No class of artefacts (with the possible exception of coins) is simultaneously more intrinsically interesting, and yet also more routinely approached formulaically by scholarship, than inscriptions. Inscriptions – particularly stone inscriptions – manifest as complex interplays between text, material and, often, image. Even the shortest texts contain multitudes: through the public commemoration of laws, or of rituals or honours, they both express and construct complex nexuses of human and often also divine relationships. They blur the arbitrary boundaries we set not only between text and object, but also between textual genres, and their repetitive and often-abbreviated language, at first glance so predictable, so resistant to interpretation, in fact offers us a playground for thinking about the ways in which form shapes reading and how epigraphic language offers haiku-like opportunities for a multiplicity of subtle gradations of meaning and subtext.

And yet, the academic study of inscriptions – epigraphy as a discipline, not as a category – has traditionally failed to engage fully with the interpretative potential of these extraordinary objects, in large part because it has often neglected to treat them as objects and in particular as contextually-situated objects in a lived material world. It is now almost clichéd to point out that by printing inscriptions in plain fonts, with no illustrations, traditional epigraphic corpora divorce text from artefact and ‘sanitise’, as it were, our experience of epigraphic objects by removing our ability to engage not only with the plain words, but also with how the letters and monuments looked, how big they were, how messy, how degraded by the passage of time, amongst a host of other material aspects. As a consequence, the focus of epigraphic research has too often been on texts in isolation not only from their monuments, but from their contexts in wider physical and social landscapes. (An exception here is the superb scholarship in recent years, largely spearheaded by visual culture specialists rather than epigraphers, which focuses on the interplay between text and image.) Meanwhile, the highly specialist nature of epigraphy as a discipline has often served to hive it off from theoretical and methodological developments in archaeology or ancient history as a whole. This brings us to the volume under review. Stemming from a series of research seminars at Durham in 2011–12, it seeks to ‘explore the phenomenon of the materiality of texts’ through the specific lens of epigraphy (p. 13). Although the results are sometimes mixed, the fact that this collection exists at all can give us cause for optimism.

The volume is divided into two parts, ‘Concepts’ and ‘Contexts’, of very unequal length (two chapters and twelve respectively), with a methodological introduction to the whole. In the introduction, A. Petrovic lays out a manifesto for treating inscriptions as material objects and attempts to situate the volume and its contributors within a wider framework of materiality studies in phenomenology, anthropology and archaeology. The goal here is laudable; however, the chapter suffers from an attempt to condense a great deal of difficult scholarship in a very short space. The academic conversation surrounding ‘materiality’ in anthropology and archaeology in particular has been dense, combative and at times contradictory, and there are signs here that the author has not fully grasped what that admittedly complex conversation has been. T. Ingold, for example, probably the most prominent voice critiquing materiality as a concept, is here repeatedly presented as a proponent of it, and the paean at the end of the chapter to the recent arrival of materiality to Classics as a whole in some way demonstrates just how far removed the discipline can still be from archaeology and anthropology, where attitudes to materiality as a paradigm are now considerably more mixed.

Moving on to the main body of the volume, the short Part 1, ‘Concepts’, seeks to clarify how ancient audiences would have conceptualised inscriptions, although with a noticeably Greek bias to the material. A. Kirk explores what the use of the term ἐπιγραφή may tell us about Greek conceptions of writing on stone, and how those may differ from our own, and in particular argues that for Greek writers the text of an ἐπιγραφή is indivisible from the object upon which it is inscribed. Some of her conclusions are weakened, however, by an achronological approach – can Dio Chrysostom, for example, be legitimately set alongside Herodotus and Plato (as on pp. 42–4) without taking into account the cultural and linguistic changes that may have occurred in the intervening five centuries? In Part 1's second chapter A. Zadorojnyi dives into the language used to refer to inscriptions by authors of the Second Sophistic, in particular Julius Pollux and Flavius Arran, a process that offers interesting insights into second-century ad elite Greek-speaking attitudes towards both the aesthetics of new epigraphic monuments and the social role of old, even illegible, ones.

The much longer Part 2, ‘Contexts’, is divided into three separate sections: ‘Epigraphic Spaces’ (three chapters); ‘Literary Spaces: the Materiality of Text in Greek and Roman Literature’ (three chapters); and ‘Architectural Spaces’ (six chapters). These chapters vary quite a bit in their commitment to the introduction's manifesto for an in-depth, theoretically informed, investigation of the materiality of text as it pertains to inscriptions. For example, in the section ‘Epigraphic Spaces’ J.W. Day makes steps towards a more sophisticated understanding of the role of inscriptions, in particular of epigram, in the construction of cross-temporal ‘conversations’ amongst visitors to sanctuaries. On the other hand, V. Garulli's ‘Lectional Signs in Greek Verse Inscriptions’ is primarily a catalogue, while P.J. Rhodes's ‘Erasures in Greek Public Documents’ offers an abundance of specific examples each discussed in detail, but lacks an overarching argument that ties the examples together: both are familiar formats in epigraphic scholarship, and certainly necessary first steps on the road to analysis, but somewhat disappointing in their overall lack of interpretation or desire to push beyond a disciplinary model where to list is to explicate.

The next section in Part 2, ‘Literary Spaces’, comprises three papers on topics related (sometimes quite tangentially) to literary epigram. The papers offer cogent and interesting discussions of several aspects of ancient literature; however, their connection to the volume as a whole could have been much more clearly delineated. This is, I think, an editorial problem. The logic behind these papers’ inclusion seems to be that literary epigram remains intrinsically connected to epigraphy and the study of epigraphic objects, since its origins as a genre lie in pretending to be, and therefore pushing the conceptual boundaries of, ‘actual’ stone epigrams. However, in particular in the contributions by M.A. Tueller on women's speech and S.J. Heyworth on Latin elegy, this connection is never made explicit, and indeed mentions of inscriptions of the type dealt with in the rest of the volume are almost entirely absent. (D.E. Lavigne's paper on Archaic Greek epigram, which explores the connection between funerary epigram in cemeteries and Archaic performance culture more generally, is much more successful in this respect.) As a result, the section finishes by reading like part of a very different volume on literary culture. A firmer editorial hand when it came to the authors’ framing of these chapters would have helped to ensure that the section more successfully spoke to the aims and themes of the volume.

Engagement with those aims is on the whole much more successful in the last, and longest, section, ‘Architectural Spaces’. In particular, I. Östenberg's contribution on so-called damnatio memoriae and the relation of materiality to memory stands out as a very convincing example of the opportunities for insight that a more theorised approach to inscriptions can give us. Not coincidentally, it is also the only paper in the volume that explicitly stakes out a position on how the author uses materiality as a concept, both in a programmatic section at its outset and throughout the ensuing discussion. This suggests, again, that a heavier editorial hand, one which insisted on contributors’ directly engaging with the materiality scholarship discussed in the introduction, would have resulted in a more coherent volume overall. Similarly, K. Bolle's paper on monuments in late antique Ostia, though less overtly theoretical than Östenberg's, demonstrates the depth and subtlety of argument that can result when descriptions of the physical characteristics of inscriptions are carefully and consistently combined with analysis of what those qualities may tell us about both dedicators and viewers. The other papers in this section – I. Mylonopoulos on dedicatory inscriptions on Greek sacred architecture, A. Graham on duplicate inscriptions at Aphrodisias, F. Opdenhoff on layers of writing and announcements on Pompeian walls, and S.V. Leatherbury on tabula ansata in late antiquity – all also largely succeed at showing the value of placing inscriptions into their physical context and taking into account the visual and social messages of their surroundings, though once again explicit engagement with materiality as a concept in these chapters would have served to drive the message home even more effectively.

As I discussed at the start, our standard approaches to epigraphy have long failed to exploit fully the potential of inscriptions as objects. The aims of this volume, then, are heartening, even if the execution could sometimes be more consistent. Most encouragingly, its most memorable papers succeed in pointing in the direction of a brave new world of what could be: a world in which we might finally do justice to the extraordinary nature of these chameleon-like things.