This detailed, dense volume promises a history of linguistic ideas, as gleaned from early Christian written sources of many genres, within three areas: language history, language diversity, and language description. The subject is appealing, important, and understudied. First the history of linguistics is not a subject which is frequently addressed, and when it is, it is most often an account written by modernists hurrying to find the watershed of nineteenth-century scientific methods and all the important and interesting developments since then. The state of the field is, in truth, more than a little like that of Anglo-American analytic philosophers, for whom the history of philosophy offers some few propositions for analysis and fewer attempts at solutions. Denecker's work differs by being a history of linguistic thought (to quibble: this is its stated approach; in execution, the reader gets more what the title proposes—an inventory of ideas about language). Again, the subject is particularly important because of the challenge the new Christian movement posed to the inherited, robust system of ancient language science—an anachronistic term I would use for the combined weight and impulses of the ancient disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, and (to a lesser degree) hermeneutics and anthropology. Christianity brought a triple challenge in the form of scripture, Babel, and Hebrew (more minor challenges from xenolalia and spiritual language). Denecker approaches the triple sections (history, diversity, description) by cataloging the pertinent comments of early Christian writers. As he notes, these attitudes are more often than not embedded in the authors’ works; they are often incidental comments in a sermon or even a poem. A strength of this book is the clarity of its divisions and of its exposition. (The table of contents is longer than this review; the indices full and useful.)

Denecker intends to liberate understanding of all these issues from the traditional overreliance on Augustine and, to a lesser extent, Jerome. Nonetheless, he offers a great deal of cogent, concise exposition of Augustine on language. His exposition of Filastrius (e.g., on page 65 Filastirus may mean that before Babel there were many languages, and thanks to caelestis scientia, human beings had multilingual translation abilities) and discussion of Ambrosiaster lead to an illuminating discussion of Augustine's position (78–81).

Denecker's approach is often to explicate the contrastive remarks of Jerome and Augustine (both of whom were reacting to the evident difference of Hebrew or of Greek from their native Latin). Far from idealizing the trilingual philologue Jerome, Denecker gives proper credit to his scriptural philology while acknowledging two unmodern concerns: that variety of language does not imply variety of viewpoint (diversity is not a virtue, and this observation holds generally for the corpus of writers) and that Jerome's “expertise” in Hebrew and his translation of this into Latin are meant for a polemical purpose—to confound the Jews and undermine their interpretations.

Generally, Denecker is sensitive and insightful about the extension of the linguistic horizon that came with Christianity. Often the new directions followed polemical paths. The Christian desire to emphasize the providential nature of language origins clashed with Epicurean theory. It also clashed with a sense of the futility of language. Denecker stresses the unnameability of God; one might add a certain antirhetorical view of the power of language to ensure the public good or indeed the purpose or efficacy of highly wrought language. While Denecker attends to the trope of modestia in many Christian authors’ accounts of their own style, more work is certainly left to be done on the contradictory impulses that drove early Christians to assert the limits of human language as at the same time they were developing a new literature.

Denecker's work makes substantial, general observations (e.g., that the identification of primeval language with Hebrew was not universal [61]). The state of the scholarship on the various issues is enumerated (even when the prior work was not particularly pertinent or insightful). The corpus is inventoried. The summaries at the end of each chapter are concise and useful. This is both a well-structured thematic collection and analysis of ideas of language and a convenient and comprehensive reference work (in effect, an index to sources and bibliography).

Denecker's own brief conclusions invite more scholarship. His announcement of what research should now turn to mostly concerns the reception of the ideas and figures he has just canvased (as if one were to begin with Isidore and soldier on). I think this valuable, synthetic achievement invites reconsideration of Varro's influence in later antiquity generally and in the influence (at times mutual) of Greek authors and thinking on the later Roman tradition.