This book is generally well done and contains some interesting ideas. A new English translation of the Hamartigenia is followed by a suite of interpretative essays in an introduction to which M., apparently subscribing (p. 51) to the poetics of Archibald Macleish (‘a poem should not mean/But be’), declares that ‘the Hamartigenia is an exploration of the problem of sin, which for Prudentius … is inseparable from the fallen state of language and the fruit of that fall’. While, however, M. adequately serves her principal audience, the classicist interested in the Nachleben of Augustan poets (and, perhaps, Milton, against whose Paradise Lost the Hamartigenia is recurrently read), the student of Prudentius' pointed transformation of classical culture may find at least a bit disappointing a relatively glancing engagement of the problem of sin.

Need for another English translation of the Latin cannot be described as urgent. Stam (1940) and the Loeb edition of Thompson (1949), whose Latin text is, oddly, also the basis for M.'s new translation, already stand serviceably ready. Although M. perhaps means to midwife her interpretations by bringing over the poem into loosely iambic pentameter verse, and although it is certainly daunting to attempt to capture the tone of Prudentius' language in English, this new translation lacks (deliberately, one supposes) the gravity of the Latin hexameters. Further, the Hamartigenia seems quite remote from the (Neo-)Alexandrian game of poetic masks of the Augustans, and of Ovid in particular, while Prudentius grapples – or at least earnestly presents himself as grappling – with the twin facts of the corruption of the cosmos through the original sin as well as his own sinfulness. That struggle, ‘real’ or pose, is the animating feature of this poem in particular (and, perhaps, the entire Prudentian ‘Supergedicht’). If, for whatever reason, the author of a book dealing specifically with the Hamartigenia does not choose to give sin sufficient scope, the results are inevitably a little disappointing.

In fact, M.'s own statement in her introduction, concerning the fact that sin in the world is reflected in a fallen state of language (an excellent notion), is never adequately elucidated; there is included, however, an interpretative essay entitled ‘Falling into Language’. Sin's fallen state might have been better explored, in part at least, had M. pursued more closely Prudentius' own adaptations of Scripture (she is content to quote only the KJV and leaves wholly to the side the complicated question of Prudentius' relationship to the Vulgate). M.'s reading of the Hamartigenia against Milton, while hardly uninteresting, is not nearly as useful to understanding the poem as would have been a reading ‘against’ Scripture and Marcion, arguably the first relentlessly systematic abuser of Scripture. Even if she agrees largely with Gnilka that Marcion's heresy is a dead letter for Prudentius in the fourth century, the fact that that heretic was, and (more importantly) that Prudentius likely knew him to be a radical redactor of Biblical texts suggests that, as she herself acknowledges (e.g. on p. 76), Marcion and his heresy are central to the poem's design.

Because M. is justifiably much interested in the discovery of Augustan (and other) intertexts, the chapter on Ovid is particularly useful. While an allusion to Tristia cited on p. 190 seems merely plausible, however, that to Persius (p. 161) is much more convincing, in particular because it concerns vision, which is certainly one of the major themes of the poem and is discussed in some detail in M.'s third interpretative chapter (‘Seeking Hidden Truth’).

A nearly complete bibliography and good index complete the work which, taken on its own terms, is certainly useful.