Despite the general scope suggested by the title, a study of this length can hardly be expected to provide an exhaustive account of classical learning in the three countries under consideration even within the limited compass of 60 years. The subtitle indicates the book's more specific aim, namely a reframing of the ‘culture wars’ of the period that takes us beyond the ubiquitous dichotomy of ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’. This V. accomplishes by examining the classical scholarship of both better and lesser known figures – principally Richard Bentley, Pieter Burman the Elder, Jean Le Clerc, Conyers Middleton and Charles Rollin – in terms of a distinction between philologia and philosophia. The result is a book that will be of great interest to classical scholars with interests in reception studies and the history of the discipline as well as to intellectual historians.

By the end of the seventeenth century, as V. writes, ‘the function of ancient Latin and Greek literature was no longer self-evident’ (p. 4). In the familiar historiography of the period, the question of the purpose of classical studies was debated in the ‘querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ in France and the Battle of the Books in Britain, which set the defenders of the achievements of antiquity against the partisans of modernity. Yet, as V. rightly notes, this dichotomy fails to describe adequately individuals such as Bentley, a classical scholar who used his philological acumen to demolish the claims of an ‘ancient’ like William Temple while nevertheless esteeming his subject of study as a pursuit of the utmost importance. As outlined in the introduction, V. proposes to complicate the ancient–modern distinction by considering various exponents of antiquity in terms of the opposition, ultimately traced back to Sen. Ep. 108.23, between philologia and philosophia, while also expanding the traditional Anglo-French geographical focus of scholarship on the ‘querelle’ to include the Netherlands. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries V. sees the principle of philologia instantiated in the Dutch school principally influenced by Joseph Scaliger, among whose followers a concentration on textual criticism predominated, while philosophia is exemplified by a French approach concerned primarily with the possibilities of classical literature for moral edification.

The national or geographical designations are necessarily imperfect. The Genevan-born Jean Le Clerc, V.'s prime example of the French approach, spent most of his career in Amsterdam. English scholars could fall on either side of the divide, depending on their inclinations and affiliations: Bentley, for instance, shared an absorption in issues of textual criticism with many of his colleagues in the Low Countries. One wonders how contemporary scholarship produced outside of the three countries studied relates to this dichotomy, and not all scholars will fit as neatly into one or the other camp as those considered in this volume. The contrast between philological and moral approaches was nevertheless a real one, and thinking about the ‘culture wars’ of the period in these terms offers a novel perspective on an important chapter in the history of classical scholarship: both sides can be considered ‘ancient’ in their privileging of antiquity, but the Dutch school appears ‘modern’ in the sense of representing the early professionalisation of classical studies as a discipline, while the French approach, more often favouring the vernacular, appears ‘modern’ in the very different sense of attempting to make classical literature relevant to a broader European public.

The three chapters following the introduction put this method to work in a series of case studies respectively concerned with the disputed nature of Renaissance humanism, the treatment of some of the more risqué Latin texts and the conception of Roman civic virtue in classical scholarship of the period. Chapter 2, ‘The Construction of Humanism’, looks to the works of Burman and Le Clerc to reveal some of the ways in which the legacy of Renaissance humanism was contested by the two different schools of thought. V. examines how Burman's work – including the Sylloge Epistolarum (1727), a five-volume edition of the letters of modern viri illustres; an edition of the Emendationes and De critica of Henri Valois, completed and published by Burman's nephew of the same name; and an edition of the works of the Scottish humanist George Buchanan – establishes textual criticism at the core of classical studies past and present while denigrating those who, like Justus Lipsius, deviated from Burman's concept of the discipline. Le Clerc, by contrast, finds a model of his own interpretation of classical scholarship in Erasmus, who understood that text-critical studies were only a first step towards drawing out the wisdom of classical literature and integrating it into a Christian moral framework. In Chapter 3, ‘Sex and Scholarship: Textual Criticism as an Instrument in the Struggle for Scholarly Independence’, V. considers Burman's edition of Petronius and Bentley's edition of Horace with regard to the same dynamic. Both commentaries provided philological comments on the language of the texts while avoiding condemnation or expurgation of their explicit sexual detail, which led the likes of Le Clerc to conflate the editors’ scandalous personal lives with their ‘immoral’ approach to scholarship. The case of Thomas Creech, the Oxford scholar widely pilloried after his suicide for his work on Lucretius, offers an instructive, albeit too briefly explored, comparison (pp. 102–4). Chapter 4, ‘The Quest for Civic Virtue’, turns to the works of Conyers Middleton and Charles Rollin in order to demonstrate how moralising critics interpreted the civic virtue of republican Rome for English and French readers in the eighteenth century and beyond. Middleton's History of the Life of Cicero (1741) constructed an Enlightenment Cicero as a deist and a moderate liberal, which was met by a philological critique from the more conservative James Tunstall. Rollin's history of Rome, which highlighted the role of civic virtue in the Republic, is considered in the context of the educational programme of the Jansenists, who followed Augustine in emphasising human depravity while nevertheless making use of pagan literature for moral instruction. Middleton's and Rollin's works attracted the attention of such ‘philosophes’ as Montesquieu and Voltaire, and Montesquieu even seems to have borrowed his distinction between the ‘esprit de commerce’ and the ‘esprit de conquête’ from his reading of Rollin's history (pp. 191–3).

In a short conclusion the trajectories of the Dutch and French approaches – or what might better be described as ‘Scaligerian’ and ‘Lipsian’ paradigms; Scaliger, as previously mentioned, inspired the Dutch school of philology, while both sides acknowledged Lipsius, who boasted ego e Philologia Philosophiam feci (cited p. 43 n. 26), as an icon of humanistic philosophia (see pp. 40–3, 47–50 and 66) – are followed into the next century, where they are paralleled in German scholarship by the rivalry between ‘Wortphilologie’ and ‘Sachphilologie’, thereby ‘forming a bridge’, as V. notes in the final sentence of the book, ‘between Renaissance humanism and nineteenth-century Altertumswissenschaft’ (p. 206). While V. does not take his reflections further in time, one might well recognise something of the same philologia–philosophia divide in current discussions about the state of the discipline.

Certain areas call for further attention. V. largely neglects Greek studies, though this is partly a function of his subjects’ interests. The politics of scholarship, a recurring but minor theme of the volume, deserves a more comprehensive treatment for this as for other periods. The fascinating and still underexplored relationship between classical studies and the new science, quite regrettably, is only mentioned in passing, and some engagement with D. Levitin's Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (2015), not cited, might have been salutary. V.'s monograph nevertheless delivers a noteworthy contribution to the field in revising our understanding of the ‘culture wars’ of the period and in shedding new light on the development of Classics as a modern academic discipline.