K. has arguably done more than anyone else over the last 30 years to shape the ways in which Virgil's Nachleben, especially during the early modern period, has been studied. In addition to his bibliographical work on editions and translations of the poet's corpus, K.'s three monographs on the subject (In Praise of Aeneas [1989], Virgil and the Myth of Venice [1999] and The Other Virgil [2007]) remain a fundamental point of reference for anyone interested in the afterlife of T.S. Eliot's ‘classic of all Europe’ in the literary and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy and beyond. A distinctive feature of K.'s approach to the reception of Virgil during this period has been his concentration on the physical form in which the ancient poet's texts were encountered by his later readers, and a keen attention to marginalia, typeface and illustrations is visible in a number of the essays collected in K.'s The Virgilian Tradition (2007). These concerns take centre stage in the present volume, which brings together the results of K.'s meditations on the subject over almost four decades (p. vii). In view of this long period of gestation, and of the vast horizons evoked by the title and subtitle, the resulting treatise turns out to be a curiously slim volume; but K.'s latest foray none the less makes a solid contribution to scholarship, and offers a concise and lucid restatement of his views on the importance of integrating analysis of reading practices, publication history and mise-en-page into the study of later interactions with classical literature.
K.'s clarion call for consideration of the material aspects of Virgilian reception alongside investigation of its textual dimensions sounds throughout: ‘The first fundamental premise of this book is that both form and content matter, and that both must be described accurately and analysed to produce a compelling interpretation. In other words, Virgil's poetry is not just a disembodied text, but a series of textual incarnations in a variety of physical forms. Therefore, to understand how this poetry was received through the ages, we have to take account of those physical forms as well as the texts they carry’ (p. 5); ‘we need the whole book – words and pictures, binding and type font, margins both blank and annotated – to track the reception of Virgil's poetry through the ages’ (p. 151). The message is salutary (if scarcely surprising to those acquainted with K.'s previous work), and on a theoretical level I am not sure that anyone would seriously dispute K.'s central contention, although in some cases scrutiny of the production, layout and usage of Virgilian editions is likely to prove more informative and rewarding than in others (as K. would presumably be the first to admit). It might be expected that anyone seeking to demonstrate such a proposition from the full range of past engagements with the Virgilian corpus would be faced with an embarras de richesses; so how does K. set about justifying his materialist manifesto?
Following a methodological introduction, the enquiry proceeds in roughly chronological order according to media, with one chapter on manuscripts, two on print (the first devoted to text, the second to illustrations) and one on computers. In the first of these, K. observes that ‘if we want to understand the reception of Virgil's poetry during the long Middle Ages, the material evidence encourages us to explore the complexities of its relationship to Christianity’ (p. 48). This assertion is borne out by the discussion of illuminated manuscripts on pp. 45–8, and to some extent by the survey of schoolroom glossing later in the chapter; but the intervening rehearsal of some very familiar material on Christian interpretations of the fourth Eclogue is less closely tied to the material incarnations in which Virgil's text was experienced by his medieval readers. In the analysis of printed editions, the perusal of the poet's works for maxims and figures of speech is insistently identified as ‘a distinctively Renaissance way of reading Virgil’ (p. 90; cf. p. 106) – but the practice of highlighting and culling sententiae was well established long before the invention of the press (as K. acknowledges in his remarks on anthologies and florilegia on p. 106), and does not presuppose the medium of printing. Arguably the most effective vindication of K.'s thesis is offered by the section on illustrated editions, translations and travesties of the Aeneid; it is also the only part of the book to have been published previously (twice, in fact, since it has also been reprinted in K.'s The Virgilian Tradition).
The major departure from K.'s earlier work, and the most innovative feature of the present study, is the final chapter on Virgil in the age of the computer. K. displays due caution about advancing any large-scale hypotheses as to what Virgil's cultural footprint will look like in the new digital media (‘we are only beginning to grasp how the computer is transforming textuality’, p. 157; ‘It is impossible to predict now where all this will end’, p. 167), but even the prediction he does allow himself is open to question. For K., ‘it is more likely, I think, that as the generation of readers whose entire life experience has been formed in a digital environment, where everyone is equal and authority is suspect, comes of age, the so-called “pessimistic” reading [of the Aeneid] will continue to gain ground’ (p. 165). If the character of the digital age is as K. has defined it, it is surely to be expected that the consequence for Virgilian interpretation would be not the advance of one of two competing readings at the expense of the other, but rather a greater plurality of readings or – perhaps more likely, given the apparently inevitable tendency of any online discussion – a greater polarisation of opinion.
‘Authorial negligence, errors in composition, and the inattentiveness of proofreaders all play their role in making a book’ (p. 9), and K.'s own book is no exception. Most of the blemishes here are relatively minor, and several can be attributed to the effects of an overactive spellchecker on languages other than English, but occasionally there is a risk of misunderstanding. On p. 22, Boccaccio's dates are assigned to Petrarch (whose dates are given correctly on p. 34), and the dates of Coluccio Salutati and of the French polemicist Leplat are wrong on p. 58 and p. 138 respectively; on p. 53, ‘Virgil's works’ should read ‘Jerome's works’, and on p. 54 ‘Augustine had preserved’ should read ‘Virgil had preserved’. On p. 59, ‘Apostolorum principis Petri’ surely suggests ‘of Peter, prince of the Apostles’ rather than ‘the apostles of Peter, their leader’, and in the misquotation from Cicero, Cat. 1.19 in the passage of Servius quoted on p. 66, Laecam should be taken with Marcum, not with te as translated. It is a little strange to find a reference to an edition dated 1476 by Antonio Miscomini ‘active 1481–96’ (p. 87), and labor omnia vincit (p. 171) is a misquotation of Georgics 1.145, although the modification is well attested in the later tradition. Readers will look in vain for an article on Proba by R. Green in the Classical Journal (pp. 73 n. 80, 180); it is in the Classical Quarterly. On a stylistic level, repetition of the mantra ‘References to X will be placed in the text’ in multiple consecutive footnotes seems unnecessarily pedestrian.
None of this seriously detracts, however, from the overall value of K.'s efforts to grasp the ever-shifting contours of his protean subject (though I cannot help feeling that the emphasis on the straw man of ‘textual stability’ is slightly overplayed: see pp. 10, 21, 40–1, 79, 115, 123, 156, 170), or from the validity of his exhortation to take account of the material context of engagements with the poet's words. It might be argued that, in illuminating the polymorphous character of Virgil's post-classical career, K. has not only performed a service to students of Virgilian reception, but has also contributed in some measure to the appreciation of the poems that lie at the heart of his study; for consideration of the almost infinite variety of responses inspired by Virgil's poetry among so many different readers in so many different times and places ultimately brings us back to that poetry itself, in all its magnificent multiformity.
