This volume stems from a conference held in Antwerp in 2011, and successfully recreates the sense of dialogue and exploration of a rich scholarly discussion. The editors rightly insist on the pioneering quality of the project: although disability studies have been a flourishing area of historical scholarship for some time, much to the merit of several contributors to the volume, this is the first effort of such broad scope. The stated focus on Rome is not the prominent selling point: the discussions are really at the forefront for the methodological fundamentals they debate and, more often than not, look at Graeco-Roman antiquity as a whole, and at the status quaestionis of ancient disability studies broadly conceived – which is both unavoidable and sound as an approach.

The editors' introductory chapter touches on issues that are central for all scholars of cultural history (most prominently, the debate between constructionism and essentialism). The editors present the project's ‘a capite ad calcem’ agenda as a way to reject extreme forms of constructionism and to recognise the reality of the experience of disability, which has an irreducible core of real challenge and suffering, in respect to which ‘similarities might be discovered across time and place’ (p. 6). A straightforward organisation of the material within which to introduce complications and variables seems thus to be a good editorial choice. Moreover, in the course of the book the a capite ad calcem approach argued for in Chapter 1 turns out to be more of a methodological insurance against constructionist evanescence than a constraining structure: in fact, the chapters are rather organised along a split between head (with mental impairment included here) and rest of the body (limbs, general physiology, sexual differentiation, body as object of social treatment or creative gaze). On this point, notwithstanding the awareness repeatedly shown by the contributors of the inadequacy of (post-)Cartesian dualisms in approaching ancient mental life, the fact of assigning it to the caput (especially when mental life includes alcoholism, for example) seems an illegitimate simplification. But collections must be organised following some arbitrary order, and these editors miss no occasion to remind us of the provisionality and conventionality of rigid thematic structures in their field.

The following two chapters are more general and have a methodological interest rather than anatomical focus. Chapter 2, by G. and R., offers a broad-ranging discussion on ‘intellectual disability from Homer to late antiquity’. The authors are authorities in the field, and their survey reflects the breadth of their competence. The textual examples (e.g. Homer, Galen, Roman Satire) are very disparate ones, and at times I missed a stronger common narrative given the huge span of time taken into consideration (and not exclusively Roman, despite the stated objective). The chapter works thus more as a stimulating addendum to the introduction than as an original study in itself, with summarising parts along the way (on Homer and Plato in particular). Clark and R. move on to address psychiatric disability in Galen (Chapter 3), focusing on social interaction as it emerges through Galen's reports on mental illness, and readers learn much from the discussion of patients and the survey of individual mental cases in the corpus. In Chapter 4 Gourevitch (with the cooperation of G. Demigneux and L.) looks at wine drinking and its excesses as pathogenic and pathological in ancient medical literature, sometimes naming it confusingly ‘alcoholism’ but also discussing the category in the perception of the ancients – an instructive discussion, which had been missing from scholarship on ancient pathological behaviours. Chapters 5 and 6 are anatomically focused, both discussing versions of visual defect: ‘visual impairment in ancient Rome’ in L. Trentin's piece and ‘accounts of blindness’ in Greek Miracle stories by C.B. Horn. Trentin looks at Roman material, although she opens with a survey of the classical world (mostly poetic and curiously leaving out the Hippocratics altogether) and scrutinises it against models of ‘integration, not isolation’ and ‘accommodation, not alienation’ (pp. 108, 110). Horn compares miracle stories from the early Hellenistic period and the late-antique hagiography to discuss personal religion and healing of the self with particular reference to stories of blindness. She emphasises a greater ‘therapeutic transformation’, of which physiological healing is only a part, a ‘universal typology of healing in the Mediterranean world’ (p. 141) that maintains recognisable features across many centuries, and very different theologies. L.'s topic in Chapter 7 is also ‘capital’, as he addresses ‘speech impairment in Roman antiquity’. Here the ancient world is rightly, again, scrutinised as a whole, combining Greek background and Latin examples. L. analyses relevant Greek and Latin vocabulary on speech difficulties and forms of speech therapy, and offers plenty of sources; perhaps more attention to Hippocratic patients would have offered that amplitude of social samples that L. laments to be missing from the historical record (‘small minority of the well-to-do in a literary culture’, p. 168). From Chapter 8 onwards the topic widens to bodily disability of the individual as a whole. Graumann describes ‘the case of hermaphrodites in antiquity’ in a competent analysis of the changing definitions and labelling of sexual differentiation disorders in modern and current perceptions, medical, social and political-legislative, an account that is both enlightening and sensitive to current debates. This is another contribution that fills a thematic gap in current scholarship. In Chapter 9, Gevaert and L. analyse the work of Pliny the Elder for ‘teratology and bodily disability’ and scrutinise views of monstra, strangeness and ‘otherness’ at the time of Pliny; Chapter 10 analyses pain as a feature of disability in Samama's ‘A King Walking with Pain’, a cultural analysis of wounds and impairment as signs of military prowess in figures of authority, with Philip II of Macedon as the key example. Archilochus' commander deserved a mention here, to relativise the reading of Philip as ‘turning point’ in dignifying the ‘wounds of the king’, in opposition to earlier views consistent with kalokagathia. The last two chapters turn to material culture, in two very different ways: the archaeology of tombs and the paleopathological information they preserve, and figurative artefacts respectively. In the first Graham analyses the archaeological remains of various Imperial tombs in Italian cemeteries. The survey suggests special burying customs for individuals whose body displayed signs of extraordinary strain or pathology, to the point of visible disfigurement, which may also suggest, at times, a likelihood of mental affection. The following questions, on the social treatment of the disabled in life, are posed with anthropological insightfulness; the answers do not point necessarily towards segregation and marginalisation, but suggest alternative forms of ‘community’ and integration among such individuals. I learned much from this paper. Mitchell's ‘Disparate Bodies in Ancient Artefacts’ closes the volume discussing pathological information gathered from the so-called ‘grotesques’ (caricatured figurines of Mediterranean provenience dated widely to the third century b.c.–third century a.d.). Mitchell interrogates this material as objects of talismanic/apotropaic inspiration, and at the same time reflecting medical accuracy and offering useful testimony to ancient perceptions of the human body and its deviations from a perceived norm.

The collection has great value as a whole for various reasons: its breadth (in terms of period considered and media analysed); the effort to engage with current scholarship and debates, including references to official medical authorities and current policies; a characteristic combination of philological-textual interest with the methodological and theoretical, and the dialogue with our own current perceptions of (dis)ability, with equal attention paid to the cultural construction and to the biological hardware (so to speak); the freshly updated bibliography, inclusive of several online resources. I noticed a somewhat high number of typos (both in the Greek and in the English, and more in some chapters than in others) and some lack of organisation on occasions. None of these improvable points, however, goes near challenging the valuable and stimulating experience offered by this volume, which is a landmark in this emergent field. The editors have given us a sample of the plentiful research paths that are opening up in this area, providing access to the efforts of some of its prominent champions.