl and an Orphic oracular text that underwent similar amplification in Christian literature. Other interesting points that witness how fruitful a path this study opens are the discussion of the vision in the Shepherd of Hermas (p. 34); the explanation (against Lighfoot's opinion) of the Jewish character of the Sibyl, by hinting at her Babylonian origin, with an implicit superposition – current in classical antiquity – between Chaldaeans and Hebrews (p. 62); the detected oracle in Arnobius 3.9 and Minucius Felix 21.12 (p. 111); the mention of a little-known passage in the Elenchos (p. 163); the treatment of some Christological riddles (p. 171); and an interesting reference to Cicero's translation of the Timaeus, whose rare verb decussare appears in the Consultationes Zacchaei et Apollonii and is used to describe the cross (p. 274).

Particularly invaluable is the final section, where B. investigates the survival of Sibylline imagery in folkloric Italian traditions and chivalric literature of the fifteenth century, such as Andrea da Barberino's Guerin Meschino, Antoine de la Sale's Le paradis de la reine Sibylle and a brief hint in Felix Hemmerli's Dialogus de nobilitate that probably influenced the legend of Tannhäuser. In these texts, the Sibyl is depicted as a sorceress, her iconography blending with that of Morgana in Arthurian literature. As B. convincingly discusses (p. 311), the kernel of the Sibyl as a magician originates in a fault of the manuscript tradition, where the original reading magna (‘great’) corrupts into maga (‘sorceress’), but none the less this epithet is particularly fitting for a polymorphic figure, who already in the Middle Ages was considered a sort of fairy and sometimes had even become a ‘rival’ of the Virgin Mary.