Since C. Martindale's Redeeming the Text (1993) Virgil has become a locus classicus for reception studies. C.'s volume represents a significant contribution to the lively field of the reception of Virgil, focusing as it does on English translators of the Virgilian oeuvre between the 1640s and the 1660s. By zooming in on one of the most unsettling phases of English history, C. offers an ideal addition to recent studies such as S. Brammall's The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil 1555–1646 (2015) and functions as a bridge to studies revolving around John Dryden's translation (L. Proudfoot, Dryden's Aeneid [1960]; R.F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception [2004]). Also, as C. asserts in the introduction, the book's aim is not so much to discuss matters of translation theory as to ‘situat[e] the works of Virgil's mid-seventeenth-century translators more securely within their fraught, contingent historical context’ (p. 9).

One major strength of C.'s monograph is its almost unfailing cohesion, which is ensured by the fil rouge of the politicisation of Virgil's works in the light of contemporary English politics of the middle decades of the seventeenth century. By means of close readings of aptly selected passages, C. cogently shows the politicised engagement with Virgil on the part of nine writers active in the Interregnum period – Sidney Godolphin, Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham, Abraham Cowley, John Ogilby, Sir Richard Fanshawe, James Harrington, Sir Robert Howards and John Boys. Each chapter considers how these translators engaged with Virgil in order to ‘delineate and secure the future they hoped would come to pass but also to anticipate the future they feared would come’ (p. 1). According to C., these English translators of the Interregnum found in Virgil's works the ideal medium to express their anxieties and concerns as well as to formulate their hypotheses about England's political future, especially after Charles I's execution in 1649.

These authors’ topicalising approaches to Virgil function as the structuring principle of the book: its seven chapters are each centred on the translators’ respective political stances and expectations, at least in the way in which they emerge in their engagement with Virgil. The variety of the translators’ political allegiances – ranging from Denham's constitutional royalism and Ogilby's triumphalist ultra-loyalism to the royalist cause to what C. terms the ‘autocratic republicanism’ of Harrington (p. 139) – and their respective use of Virgil are condensed into binomial phrases, which serve as titles for the chapters and facilitate comparisons for the reader: ‘Desired Futures’ on Godophin and Waller; ‘Prophetic Elegy’ on Denham; ‘Absent Presence’ on Cowley; ‘Sacred Majesty’ on Ogilby; ‘Hopeful Prince’ on Fanshawe, ‘Private Interest’ on Harrington, whose republican sentiments make him an exception among the other translators discussed; and ‘Future Contingencies’ on Howard and Boys.

The overall cohesive quality of C.'s monograph is almost unfailing since at times he indulges in the analysis of the translators’ works that cannot be properly defined as translations from Virgil, such as Fanshawe's The Faithfull Shepherd (pp. 116–18) and The Lusiad (pp. 129–34) and Harrington's Oceana (pp. 140–51). Although their inclusion partly belies the focus on translation implicit in the monograph's title, the analysis of these collateral works contributes to shedding light on the translators’ engagement with Virgil in a variety of forms, including adaptation and direct quotation in paratexts or political poems. Adaptation is meant as a process that informs translation and, as C. illustrates in his meticulous analysis of selected passages from the nine translators’ versions of Virgilian works, translation involves not only interpolations, expansions and variations but also less conventional techniques such as the use of italics and significant omissions. In his discussion of the relevance of the translators’ omissions from the original or of their missed opportunities to allude to contemporary or near-contemporary events, C. offers balanced reflections, thereby eschewing over-simplification and showing high attention to nuances: even at the risk of weakening the major thesis of the book, C. duly recognises the absolute absence of what he terms ‘politicized translation’ (p. 125) when necessary, and he candidly registers the mere presence of ‘apolitical’ versions (p. 155). Intellectual honesty is indeed one further remarkable quality of this monograph.

Virgil's English Translators realises Martindale's concept of reception as ‘a two-way process of understanding, backwards and forwards, which illuminates antiquity as much as modernity’ (C. Martindale, ‘Reception – A New Humanism?’, Classical Receptions Journal 5 [2013], 171), with ‘modernity’ standing in this case for the early modern period. C.'s close comparative analysis of the texts enables him to offer readings that are illuminating for scholars in Classics and early modern English studies alike. The translators’ different responses to the current political scenario, and their personal relationship with monarchical authority, are consistently classified by C. into two main categories deriving from the early modern interpretative tradition of Virgil: the poet as counsellor and the poet as prophet/vates. In so doing, C. invites readers to reflect on these and other Virgilian tropes including the post-eventum prophecy and the mors immatura, which resurface throughout the volume and contribute to its cohesion. The category of the retrospective prophecy is particularly productive, as some of the translators discussed tended to backdate their translations in order to endow their work with a more credible prophetic quality. As more specific examples of the mutual illumination between classical and early modern perspectives, I note the fascinating discussion of Ogilby's rendition of ‘Lucifer’ as ‘Hesperus’, which according to C. ‘renders explicit what is latent in Virgil's text’ (p. 94), and the triangulation C. establishes between Virgil, his English translators and other classical authors such as Lucan and Homer. Another triangulation discussed is the one between English political protagonists, Virgilian characters and figures from yet another tradition, the Christian one: Cowley's Davideis draws parallels between Prince Charles, Aeneas and King David, a connection that, as C. points out, will be exploited by John Dryden in Absalom and Architophel (p. 180).

As these instances show, the monograph would have benefited from a more sustained dialogic engagement, both diachronically, with the work of previous translators of Virgil (S. Brammall, The English Aeneid [2015], which C. cites, but could perhaps have taken into greater account to compare the politicisation of Virgil in the years preceding and following the Civil Wars), and synchronically, with the contemporary receptions of other significant classical authors for English politics of the Interregnum such as Lucan (E. Paleit, War, Liberty, and Caesar [2013]) and Thucydides (especially in the translation by Thomas Hobbes, whom C. mentions in passing in relation to his influence on Harrington, pp. 156–7). Also, since the writers discussed are not widely known, more biographical information on them would have been helpful to less specialised readers.

Nevertheless, thanks to its combination of detailed comparative textual analysis and nuanced examination of the political strands during the Interregnum, this volume represents a valuable scholarly contribution to classical reception studies. As emerges in C.'s analysis, the English reception of Virgil during the Interregnum exemplifies the mutual influence between antiquity and a given historical period. C. convincingly shows how Virgil functioned both as a privileged ‘conducive site’ (p. 3) for royalist translators, who fashioned the Virgilian corpus to their own purposes through interpolations, omissions and paratextual frames, in order to ‘make the Virgilian matter better reflect their sense of the precise historical moment’ (p. 3), and as a ‘prism’ (p. 150) through which intellectuals read and interpreted contemporary events, imagined possible futures and even fashioned their own relationship towards monarchical authority, be it as royal adviser or prophet. The coexistence between politicised fashioning of Virgil and ‘Virgilian self-fashioning’ (p. 134), i.e. through and according to Virgil, well illustrates the hybrid nature of classical reception: classical texts are not only patients, passive undergoers, in the reception process but also influential agents conditioning the receivers’ interpretative and self-defining attitudes.