Max Engammare's latest book is a development of the unpublished chapter that he might have included at the end of his Ordre du temps (Geneva 2004). That book had much to do with Reformers: here, it is not just Calvinists (Beza, Goulart, La Noue) but also Lutherans (Melanchthon, Peucer, Camerarius the Younger, Rantzau) and at least one Catholic (Weinsberg) who are shown to have a keen interest in certain non-predictive aspects of astrology and especially in the climacteric. For most (although not for Pliny) this period of life, which is ordinally the age of sixty-three, or cardinally the preceding (i.e the sixty-third) year, is dangerous and subject to unforeseen change. The phenomenon can be linked to the statement in Wisdom xi.20 that God ordained all things by number, weight and measure, but the precise doctrine is found in various antique sources, notably Pliny, Aulus Gellius, Censorinus and Firmicus. The humanist recovery of these texts makes the study of the climacteric a purely Renaissance phenomenon, which, as the author shows, begins with Ficino's De triplici vita of the late fifteenth century. Engammare investigates with his usual thoroughness and erudition the religious, medical, political, philosophical, literary, poetic, historical and astrological aspects of his topic. He shows that the climacteric was not of interest to all – indeed, not even to those whom one might have expected to have made much of it. Physicians, after all, had a doctrine of decretorial days, and it would seem natural for a doctor such as Cardano, who expressed a Plotinian view of numbers as entities with mystical and occult force, to have referred to the climacteric, but in fact he makes no use of the combination of seven and nine in his various writings on astrology and medicine. It is a strength of this book that such negative results are clearly recorded. Engammare also highlights positively various characteristics of Renaissance numerology and occult thinking. The most important of these is the penchant at the time for correspondences and analogical thinking, very often conducted in a cavalier spirit (remember Cardano's blithe admission in the De subtilitate that he had simply thought up the parallels between planets and metals). Also revealed here is the ‘confirmation bias’ of all numerological thinking, which translates approximation into precision, as in the case of Bodin's undemonstrable claim that Henri iii was the sixty-third king of France. The belief in the climacteric is shown to sit uneasily with Christian thinking, according to which God's providence and oversight of man applies to all ages and periods of life; there are no special moments for prayer or increased religious discipline. Some well-chosen quotations from Calvin show how the Reformer linked numerical parallels with superstition and the inappropriate investigation of the mysteries of providence. There would have been room in this study for an investigation of the similar phenomenon of numerical apocalypticism (of which Michael Stifel's Ein sehr wunderbarliche wortrechnung Sampt einer merckliche erklerung etlicher zalen Danielis und der Offenbarung Sanct Johannis of 1553 is a good example). Both are examples of what Engammare refers to as ‘l'imaginaire numérique et anthropologique des hommes de la Renaissance’; and both are opposed to an acknowledgement that such a thing as unmotivated coincidence can occur, and to the view that numbers do not have a separate existence, any mystical power or any status as causes, as Aristotle clearly sets out in the fourteenth book of the Metaphysics. Perhaps this excellent study will provoke such a companion volume.