Amongst the evidence given before the recent Iraq Inquiry in the UK, a transcript from the hearing of an MI6 agent, referred to as SIS4, offered a poignant exchange, in which two participants borrowed Virgil's words to articulate their thoughts on the misrepresentation of evidence, the invasion and its aftermath:

Whilst Virgil's Aeneid may now rarely be used to comment on current affairs, B. capably demonstrates how its early modern translators employed their renderings not only as vehicles for panegyric, but to ‘educate the nation, question structures of power, lament the loss of virtues, incite people to love or war, or … issue threats’ (p. 3). Responding to a tendency to study Renaissance translations of the Aeneid as part of a process that culminates in the Augustan renderings, which ‘has distorted our understanding’ of earlier versions (p. 8), B. explores thirteen translations of (parts of) the Aeneid to excellent effect. Without losing sight of the details of the texts themselves, he locates each of them within its own particular context and considers how the translators relate to one another's renderings, often with a sense of aemulatio. This desire to surpass their predecessors ‘with improved perspicuity, aptitude, elegance or cultural utility’ (p. 15) is prevalent, B. demonstrates, in early modern attitudes towards translation and may usefully be explored through a study of the numerous translations of the Aeneid from this period.

In considering the influential translation by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne that enjoyed more editions (eight) than any translation of Virgil's poem until the eighteenth century, B. borrows Richard Stanyhurst's description of the rendering's diction as ‘loftie’. He shows how Phaer achieved this sense of ‘loftiness’ in Books 1–9 through (i) the fortuitous use of fourteeners and the near line-by-line correlation with Virgil's original – English versification could ascend to the heights of classical achievement; (ii) the glorification of the nobility; and (iii) the ‘especially high opinion of man’. For Phaer, ‘Aeneas [was] the consummate hero of virtue’ (p. 31), and his version of the Aeneid provides ‘a humanistic expression of the lofty potential of man’ (p. 22). Contrary to the communis opinio, B. emphasises the continuity of Twyne's rendering with his predecessor's, suggesting that the particular contribution of the translator of Books 10–12 comes in the unobtrusive shift marked by his Protestantism. Phaer, though not seeking to write a Catholic version of the Aeneid, refers to pilgrims, limbo and saints in his translation, whilst these are absent from Twyne's. The latter was ‘a sensitive reader of Phaer's poetry’ (p. 33) and seems assiduously to have followed his predecessor in the emphasis given to the humanist notion of uirtus, and in terms of versification. This chapter concludes with a persuasive apology for Stanyhurst's infamous translation of Books 1–4, attending to the circumstances in which this rendering was undertaken. Exiled because of his conversion to Catholicism, and affected by the hanging of his friend Edmund Campion, the translator presents Aeneas not as a hero endowed with virtue, but as an exiled pilgrim and a martyr. This very personal translation ‘is not a travesty’ (p. 45), as has been thought, but struggled to negotiate its relationship with Phaer-Twyne's Aeneid alongside Virgil's poem.

The second chapter is devoted to Christopher Marlowe's Dido. B. focuses on where the playwright is closest to Virgil's Latin, demonstrating that translations frame the play's freer, lyrical core, and that, divorced from the narrative voice of epic, they create destabilising polycentric voices. He also shows, contrary to critical opinion, that there is not insignificant Marlovian engagement with earlier translations of the Aeneid and with Renaissance commentaries.

In a fascinating third chapter, B. considers un(der)explored translations which survive only as manuscripts. He offers the first reading of an anonymous translation of Book 4 which is constituted of six-line a-b-a-b-c-c stanzas and is loose in its handling of Virgil's text. The focus is on love, and the rendering is littered with courtly imagery; it is tentatively suggested that it may have been composed in the 1580s or 1590s by court poets, known to be interested in Dido's story and to have used this stanzaic form. Next B. offers a reassessment of John Harington's translation of Book 6 for King James and Prince Henry, suggesting it ‘should … be read as a response to the use of Virgil in James's Basilikon Doron’ (p. 90). He explores the significance of the use of the ottava rima, rare in English translations, and considers the guidance given to Harington's royal reader in his commentary. These paratexts are steeped in their author's reading of Augustine (and his commentators), and this leads to a Book 6 which, B. argues, warns the prince that stability is found in Christ, not in a political system. The poem produced by the Scotsman, William Mure, varies between translation and adaptation of Books 1 and 4, and original composition, and, B. suggests, is used by the poet as a stepping stone in his literary career. He felt no ‘weighty obligation to … stay true to [Virgil]’, but was concerned, rather, with elevating his amatory verses ‘onto a grander level’ (p. 103). The Aeneid of the English Renaissance was not, as B. shows through these manuscript translations, ‘always a serious, moral poem’, but one that could be treated more lightly and mischievously (p. 110).

B. next treats three translations of parts of the Aeneid by members of the Virginia Company, arguing that each responds to ‘a similar cultural moment’ and uses Virgil to ‘reflect on [England's] colonial activities and foreign policies’ in the early 1600s (p. 117). The renderings of Books 2 and 4 by Thomas Wroth and Dudley Digges respectively actualised ‘specific strands of interpretation … in order to apply the text to their immediate needs’ (p. 145). The former adapted Aeneas’ narration of Troy's fall and Creusa's prophetic appearance to engender confidence in a providentially-sanctioned colonialism; the latter sought to encourage the king to promote Protestantism and wage war on Catholic Spain by recalling the story of a prince, drawn off course, who neglects his proper imperial project and his ‘masculine duty and virtue’ (p. 133). The rendering of Book 1 by George Sandys looks, according to B., to the example of Aeneas as the founder of a nation, and, through the humanistic language that characterises him, develops a relevance for those concerned, like Sandys, with the founding of a successful state in Virginia.

Finally, B. considers three understudied translations which contrast with the Augustan Aeneids that followed. John Vicars’ rendering of Virgil's poem served as a Parliamentarian ‘tool of resistance’ (p. 152), that was steeped in its translator's Puritanism: ‘the piety and righteousness of a whole nation [are portrayed as] battling a Catholic threat’ from the king's policies (p. 155). The ‘lively indecorum’ of Vicars’ translation contributes, B. argues, to an oppositional and militaristic reading (p. 159), which looks for a return to the Elizabethan heyday. Likewise, the line-by-line translation of Book 4 by Robert Stapylton allegorises Aeneas’ martial Rome overcoming Dido's sybaritic and mercantile Carthage. This favourable emphasis on militarism provides a politicised reading different from the later Augustan renderings and demonstrates another way in which individual books were appropriated. Robert Heath's translation similarly explores militaristic themes, but, emulating Vicars’ Parliamentarianism, he encourages the Royalist cause: it has nothing of the Augustan Virgil about it, however, originating instead from oppositional Aeneids of the early Stuart years.

B.’s wide-ranging, finely-produced tome situates the translations it considers within their cultural and historical milieux, offering re-evaluations of thoroughly explored renderings, and bringing to light a number of understudied and unstudied versions of Virgil's epic which bear serious consideration by Classicists and early modernists alike. It is lucidly and articulately written, and leaves one wanting to find out more about the texts, their authors and their contexts.