The significance of John Leland (c. 1503–52) in the growth of English humanism in the earlier sixteenth century was presented a generation ago by J. W. Binns in his ground-breaking survey of neo-Latin writings in Renaissance England. This account, which stressed Leland's activities as a neo-Latin poet whose verse addressed contemporaries, expressed his aspirations, and memorialised events of national significance, prioritised those works printed in his lifetime or later in the century. But much of what was most valuable in Leland lay unfinished and unpublished at his death. In 1533 Leland, influenced by his period in Paris in the late 1520s, persuaded Henry viii to sponsor a project ‘to search all the libraries of monasteries and colleges of this your noble realm’, resulting in book-lists (Collectanea) and copious notes which formed the basis of his proposed biobibliographical and topographical works. Leland's sundry papers were preserved and thereupon mined by well-informed antiquarians and biographers from Stow to Tanner. Moreover, John Bale drew significantly on the manuscript of Leland's De viris illustribus, made available by John Cheke, for his monumental Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytannie Catalogus (1557–9), which then in part occluded it. The De viris illustribus, arguably the most significant, and probably the most complete of Leland's unfinished projects, had to wait until 1709 before being published by Anthony Hall as Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis, which contained various omissions and inaccuracies. James Carley now provides us with a splendid and scrupulous edition of the De viris illustribus based on the sole extant manuscript witness, and furnishes it with a translation not merely suitably lucid and robust, but often engagingly idiomatic in its attempts at capturing the eloquent Leland's various registers and modes of self-presentation. In a section of his nearly book-length introduction, Carley also teases out the two phases of composition, 1535–7 and, having forsaken poetry, 1543–45/6. Contrasting the first phase – that based on his research prior to the closing of the monasteries – with that undertaken after a six-year intermission, reveals, both in its rhetorical manner and the processes of deletion and revision, Leland's response to the break with Rome and the impact of Henry's shifting policy. With the demise of Henry viii, this self-styled antiquarius – his endeavours predate any official post of King's Antiquary – most probably suffered the final crippling blow to his already tenuous sanity. But more than a memorialisation of bare, ruined stalls, or a fragmentary monument to an unachievable undertaking, his encyclopaedic study of British writers from the earliest times articulates Leland's celebration of Britain's medieval glory. The entries are laced with poignant descriptions and anecdotes not merely idiosyncratic, but representative of the range of Leland's broad scholarly and personal concerns, from his vehement refutation of those, like Polydore Vergil, who questioned the traditional British history – the existence of King Arthur a major flashpoint – to his friendlier and liberal weighing of the evidence and arguments of other sources. In addition to a survey of Leland's extant works, his life, and his place in Tudor humanist culture, there is also a painstaking reconstruction of the itinerary of Leland's scholarly peregrinations. Although we await the promised complementary edition of Leland's discursive analytical notes, Carley's consummate restoration and discussion of one of the most significant scholarly achievements of sixteenth-century England has already greatly enriched its literary and historical landscape.