Hot on the heels of 532 pages of sole-author Cooley (reviewed JRS 105 (2015), 403–5) come 888 pages of twenty-eight authors under the aegis of Bruun and Edmondson. The former used the epigraphic culture of the Romans (and others) on the Bay of Naples as a way into the epigraphy of the Roman world, the latter aim to cover systematically all important aspects of the epigraphy of the Romans, including (at any rate some) Greeks under this banner. The editors begin by imagining how Pflaum and Marec might in 1952 have gone about publishing an important new inscription, telling them off for what they did wrong. We then have a section covering epigraphic manuscripts, forgeries, corpora and works of reference, and digital resources, and a section on the different categories of Roman inscriptions and on the process of engraving. The next two chapters, by Beltrán Lloris and Salomies, exemplify the two extremes to be found in the rest of the volume, the first on the epigraphic habit, that might with adaptation be an article in a journal, the latter a comprehensive, if austere, account of what makes up Republican epigraphy.

While the aim of covering Greek inscriptions important for understanding Roman culture is rather haphazardly fulfilled (for example, the bibliography to ch. 14 omits H. J. Mason, Greek Terms for Roman Institutions (1974)), the list in Appendix IV of Latin-Greek equivalences for family relationships is a welcome feature of the book. It seems odd in Appendix II not also to direct the reader to the list of abbreviations in Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae; the list of voting tribes in Appendix V is straightforwardly alphabetical, and directs the reader neither to L. R. Taylor, Voting Districts of the Roman Republic (1960) nor to the recently published new evidence for the official order (CRAI (2002), 1125–36), originally discussed by Taylor, nor to the ‘pseudo-tribes’ that appear in the Imperial age.

After the first chapter, we work our way through the predictable categories of Roman public inscriptions, ending with Salway, making the important point that the study of late antique epigraphy has been hindered by the existence of largely separate corpora for Christian and ‘pagan’ texts. It is odd that there is no cross-reference from the mention of the affair of Cn. Piso in Rowe's chapter on juridical epigraphy to the account in Potter's chapter on the inscriptions that tell us the sorts of things we find in the narrative sources; and that Richardson (1997) is cited for a conclusion the opposite of that reached by Richardson. Nor do I understand why ‘sacred laws’, whatever they may have been, are spatchcocked into a section on imperial pronouncements. Separate accounts of religion in Italy and religion in the provinces and Christianity display precisely the divorce rightly castigated by Salway.

The section on society and economy displays the categories one would expect: it seems faintly idiosyncratic that Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices, the epigraphic text with the largest body of economic information from the ancient world, does not get a look in; coinage does not appear in the Index at all, money only via a mention of tesserae nummulariae (if that is what they are): contrast the rubrics devised by Jeanne and Louis Robert for the general part of the Bulletin Épigraphique. Corbier (1983) is cited for a view of transhumance that is certainly wrong, though the translation in the article is correct (eadem in D. Pupillo, Le proprietà imperiali nell'Italia romana (2007), 1–48, remains unrepentant; but the Latin will not bear her meaning: the volume in memory of Martin Frederiksen, the English scholar who probably knew Italy better than any other foreigner in recent times, has not enjoyed wide diffusion).

To return to Diocletian's Edict, the innocent reader might from the end of ch. 14 expect a discussion in ch. 15; but it is only under Late Antiquity that it achieves prominence. Salway indeed mentions that the Edict still exists in up to c. 45 copies; but one would have expected in a handbook of epigraphy a mention of the methodological aspects of texts that are multiply attested. And there are occurrences before Late Antiquity: see, for example, C. P. Jones, Chiron 14 (1984), 93–9, ‘The sacrae litterae of 204: two colonial copies’. The sacrae litterae, which forbid billeting in the houses of senators, raise, like the Prices Edict, the problem of the uses of Latin and Greek (and indeed other languages) in the administration of the Empire, a problem to which the Handbook does not appear to direct its readers. And neither ‘Contents’ nor ‘General Index’ mentions a theme of considerable interest, the juxtaposition of image and text in ancient works of art (see, for example, Z. Newby and R. Leader-Newby (eds), Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World (2006)): as far as I can see the twenty-eight authors are all ruthlessly text-oriented.

Four of the most sparkling chapters are those by Clackson on languages other than Latin (the volume as a whole has less to say about the non-Latin epigraphies of the Roman world than the Guide de l’épigraphiste), Kruschwitz on linguistic variation, Bodel on literacy, Schmidt on verse inscriptions — perhaps because the available material is less in quantity, perhaps more likely because the selection has been better made. The four chapters overlap quite a bit, but reinforce each other.

Finally, I offer a couple of contributions to the debate on literacy. Of two texts cited by Martin Goodman in State and Society in Roman Galilee (1983), 141, one is worth quoting in full: the Sifre to Deuteronomy 6, 6, ‘and these words which I command thee this day’, runs: ‘they should not be in your eyes like some antiquated diyategma to which no-one pays any attention, but like a new diyategma which everyone runs to read’ (R. Hammer, Sifre: a Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy (1986), 62, Pisķa 33). The passage cited from the Tosefta (J. Neusner, The Tosefta. Second Division (1981), 68) is less striking. And Archaeological Reports 61 (2014/15), 62 summarizes astonishing evidence for the literacy of Attic shepherds and goatherds from the Archaic period onwards; are we to suppose that shepherds in Italy were different? Those of the pre-Roman period certainly seem to have been able to organize a weaving business (Ostraka 20 (2011), 143–62).

Selection is of course the nub of the problem, and I should like to end by saying that the editors, despite being inward-looking rather than outward-looking, have probably done more often than not as well as it would be possible to do: there is much to learn and think about, most of it reliable, and research students who absorb this volume will have gone a long way, even if not often been excited to become epigraphers.