In this richly detailed and painstakingly researched study, Angela Fritsen presents, by way of the Italian humanist commentaries on the Fasti, an account of Renaissance antiquarianism focused on the activity of the Roman Academy in the fifteenth century. The commentary of Paolo Marsi (first printed in 1482) has top billing, alongside that of Antonio Costanzi (1489), with those of Antonio Volsco and of Pomponio Leto himself (both preserved in student notes), amongst others, playing important supporting rôles. Taking commentaries as the starting point for investigations into broader issues surrounding a text's reception has proved to be a fruitful approach in several recent monographs; it is one that seems particularly appropriate here, since as F. points out, the Fasti is itself a commentary on the calendar.

In ch. 1, ‘Reading Ovid's Fasti’, F. deftly aligns her study with recent critical trends, taking up in particular Carole Newlands’ account of the Fasti as a ‘manipulation of time’, an idea that will inform the analysis of the Renaissance commentaries. Medieval precedents for the work of the Quattrocento humanists are here represented by the commentary of Arnulf of Orléans and the glosses of William of Orléans in the Bursarii Ovidianorum, giving a sense of how the Fasti was put to use in medieval education, and of the long tradition of using the Fasti as an antiquarian source. Here, and throughout, F. is rather stronger on detail than on the bigger picture: readers who want a broad-brush overview of the post-classical reception of the Fasti must look elsewhere.

Ch. 2 moves on to the ‘Fifteenth-Century Revival’ proper, taking in a wide range of evidence from manuscript glosses, student notes, printed commentaries, letters and dedications, and poems. F. presents here a thoroughly contextualized account of Marsi's commentary, its relation to his teaching at Rome, and his links to the circle of Pomponio Leto. The case for Costanzi's link to Roman humanism is less clear-cut, since his commentary comes out of his teaching in Fano, and is dedicated to Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. There is another, non-Roman, context for Marsi's work, too, since it was printed in Venice with the support of the Venetian nobleman Giorgio Cornaro: the implications of this are partially unfolded in the Afterword.

Ch. 3, ‘Commentary and Professional Identity’, considers Renaissance uses of commentary, taking account of the demands of patronage and print, and exploring the commentaries’ links to educational settings (64–73). That Marsi essentially presented his commentary as a pedagogical text (68–70) is interesting since it seems at odds with the way in which F. characterizes the commentary generally. Here the discussion of the features of Marsi's and Costanzi's commentaries would have benefited from wider comparison and contextualization, since they do represent recognizable types of Renaissance commentary.

Ch. 4, ‘Antiquarianism I’, is the main event: a detailed account, underpinned by very through research and synthesis of the Italian scholarship, of the place of the Fasti in the Roman Academy's antiquarian activity. There is important background on Flavio Biondo, of course a major influence on Leto and his circle, whose methods and style inform Marsi's commentary, and on Ciriaco d'Ancona (who taught Costanzi). There is lively and informative discussion of Renaissance antiquarianism's interweaving of textual and archaeological sources, of philological enquiry and empirical investigation (tours of ruins, topography, epigraphy), and the humanists’ persistent anxieties about the displacement of textual authority.

Ch. 5, ‘Antiquarianism II’, explores the humanists’ impulse to draw the customs, rituals and concepts they found in the Fasti into schemes of comparison with their own practices and beliefs, and sometimes to exert strenuous efforts to reconcile them. Marsi deployed convoluted arguments to establish the date of Rome's ‘birthday’ on 20 April, so that the Roman Academy's revived Palilia might be celebrated in closer alignment to the feast day of the Christian martyrs Victor, Fortunatus and Genesius. Costanzi wanted to make the Fasti endorse his own political agenda, connecting Augustan power with the power of the Roman papacy.

F.’s focus on the antiquarian interests of Leto and his circle enables a close and detailed engagement with the fifteenth-century commentaries. What the book does not offer is a comprehensive treatment of the Renaissance commentary tradition on the Fasti. Although the focus on Roman humanism is entirely justified, it does mean that developments outside of Rome are given little attention: for example, Poliziano's commentary, edited by Lo Monaco in 1991, is mentioned (42–3) but not included in the discussion. That the work of Marsi and Costanzi ‘ruled the field in the Renaissance’ (30) is undoubtedly true, but theirs were not the only notes to appear in printed editions of the Fasti: the northern European editions are almost entirely ignored, which tends to undermine any generalizations about the Renaissance commentaries. The list in Appendix I of ‘Renaissance Commentaries on Ovid's Fasti’ is not what the title suggests, but rather a check-list of the commentaries discussed in the course of the book.

The Latin is accurately transcribed and translated for the most part, but there are a few errors: some of the Latin is missing in the block quotation on 34; ‘paucis accipe’ (71) does not mean ‘take them … because they are brief’, but ‘hear in brief …’; the text on 98 is mistranscribed and so mistranslated (the distinction being made is between ‘noxa’ and ‘noxia’); and ‘ferenda’ (102) probably does not mean ‘made public’, but rather ‘put up with, tolerated’.