The field of ancient glass studies has marked two important milestones in recent years: first, the retirement of Jenny Price, one of its foremost scholarly voices over the past half-century and, second, a landmark exhibition of the master works of Ennion, a leading producer of mould-blown glass vessels during the early Roman Empire and one of the few ancient glass-makers known to us by name. These two figures have much in common with each other — a passion and a genius for working with glass, a broad vision coupled with a meticulous nature, the distinction of having driven their discipline forward in unparalleled ways, and an outsized legacy.

Price, with her pioneering work in the field of Roman glass, has shaped the direction of the discipline over a long and productive career and has mentored a generation of scholars. In a field that all too naturally diverges along questions of source (archaeological, museum collection), chronology (pre-Roman, pre-blown) or geography (eastern empire, western empire), Price's work has been exemplary in demonstrating both how a focus on glass as a material allows us to range across time and space (from Tripolitania to Caerleon) and how a focus on time and place (Roman Britain) allows us to develop a rich understanding of regional patterns in glass production and consumption. For colleagues and collaborators, she has set a high standard and a breathtaking pace. For scholars new to the field, her methods and the corpora of material she has published have provided both raw material to build upon and exemplary models for how to do so productively.

When Price retired from the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in 2006 (but not, we trust, from continued research and mentoring), she was honoured with a two-day conference that drew together a Who's Who of leading figures in the field of Roman glass to honour, to reflect on and to build upon Price's scholarly contributions to our understanding of typology and distribution, techniques of manufacture, scientific analysis and the ‘odd fish’. That conference, organized by the Association for the History of Glass, resulted in the publication of the edited volume, Glass in the Roman World, which stands as a worthy tribute to its honouree.

The volume is divided into three sections: 1. Technology and Production, 2. Vessels and their Forms, and 3. Other Uses of Glass. All of the eighteen papers included offer something new — new evidence, a new synthesis, new insights and fertile ideas for future work. Several are treasures of insight offered by the best minds in the field. In Section 1, six scholars address a range of technical issues including evidence from furnace installations in the Wadi Natrun at Beni Salama for the nature and the location of primary glass production during the early Roman Empire (Nenna); the current, unfortunately sparse, state of evidence for glass-working in the ancient city of London pointing to the Upper Walbrook Valley as the prime glass-working area of the time (Shepherd); evidence for primary and secondary production of distinctive classes of late Roman mould-blown vessels in the Hambach region of Germany (Follmann-Schulz); an examination of pontil marks (or the lack thereof) on Roman and post-Roman blown vessels in the Corning Museum of Glass as evidence for the timing of the introduction of the pontil (Whitehouse); and a discussion of how the chemical analysis of superficially similar early imperial coloured glasses can unmask significant underlying compositional groupings (Freestone and Stapleton).

To my mind, there are two stand-out articles in this first section. First, at a time when scientific studies have become an increasing focus of research into ancient glass, Caroline Jackson and Harriet Foster offer a valuable overview of the evolution of scientific analyses and their current contribution to our understanding of the Roman glass industry and its place in the Roman economy. Glass studies have necessarily lagged behind metal and ceramics in this regard because of the relative dearth of identifiable production centres and because glass as a material is highly perishable. However, powerful methods such as trace element and isotopic analysis have opened a window for researchers onto finer distinctions in Roman glass composition (as witnessed in the contribution of Freestone and Stapleton), differences through which provenances may be determined with greater precision. This, in turn, is spurring innovative research into models of production and consumption through a dynamic integration of archaeological, geological and scientific data.

Second, E. Marianne Stern paints a rich, big-picture view of the opposing trajectories of the Roman glass industries of the Eastern and Western Empires over time with attention to the three major glass-working techniques: ‘shaping by breath, tooling on a turntable, and chasing like silver’ (77). This is a particularly interesting study given the tendency of research in Roman glass to follow geographical divisions. Stern notes that, after the discovery of the inflation technique in the East (most likely, she argues, among bead-makers), most major developments of the nascent glass-blowing industry (furnace design, tools, decorative techniques) occurred in the West where a greater variety of forms fulfilling a greater range of functions arose early. As the diversity of forms declined in the West through the fourth century, the number and diversity in forms in the East increased, peaking in the fourth and early fifth centuries a.d.

In Section 2 of the volume, six scholars present studies of a range of vessel types including discussions of mould-blown beakers with sporting and mythological scenes from the province of Narbonensis (Fontaine and Foy); local tastes and patterns of trade in Roman and post-Roman glass from the Fezzan oasis in Libya (Hoffman); remarkable finds of Roman glass from Caesarea Maritima including a fragment from a mould-blown vessel of the type made by Ennion and Aristeas and a recently discovered fragment from a cage cup in colourless glass with a blue overlay (Israeli); and a beaker from a Roman bath near Barzan (France) with the rare combination of a mould-blown body and a tooled tubular base-ring (Cottam).

Notably, this section features the first full publication of a major new find, the recently identified early imperial Roman two-handled cameo vessel with Dionysiac scenes, only the thirteenth such vessel known and one that promises to shed further light on the Portland Vase and the Auldjo Jug (Newby-Haspeslagh).

Also in this second section is a stand-out paper by Daniel Keller on Roman glass assemblages from Ephesus and Petra. Keller's work, like that of Price, couples a broad vision for the potential of glass finds from archaeological contexts to shed light on Roman daily life with an archaeologist's meticulous attention to context and spatial distribution. Keller's identification of sets of glasswares of differing qualities in separate parts of Late Roman houses at Petra and Ephesus (all in sealed contexts from earthquake destruction) reveals interesting patterns of consumption. He notes that higher quality drinking and serving vessels appear to have been on display in the reception rooms of these houses, while more utilitarian glasswares were found in or near the kitchen and that the heterogeneity of these groups perhaps reveals a mature stage in the life cycle of discrete glassware sets with new vessels replacing those lost to breakage. Keller's work, setting glass into its lived context, provides a model for future research very much in line with that called for by Jackson and Foster.

The third section of the volume — ‘Other Uses of Glass’ — includes five papers on a range of topics. Leading off are two contributions on the subject of window-glass: a preliminary study of the flat glass from the ancient port city of Butrint (Albania) that provides a detailed and useful overall summary of the stages of ancient window-glass manufacture from casting in trays (early imperial) to split blown cylinders (Roman into Byzantine) to medieval crown glass (Jennings), and a discussion of two silver fir glazing bars from the Roman legionary fortress at Vindonissa where their rare use in window construction in the Roman North-West may reveal Mediterranean influence (Amrein). The final three papers of the volume provide helpful overviews of unusual topics in Roman glass studies: first, a discussion of the reworking of Roman glass based on evidence from the Roman fort at Augusta Raurica (Augst) including bases with base rings reused as lids, flat glass apparently broken into geometric shapes, and reworking to create lithic type tools for cutting or gouging (Fünfschilling); a helpful overview of Roman enamelling, a technology that was limited in the Roman period to the North-Western provinces and Pannonia (Bayley); and, finally, a comparison of the uses of black-appearing glass for vessels and objects during two peak periods (the mid-first century a.d. and the mid-second to late third centuries) in Britannia, Gallia Belgica and Germania Inferior (Cosyns).

The volume is well designed with ample illustrations and photographs, many in colour, throughout. It is extremely useful for both the specialist (if the myriad bookmarks left in my copy for future reference are an indication) and for the generalist or student of ancient technology seeking good overviews of particular aspects of the Roman glass industry.

In Ennion: Master of Roman Glass, Christopher Lightfoot, Curator of Roman Art in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a specialist in Roman glass, has produced a welcome and authoritative study of an ancient master craftsman with few equals. Ennion was an innovator and self-promoter in the heady experimental days of the nascent Roman glass-blowing industry in the first century a.d.; he worked for most of his career in Sidon where a group of glass-workers pioneered the technique of blowing glass into multi-part moulds to create richly decorated vessels in part emulating moulded vessels in metal. We know Ennion's name because he signed his works, carving into his moulds variations on ΕΝΝΙΩΝ ΕΠΟΙΕΙ (‘Ennion made it’) framed in a tabula ansata. What exactly ‘made’ means in this context is ambiguous: was it Ennion's actual breath that created the vessel? Was he the artist who made the moulds? Or was he the owner of the glass workshop where the vessel was produced? These are just a few of the central questions addressed in this comprehensive study produced in conjunction with the landmark exhibition of Ennion's work and related material at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass in 2014–16. The centrepiece of the volume is an important essay by Lightfoot, the driving force behind both the volume and the exhibition, who provides authoritative assessments of who Ennion was, where and when he worked, the current known inventory of his work, where and when it was found or collected, and the history of past exhibitions and scholarship. Essays by Karol Wight on the mould-blowing process, Yael Israeli on the Ennion jug found in Jerusalem, Zrinka Buljević on the exciting recent finds of multiple vessels of Ennion and Aristeas in the Roman province of Dalmatia and an appendix by Mark Wypyski presenting the results of the scientific analysis of two of the vessels signed by Ennion in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum add important complementary perspectives to the study. The handsomely produced and illustrated catalogue includes twenty-six of Ennion's works (cups, bowls, jugs and flasks) from museum collections worldwide, together with signed work of four other mould-blowers associated with Ennion: Aristeas, Jason, Meges and Neikais, associated unsigned works, and other related material. With this volume, Lightfoot has given us an exceptional resource for understanding both an intriguing character and Roman glass production and distribution, particularly of mould-blown glass, in the early imperial period.

These two volumes provide a welcome occasion to reflect upon the achievement of research on ancient glass over the past half-century and upon the pioneers who made this progress possible. In the span of Price's career, studies of Roman glass have moved from the recovery of overlooked finds in excavation and museum storerooms to wide-ranging interdisciplinary investigation and from initial typology building to sophisticated scientific and network analysis. And both volumes remind us of the debt that Roman glass specialists of today owe to the path-breaking work of Donald B. Harden who first brought scholarly attention to Ennion in his pioneering study of early mould-blown glass (JGS 25 (1935), 163–86) and who served as a mentor to Jenny Price and to others who contributed to these works. One comes away from reading with a clear sense of ancient glass as powerful evidence for the nature of technological innovation in the Roman world and as a highly sensitive indicator of cultural change.