Priscillian of Avila is known mainly as a Spanish heretic suspected of Manichaeism (among other doctrinal and moral deviations) and eventually executed c. 385 under the Roman emperor Maximus on charges of sorcery. Since 1889, when Georg Schepps published an edition of eleven tractates discovered in a fifth–sixth-century manuscript in the university library in Würzburg (CSEL xviii), scholars have had direct access to works authored by Priscillian and/or his close associates. Historians have mined these for data relevant to the reconstruction of the events of Priscillian's life in their social, cultural and political context, but the broader content and literary character of the Priscillianist writings have received relatively little attention. Moreover, until very recently the only complete and reliable modern translation of the tractates was in Dutch (A. B. J. M. Goosen, Achtergronden van Priscillianus' christelijke ascese, Nijmegen 1976, ii. 270–368). Marco Conti's new edition of the Priscillianist works, with introduction, commentary and English translation, is thus to be greatly celebrated.

The volume includes not only the Würzburg tractates but also the Canons on the letters of the Apostle Paul, a brief citation of a letter of Priscillian from Orosius' Commonitorium de errore Priscillianistarum et Origenistarum, an anonymous tractate On the Trinity of the Catholic faith, and the gospel introductions known as Prologues of the Monarchians. Prior to Schepps's discovery, the Pauline canons and the fragment from Orosius were the only known surviving works of Priscillian. Conti considers these two works and the eleven Würzburg tractates ‘genuine’ but not necessarily all authored by Priscillian himself: in his opinion, Tractates iv–x, a set of Lenten homilies, were likely written by Priscillian's followers sometime between 380 and 430, yet their affinities with the rest of the ‘genuine’ corpus are strong (pp. 15–17). On the Trinity and the gospel prologues, which others have attributed to Priscillian, Conti considers ‘spurious,’ by which he means ‘Priscillianist’ but more distant from the style and thought of the Würzburg tractates and thus presumably of Priscillian himself (pp. 20–1). The question of what makes a text more or less ‘Priscillianist’ appears to be left somewhat open.

In his preface, Conti laments that ‘the large majority’ of scholarship on Priscillian published since the discovery of the Würzburg tractates ‘is focused on his historical position as the founder of the Priscillianist heresy, and the consequent councils and trials which were held against him, his followers, and his ideas’, a tendency that ‘has inevitably caused Priscillian the writer to remain hidden behind the events of his life’. He calls for ‘a more unbiased and comprehensive approach’ that might accord more attention to ‘his literary role as an original Latin writer with his style, models, and influences’ (pp. v–vi). None the less, his introduction provides a helpful and generally balanced framing of the life and death of Priscillian (pp. 1–5) and also of the scholarship that has focused on such historical, rather than philological, issues (pp. 5–12), in addition to descriptions of the (genuine and spurious) works of Priscillian (pp. 12–21), of Priscillian's writing style (pp. 21–5), and of the manuscript tradition and prior editions (pp. 25–9). The polemic hinted at in the preface does, however, reemerge at the end of his account of the history of scholarship: ‘What seems unacceptable to me is the attempt on the part of scholars to give a definitive interpretation of Priscillian through a single viewpoint.’ Here Conti apparently has in mind ‘a critical trend that exclusively sees Priscillian as a perfectly orthodox thinker who was victimized by ecclesiastical intolerance’, a position that, he fears, reduces Priscillianism ‘to a merely social movement of opposition to ecclesiastical power’ (p. 9). Conti does not specify his targets, and indeed his critique is perplexing in its context, since he also notes that the scholarly debates regarding whether Priscillian is orthodox or heretical for the most part subside by the mid-1930s, giving way to ‘different critical trends that go beyond the problem of Priscillian's doctrinal position and place him within either a precise political, social, and religious context or a particular historical milieu’ (p. 8); in other words, to argue for Priscillian's orthodoxy and to reduce his brand of Christianity to a ‘mere’ social movement are, by Conti's own account, different moves reflecting different intellectual moments. One begins to suspect that the insistence on a turn to ‘Priscillian's actual writings’ (p. 9) is, for Conti, linked with insistence on Priscillian's actual heterodoxy. What Conti does not seem to acknowledge is that at least some of the scholarship that he appears to be criticising challenges the validity, on historical grounds, of stable or essential categories of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. To the extent that Priscillian's writings can be shown to be ‘heterodox’ or even ‘idiosyncratic’ (p. 1), this is likely to be a clarity achieved with hindsight and based on criteria external to the writings themselves: it is the eventual winners of theological controversies who come to set the standards of what is orthodox or normal; Priscillian was passionately convinced of his own orthodoxy, but his was not ultimately the winning view. Certain ‘critical trends’ in social history may thus pave the way for ‘a more unbiased and comprehensive approach’ to Priscillian the writer.

Philology is finally the standard by which Conti's contribution should be judged. In providing translations as well as commentary in which he engages in transparent dialogue with other scholars' interpretive choices, Marco Conti has made an enormous contribution to the study of Priscillian and thus also to the broader study of late ancient Latin Christian literature. As those of us who have worked closely with these texts are acutely aware, they resist easy translation. Correspondingly, most translations will not be easy to read, and there will always be room for debate. The fact that the Latin text conveniently faces the English allows the reader to come to her own conclusions, in dialogue with Conti's rendering.