Late antiquity is curiously retrospective. This volume, stemming from a 2014 conference at the University of Ghent, is the latest in a long line of collections that reconsider the origins of the field. Our substantial investment in retracing the formation of late antiquity as a distinct period of study undoubtedly stems from anxieties around its (relatively) recent inception and (in all but a few places) institutional uncertainty at the margins of various disciplines of the modern university. Such frequent turns to historiographical autopsy may also stem from the recurring tendency towards autobiographical retractationes on the part of many figures influential in the establishment of the field (compare C.O. Tommasi on Averil Cameron at p. 611): not least Peter Brown (discussed by A. Giardina in this volume). I mention Brown here partly as one central (if implicit) goal of the book seems to be to establish a wider horizon for late antiquity as a discipline than that formed by Brown's World of Late Antiquity (1971) and the subset of the field that developed under his students and colleagues in the last decades of the twentieth century (see esp. the editors’ comments on p. 4). The book recovers ‘the extraordinary diversity’ (p. 4) of approaches to the period in various countries, languages and disciplinary contexts before the formation of a canonical ‘late antiquity’: approaches that, as the editors persuasively demonstrate, cannot simply be dismissed as ‘obsessed with narratives of decline and fall’ (p. 5). Ando and Formisano seek to do this through invited papers by current historians of late antiquity on key figures active from the late nineteenth century to the present day, although with a predominance in the first half of the twentieth century, and very few subjects who received their original scholarly formation later than the 1950s.

First: the necessaries. Of 32 essays in this volume of intellectual portraits of notable late ancient historians by notable late ancient historians, by my (potentially fallible) count four are written about women and eight by women (two as co-authors). The editors (at p. 3) pre-empt more generic complaints about coverage by rightly noting that this was always going to be partial. Nevertheless, I only recognise the surnames of two female authors (Garsoïan and Patlagean) in the 31 additional figures whom they mooted for inclusion. Gender history is not directly represented (barring one page of the chapter on Averil Cameron, p. 621). Given the chronology of the volume – itself a choice, not a given – an imbalance is perhaps inevitable on both scores, but not one quite this stark. Taking their rough cut-off point of the late 1970s – the period of Claude Lepelley's graduate work – would still allow for inclusion of the likes of Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Polymnia Athanassiadi, Joëlle Beaucamp, Anne-Marie La Bonnardière, Elizabeth Clark, Gillian Clark, Yvette Duval, Jill Harries, Luce Pietri, Charlotte Roueché, Aline Rousselle … Books like this one help to frame what sorts of scholarship (and scholars) matter, not only in the past, but in the present. In that sense, this volume cannot but reinscribe a sense of the study of this period as one conducted by men about men.

To provide a useful review of this book is difficult, both because the sheer breadth of the specialisms involved far exceeds my competence, and because no other reader with any sense is likely to read it as I did (cover to cover). Individual chapters will undoubtedly become the place of first resort for students of late antiquity who need to engage closely with the work of one scholar. Those students will find careful examinations of the careers and central intellectual interests of figures who remain pivotal to the study of particular problems in late ancient history. These essays draw compelling links between the individual, the work and bigger societal forces, which would be otherwise invisible to a modern reader in a university library. (And even then can remain elusive: see e.g. p. 275, N. Lenski on Santo Mazzarino's off-hand reference, in the preface to his 1942 book on Stilicho, to his military service preventing him from checking the proofs.) A recurring theme is the often complex impact of totalitarian regimes and (now widely abhorred) ideologies on these scholars’ visions of late antiquity (e.g. J. Bremmer on A. von Harnack, J. Elsner on A. Riegl, M. Kulikowski on A. Alföldi, C. Maranci on J. Strzygowski, R. Payne on N. Pigulevskaya, D. Praet on F. Cumont, S. Rebenich on O. Seeck, S. Schmidt-Hofner on E.H. Kantorowicz, S. Cullhed on P. Courcelle). Where particularly repellent analytical premises are apparent in the published work, these papers steer towards a safe middle ground between dubious apology and blanket condemnation: acknowledging in forthright terms the influence of (for example) racial theories, while setting them in a contemporary context (generally) without unjustifiable special pleading. These papers are also useful in so far as they also trace the (perhaps even more crucial) work of establishing scholarly networks: not only in the formal institutional sense beloved of contemporary funding bodies, but also through travel, mentoring and (above all) friendship (see esp. P. Blaudeau on H.-I. Marrou, J.-M. Carrié on L. Cracco Ruggini, H. Inglebert on N. Duval). Such tracing of the educational, institutional, political and cultural influences that shaped particular individuals – and their subsequent impact on their colleagues, students and occasional antagonists – will undoubtedly help to frame any number of doctoral theses in the future.

The mileage of the more general reader will vary. Perhaps the most enlightening pieces are those that seek to make surprising cases for famous historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages as students of late antiquity (e.g. Praet on Cumont, Schmidt-Hofner on Kantorowicz) or champion the work of lesser-known or lesser-cited individuals (e.g. Payne on Pigulevskaya, M. Roberts on R. Herzog, J. Weisweiler on S. MacCormack). (Another baleful recurring theme is the limited impact on Anglophone scholarship of German, Italian and Russian historians when their work did not receive timely translation.)

Particularly revelatory (at least for me) is Payne's summary of the career and interests of Nina Pigulevskaya, whose reconstruction of social history through Syriac Christian texts in Leningrad in the 1930s and 1940s prefigures one of the most dynamic aspects of the discipline today. The best of these essays transcend a simple career summary of a ‘big beast’ in the discipline by tracing the prehistory of current concerns, or even seeking to challenge them (see esp. the gauntlet laid down by Elsner on p. 182). It is in those moments that the possibility for these exercises in scholarly archaeology to destabilise accepted narratives of disciplinary formation becomes most readily apparent. Historians of late antiquity will certainly benefit from the erudite reconstructions and sophisticated critiques of foundational work offered in this volume.