Here are two new and quite different books on the reception of Virgil. Marjorie Curry Woods investigates the tradition of boys performing emotional speeches in women's voices in the medieval classroom (alongside Virgil, W. focuses on Statius’ Achilleid and the Ilias Latina). Luke Houghton surveys the reception of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance. I begin with the former book.

The evidence for all-male education in the medieval classroom is well established. The Latin classics were read aloud and performed, and speeches of emotional content by female characters attracted attention, hence boys often found themselves performing in female voices. The book's primary goal, however, is not to discuss the sources describing this practice, but to find additional evidence for performance and a focus on emotion in the annotations and marginal glosses of medieval manuscripts. W. surveys some sixty manuscripts of the Aeneid, fifty manuscripts of Statius’ Achilleid and thirty of the Ilias Latina.

The book is twofold. Throughout there are interesting observations on the importance of emotion and performance for the learning experience, as well as on the psychological implications of performing in another gender. The author has important things to say about the practice as recorded in medieval sources: one of the book's best parts is the analysis in ch. 3 of a poem by Marbod of Rennes describing a boy singing a pathetic speech by a female character. But these parts do not rely on the manuscript evidence from glosses and marginal notes.

When the author turns to glosses and annotations as evidence for the role of emotion and performance in the medieval classroom, the discussion is somewhat disappointing. W. is well aware that the primary task of glosses is that of helping with vocabulary, grammar and content comprehension (4); most of the time it is hard to see that glosses do much more than that. The glosses and annotations discussed at 16–19 elucidate the grammar, provide summaries for comprehension and commentary on rhetorical matters (i.e. ‘this is a captatio benevolentiae’). The same is true for the glosses discussed at 41–6. Yes, these are emotional passages, and yes, they are likely to have been performed, but nothing in the glosses seems specifically cued towards performance or designed to highlight pathos.

At other times the evidence is indirect. Marginal notes bear testimony to medieval teachers’ (and students’) interest in rhetoric: speeches are marked out and analysed according to their rhetorical components (e.g. exordium, narratio; see 128–31). Rhetorical treatises that were popular in the Middle Ages (e.g. the Rhetorica ad Herennium) recommend different styles of delivery for the different parts of speeches. Thus, the glosses discussed at 128–35 may have provided indications for those who sought to follow those recommendations. That this actually happened remains an attractive possibility, but the glosses per se do not prove it. Different is the case for the glosses discussed at 115–16 (the most compelling piece of evidence in the book): here a commentator supplies pathetic passages in the Aeneid as examples of the type of speeches that could be performed in the different tones suggested by the Rhetorica ad Herennium (although his actual suggestions for performance do not match those of the Latin treatise).

There are a number of unhelpful editorial choices. The original Latin of the medieval glosses is always relegated to the notes; that of the classical Latin texts the glosses accompanied is often not provided at all, but we are given elegant translations from published editions. In transcribing the glosses, abbreviations have been integrated but the original medieval spelling has been preserved (e.g. fidey for fidei): this makes everything unnecessarily difficult for the student who knows Latin but has no experience with medieval manuscripts.

I have noticed a number of slips. On 7 the manuscript seems to read non retinent te … retinere debent rather than the grammatically odd non retinente … debet. At 106 the author states: ‘The next eighteen lines, however, describe the performance without any gender specific words identifying the actors’; the author puts such words in brackets in the translation to show they have been added by the translator. In fact, there are both gender-specific words (virgo) and words with gender-specific endings (amplexura; refecta) in the Latin text.

Houghton's book studies the reception of a single, rather short poem (Virgil's Eclogue 4) in a geographically and chronologically limited context (Italy in the Renaissance). The length and depth of his study by themselves are evidence for the extraordinary productivity of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. For the reader who is not (or is only partially) familiar with Renaissance Latin literature (like this reviewer) there is much to learn here. The selection of texts is fascinating. H.'s close readings prove beyond doubt that Renaissance poets can use intertextuality to create meaning, deploying the same sophisticated strategies adopted by their classical models. H.'s analysis highlights the peculiar features that granted Eclogue 4 such an incredible afterlife — especially its nuanced combination of seemingly opposing themes and concepts — and will therefore be of interest to Classicists and Renaissance scholars alike. Finally, H.'s analysis of the endless modifications and adaptations of the themes of Virgil's poem illuminates both the modalities of reception in Renaissance literature and the different political and religious agendas that shape Renaissance interactions with Virgil's text.

H.'s book is divided into two main sections, one investigating political receptions and the other surveying appropriations in religious contexts and in Latin poetry on biblical subjects.

In the chapters on political reception, H. analyses encomiastic poetry produced at Italian courts, where the theme of a return to a Golden Age is appropriated to praise sovereigns, political leaders and popes. The trend is somewhat repetitious, but there are interesting variations. In Virgil, the new age brought about by the birth of a divine child marks a return to a mythologised past. Thus Eclogue 4 is particularly suitable to anchor in classical literature the key concept of Renaissance, allowing authors to characterise their age as the return to the glorious (classical) past after the decadence of the Middle Ages. The combination of pacifism and ideologies of conquest (the hypothetic campaigns of the puer at Ecl. 4.34–6) is another peculiar feature of Ecl. 4 that opens up the text for a variety of receptions. In the Venetian poetry discussed in ch. 4, the Fourth Eclogue is engaged to praise the new Dogi and Condottieri who will rid the world of the chaos left by their predecessors and will also open up new seas for commerce and expansion. H. is aware that it is almost impossible to detach Ecl. 4 from the history of its reception (22) –– Virgil's poem travels alongside a number of earlier receptions that become inseparable from it. Although H. does a good job of keeping track of this process, I felt he misses some pieces of the mosaic at times: in the Venetian poem by Amalteo (Silis, discussed at 74–5), Virgil has been merged with Valerius Flaccus’ panegyric of Vespasian (cf. Val. Fl. 1.7: tuque o pelagi cui maior aperti). At the end of ch. 4, we find an interesting outlier: an author (Ludovico Zuccolo) who is bothered by the fact that the Golden Age always promised by politicians never materialises, and suggests that it may be the disregard for economic and social distinctions demonstrated by the remarkable friendship of two Venetian noblemen that will bring about the true Golden Age.

Ecl. 4 is central to the tradition of Virgil as a crypto-Christian author, a tradition that begins in the late antique period, is well established in the Middle Ages and reaches its climax in the Renaissance. But, as H. shows (ch. 7), there is a great deal of debate at every stage. In the Renaissance the interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue becomes central to discussions of the role of classical literature in education. Both Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati respond to objections by scholars who deny the importance of classical instruction in view of its incompatibility with Christian revelation, and both rely on the Fourth Eclogue to justify the importance of classical literature (177–8; 198–205). This discussion is particularly relevant today. H.'s analysis of the role played by Ecl. 4 in the Renaissance phase of this endless debate shows that the classical tradition has always been and will always be contested at times of intense social and cultural change. Texts such as Ecl. 4 survive and thrive because their approach is complex and nuanced enough that they can be appropriated from different sides of the political and religious spectrum. In this respect, Ecl. 4 works as a symbol of the classical tradition as a whole –– a space capacious and complex enough always to suggest a variety of approaches and discourage wholesale condemnations.

Ch. 8 focuses on two epic masterpieces: Sannazaro's De partu Virginis (DPV) and Vida's Christiad. In common, they have their incorporation of Virgil's text in prophetic passages (e.g. the song of the shepherds Lycidas and Aegon in DPV 3.197–232, or the words of Mary at Christiad 3.303–12). These passages feature a creative Christianisation of Virgil's imagery, realised by exploiting the overlap between biblical messianic imagery and pastoral motifs: Christ is presented as the fulfilment of Virgil's prophecy, whose Christian content is highlighted through intertextuality. Another influential aspect in these two poems is the transposition of Virgil's themes and images from the political to the religious sphere. Sannazaro and Vida accommodate Virgil's view of cyclical history through the idea that Christ and the Church repeat on a different plane the achievements of the heroes of old. Thus, the new Argo announced in Ecl. 4 becomes the ship that will carry the apostles and Christ is the new epic hero that conquers death (DPV 3.226–30). At the end of Vida's Christiad (6.980–6) allusions to Ecl. 4 announce a new Golden Age that coincides with the establishment of Christianity.

H. has provided scholars and readers with an excellent tool for venturing into the still unexhausted treasure trove of Virgilian receptions in the Renaissance. The book is well edited and virtually free of typos. I commend the author's choice of providing full, precise translations of all texts along with the original Latin.