V.C. is a name with which most Plutarchists are familiar. She is a former president of the International Plutarch Society and the author of more than 120 publications, most of which deal with various aspects of Plutarch's literary works. The present volume belongs to the genre of ‘Kleine Schriften’: it consists of a collection of eighteen selected essays by V.C., lightly revised and edited by two of her students. The essays are all on topics related to Plutarch. While most of the original versions, which were previously published in various journals and collective volumes, were written in Italian, in the present edition they conveniently appear in English translation, making it possible for them to reach a broader public. The texts cover a range of thirteen years, from 2006 to 2019. According to the book's editors, the main criterion for the selection of these texts was their ‘significance’ (p. xi), presumably understood in terms of scientific originality.

The book begins with a brief preliminary note by the series’ editors, followed by a preface written by the book's editors, a list of the eighteen articles included in the book, along with their original place of publication, and an introduction by A. Pérez Jiménez. The introduction – which amounts to a eulogy of V.C. – includes reflections on her personality, information about her studies and later career, and a formal overview of the articles to follow. Next comes the main part of the book, consisting of four main sections: ‘Plutarch's Fragments’, ‘Quaestiones convivales’, ‘Religion & Philosophy’ and ‘Plutarch's Reception from Humanism to Modern Age’. The book closes with a bibliography, a curriculum vitae and a complete list of V.C.'s publications from 1970 to 2020 and, finally, an index locorum.

Part 1 comprises articles discussing texts by Plutarch that have come down to us as literary fragments. Most of the essays focus on the interpretation of either individual fragments (frr. 24 and 44 Sandbach) or specific groups of fragments (frr. 13–15 Sandbach; frr. 1–2 Tyrwhitt). V.C.'s method can perhaps best be described as historical-critical. In her close readings of the texts she systematically draws upon a wide array of ancient sources, which help locate the ideas and conceptions expressed in them in their historical milieu. Her analytical approach is rather commentary-like. She does not normally try to follow a particular argument, but prefers instead to examine points of interest as they appear in the text and then to draw conclusions empirically. One partial exception to this norm is the essay ‘For the Understanding of a Lost Text’ (an indirect allusion to Marcel Proust) – in my opinion, the most interesting essay in this section. For the most part, this essay intends to serve as a review of various Plutarchan fragments that had generally not received adequate attention before. Be that as it may, it cleverly begins with an important, albeit perhaps somewhat too brief, discussion of the term ‘fragment’ and the problems related to it (pp. 17–18). V.C. appears to follow P.A. Brunt (CQ 30 [1980], 477–8), who suggested avoiding this term and instead using the expression reliquiae. It is only unfortunate that she does not elaborate more on this topic. The issue is a crucial matter, still debated in current research (see, e.g., D. Lenfant, AncSoc 43 [2013], 289–90; G. Wöhrle, Hermes 150 [2022]).

Part 2, ‘Quaestiones convivales’, includes four essays dealing with various passages from Plutarch's text of the same name. It is a quite lengthy work, consisting of nine books, each of which is further subdivided into individual chapters. These chapters are, in turn, dedicated to particular questions that the guests at a series of dinner parties try to answer. Recent scholarship has shown how suitable this text is for approaches focusing on aspects of information and knowledge management (see, e.g., J. König, in: J. König and T. Whitmarsh [edd.], Ordering Knowledge [2007]). However, this is not the direction taken by V.C. in the essays in this part of the book. As in the first section, she appears to be more interested in the views documented in Plutarch's text, which might help to contextualise Plutarch in relation to certain contemporary realities she is interested in, namely the reception of Judaism in Greek culture, popular beliefs about casting the evil eye and the causes of bulimia. The essay ‘Plutarchus in Plutarcho: De primo frigido and Quaest. conv. 6.4–5’ deserves special mention. It deals with certain parallel passages shared by the two texts. However, V.C. explicitly distances herself from the methodology of the ‘Louvain school’, whose analysis of such passages predominantly focused on the reconstruction of Plutarch's compositional method. Instead, she examines how the same material is reworked by Plutarch to fit different contexts or occasions. A comparable (although more elaborate) approach is also found in an article by S. Xenophontos, AJPh 133 (2012), 61–91.

In Part 3 there are five essays dealing with Plutarch's reflections on a number of philosophical concepts and issues, such as justice, the divine and the conflict between luck and fate. The first three demonstrate a stronger thematic coherence, since they all address points relating to Plutarch's criticism of the Stoics attested in the work De Stoicorum repugnantiis. The fourth essay, ‘The Justice of the Sage: Polemic of Plutarch against the Stoics’, is also a study of Plutarch's views on justice and the law in comparison to the corresponding views of the Stoics. Only the last essay in this section, ‘Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride: a Reconciliation between Religion and Myth’, clearly takes a different approach. Here, V.C. examines the relationship between ‘myth’ and ‘religion’, a long-standing and much-discussed topic, from the point of view of the history of philosophy, drawing on Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride. It is worth mentioning that in each of the above-mentioned essays, V.C. does not confine herself simply to illustrating Plutarch's position with regard to the issue at hand, but she systematically examines these positions vis-à-vis those of other writers, including not only Stoic philosophers, but also Cicero, Philo of Alexandria, Seneca and Apuleius.

The last part is without doubt the most enjoyable of all, inasmuch as it sets up, through the lenses of Plutarch's reception, a fascinating journey across different eras and cultural boundaries, from the flourishing cities of the Italian Renaissance to the Germany of the Reformation and, finally, down to the Vienna of the ‘Wiener Klassik’. The authors whose works are examined here include Guarino Guarini, Thomas Naogeorgus and other humanistic translators of the sixteenth century as well as Pietro Metastasio.

The book is generally carefully edited. Here and there, however, there are some punctuation marks missing (e.g. p. 36: ‘dienen Denn’) and some typographical errors (e.g. p. 17: reliquae instead of reliquiae; p. 124: ‘the Chaerononian’ instead of ‘the Chaeronean’). Such shortcomings do not detract from the book's overall contribution. The volume is rewarding to read, not only for the information and insights it provides, but also – or even primarily – for its historical potential. Many readers will benefit from the English translations, gaining access to V.C.'s work for the first time. In my own case, many of the essays were known to me before in their original versions, and I assume that this must also be true for many other readers of this review. Be that as it may, in the present volume, these essays are put in a new context, which allows, if not encourages, them to be read not merely in relation to the questions discussed in the individual essays, but more broadly as a testimony to V.C.'s scholarly dedication to Plutarchan studies over the last few decades. In other words, this book offers a window into the history of contemporary classical scholarship through the example of V.C., a woman who truly devoted her life to Plutarch.