At the core of Duncan MacRae's endeavour lies the ambition to provide a full-scale discussion of the rôle of books in Roman religion, against the background of the recent emergence of debates on individualization in Roman religion, and the strong (if by no means uncontroversial) shift of focus away from civic religion. M. is not interested in the rôle of writing in the ritual dimension, but concentrates instead on the development and impact of theological reflection in ancient Rome through a mode that he calls ‘bookish’ (a term that is arguably not entirely helpful in its potential ambivalence): Cicero's religious trilogy, of course, but also the treatment of sacred matters in Servius Fabius Pictor, in L. Cincius’ Mystagogicon and in legal literature. Varro is central throughout: the book starts, in fact, with a lucid discussion of Augustine's reading of the Divine Antiquities. M. posits the emergence of a new breed of writers in Republican Rome, the ‘civic theologians’, and makes a coherent and valuable case for their significance in the Roman intellectual discourse from the late second century b.c. onwards. The contents of this theological reflection receive little attention (the notorious crux of Varro's theologia tripertita is hardly discussed at all; cf. 28, 158), and many of M.’s general contentions are not novel. The view that religious culture and practice is highly diverse (26–7) is already spelled out in the title of the reference handbook on the subject in English, now nearly twenty years old. Yet, M. is truly Varronian in the ambition to enable his readers to find their whereabouts through a disparate and fragmentary set of ancient evidence, which he has read with great sensitivity, and a complex and sometimes factionalized historiographical debate, with which he is thoroughly conversant (one quibble: Aldo Schiavone's argument on the formalization of the Roman legal tradition was not made ‘recently’, but about four decades ago; cf. 51). He rightly identifies the onset of monarchy as a major transformative factor in the ways in which religion is ‘written down’ and debated. Before moving to that discussion in the third part, he engages in a comparative exercise, and explores the similarities and differences between Roman ‘civic theology’ and the Mishnah, a body of written work that was produced in Jewish circles in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in a.d. 70. Both sets of texts present and engage with problems of religious authority and expertise, and M. articulates his exercise of ‘disciplined comparitivism’ (81) tersely, duly pointing out the differences between the contexts in which those two clusters of material took shape, and the fundamentally different approaches to the relationship between theology and scripture. The morphological analogies yielded by his analysis are elegant, but it remains unclear what explanatory power it carries, beyond drawing attention to what is distinctive about the Roman experience.

The third part takes us back to Rome and the impact of monarchy. Good use is made of much recent work on the Augustan strategy, and the princeps and his court are understood as perceptive readers of layers of traditions of civic theology. Claudius and Verrius Flaccus are rightly given their dues; the a.d. 22 debate on the prerogatives of the flamen Dialis is helpfully discussed as an episode of considerable significance (116: more could have been made of the discussion that the matter prompted in the Senate; Maluginensis and Tiberius were not the only ones who had done some background reading on that problem of ius diuinum). M. also offers some fine remarks on Seneca and his critique of civil theology (118–20). After some illuminating comments on Statius’ Silvae 5.3, where M. locates a precise reference to the process of transmission of religious knowledge across generations of the Roman élite, the discussion moves on to late antique readers and writers of civil theology, who are, in different ways, eminent experts in Varro: Macrobius, Tertullian, and finally back to Augustine, the starting point of the book. Here M. makes an important part of his argument, which, like other aspects of his discussion, is surely not ground-breaking, but thoughtfully scene-setting: the distinction between Scripture and religious texts that do not have scriptural status is a late antique one, and must be overcome if one is to attempt an historical understanding of the place of writing and reading — of ‘the book’, with a small b — in Roman religious practice and thought. To resort to a well-rehearsed textual metaphor, this study has irreversibly put that material on the map, and has made a major contribution to charting the boundaries and reach of that category of writing.

Two final points, of form as well as substance. The choice of printing endnotes in such a learned and wide-ranging book is nothing short of lamentable. The lack of an index locorum is a missed opportunity, and does not do justice to M.’s ability to find valuable evidence where many have failed to look hard enough.