F.'s volume takes as its starting point that writing (as act, as vehicle, as content) and ‘its various forms play a significant, symbolic role in the work of authors and artists across genres’ in Roman literature and thought (p. 5). While acknowledging the relative dearth of material evidence for ancient Latin books (broadly conceived) for the period of 55 bc–ad 15 with which she is concerned, and while recognising that almost no trace survives of those who, besides the author, contributed to the literary composition, manufacture and dissemination of the works (viz. copyists, secretaries etc.), F. encourages us to seek ‘to imagine how the lives of all those dwelling in Rome were meaningfully embedded within a particular, evolving media landscape [in which] the symbolic and expressive qualities of writing, beyond their linguistic content, must have been much more widely legible’ than they are for today's readers of the same texts and objects (pp. 6–7). As F. sets out to demonstrate, indeed, the conceptualisation of the written object qua artefact as distinct from ‘the intellectual substance’ of a literary work permitted ‘authors to play with the [degrees of] concinnity between form and content in ways that [were] legible and meaningful to readers’, and which we can begin to discern in extant texts (p. 5).

‘The project of this book’, F. notes, ‘is to keep both kinds of evidence in mind while we are reading ancient writers: the literary and the material.’ The study contributes to a growing body of scholarly discourse on writing in the ancient Mediterranean and marks itself out by its concern with ‘(1) the Roman alphabet, (2) the material culture of Roman literate practice, and (3) the impact of writing media on broader intellectual, epistemological, artistic, and social constructions’ (p. 9). After an initial chapter on the relationship between the study of classical antiquity and of book history, F. turns to a consideration of Romans’ beliefs about the origins of writing and literacy in Italy. She suggests that their understanding of these beginnings is ‘fundamental to how we … envision our authors’ “sense of text”’, just as comprehension of ‘their myths of origin is a fundamental part of understanding Romans’ sense of cultural identity’ (p. 33). F. usefully gathers together a broad range of materials that show how the Romans’ conceptualisation of their alphabet evolved and how the act of alphabetic writing ‘became part of who they imagined themselves to be’ (p. 54), but it is not immediately apparent to this reader, at least, how this chapter contributes to the arguments set out in the remainder of the book regarding the ways in which writing (as substance, vehicle and act) influences the conceptualisation of thought and memory, and how authors’ and readers’ awareness of the materiality of texts impacts the encoding and descrying of meaning.

In a marvellous third chapter F. explores a trove of material and literary evidence for Roman education across the expanse of empire and elegantly discerns, through consideration of pedagogical practices, ‘the development of an alphabetic epistemology specific to the ancient Graeco-Roman world’ that, she plausibly suggests, strongly influenced Lucretius’ use of the combinations of letters to form words and texts as a figurative analogy for the interplay of atoms (p. 60). Manilius’ exploitation of the means of literate pedagogy as a model for his own mode of didaxis – and as a metapoetic gesture – is also discussed (pp. 71–5). Her fourth chapter considers the role of wax and wax tablets, and of writing more generally, in Greco-Roman articulations of the function of individual memory and explores the centrality of writerly metaphors in expressing ‘the art of memory’ and ‘theories of mind’ (p. 107).

The last two chapters explore the Roman poetry book and Ovid's engagement with inscriptions. After a discussion of the material evidence for the book surviving from the period with which her volume concerns itself (notably the Gallus fragment), F. turns to the intradiegetic literary representation of Catullus’, Virgil's and Horace's works as (idealised) presentation copies used, in part, to negotiate the poets’ relationships with friends and patrons (including the princeps). In treating Catullus 1, F. usefully draws attention to the ways in which concern with the physical libellus – in substance and appearance – points to the cognitive tension that results from ‘an emerging dynamic between the author, his works, and his different readers in relation to specific copies of the material text’ (p. 116): only one (idealised?) reader will have access to the physical copy described by Catullus (whether real or not) and other readers will recognise this. We should note that such tensions are likely to have been more pointed in, say, Ovid's descriptions of his books of poetry in Tr. 1.1 and 3.1, where it is difficult to imagine that the papyrus rolls on which the texts were written were, in fact, as tattered as their metaliterary descriptions suggest. Lygdamus 1 (= [Tib.] 3.1) and Martial 3.2 could also usefully be considered in this vein. A striking omission in this context (and from the book as a whole) are the Heroides. The many authorial, editorial and readerly hands through which these Ovidian poems purport to pass and the interpretative tensions and challenges that result have been set out by J. Farrell (‘Reading and Writing the Heroides’, HSPh 98 [1998], 307–38). Here, it is worth drawing attention to Ovid's interest in the materiality of the texts, which bear the marks of the heroines’ sadness (e.g. the tear-created liturae of Briseis’ letter at 3.3 [also claiming, in Latin, to be written in Greek] or the tremulous hand of Ariadne at 10.140): none of these physical signs are visible, of course, to an extradiegetic reader.

The chapter on Ovid's engagement with the epigraphic habit of Augustan Rome considers the physical representation of the poet's libelli in Tr. 1.1 and 3.1 and the imagined confrontation between the poet's papyrus book with the daunting titulus that explains the reason for Augustus being awarded the corona ciuica. F. suggests that Ovid exploits this encounter of stone with papyrus to move from a concern ‘only [with] books and bodies’ to the development of ‘a specifically epigraphic sensibility, vying in earnest with Augustus in terms of their epigraphic legacy and, only now, striving to control his own durably inscribed text: his epitaph’ (p. 152). This is an egregious assertion. The poet of the Tristia was already the poet of the Fasti and would go on, in the course of his relegation, to revisit that epigraphical work par excellence. If Ovid vies with Augustus for an epigraphic legacy in any of his works, it is surely in his calendrical poem, in which he challenges and interrogates the emperor's efforts at manipulating concepts of temporality and at insinuating members of the domus Augusta into the inscriptional record. Ovid's intermedial calendar receives almost no mention in F.'s book.

I should note that I do not mean to diminish the importance of the engagement with materiality in the Tristia to which F. draws attention; indeed, Ovid's claim in Tr. 3.3 that his libelli will provide him with a greater memorial than the inscription he claims to want makes an important point about the power of poetry to immortalise alongside that of the epigraphic habit, which was rife in Rome and to which Ovid points, as F. shows, in Tr. 3.1. That being said, this is not the first time that Ovid has used epigraphic gestures in his work, and the omission of discussion of the idiosyncratic use of (mostly epitaphic) inscriptions by all of the elegists and of the concern with materiality that this intermediality signals is conspicuous. Important discussions of elegiac engagement with inscriptionality not cited include those of M. Dinter, L. Houghton and A. Bettenworth.

This is an engagingly written and thought-provoking volume that usefully brings together a wide range of interesting literary and physical material on specific topics, even if it is a little uneven and there are a handful of surprising omissions.