This fascinating book provides a readable and well-presented edition of the whole of one previously lost seventeenth-century play, the Aulularia (1629) of Joannes Burmeister, and the fragments of another of Burmeister's ‘inversions’ of Plautus, the Mater-Virgo (1621, based on Plautus’ Amphitryo). The clear, scholarly and substantial introduction to Burmeister's work, Latin style and broader intellectual context (1–91) offers a much wider ranging essay than the book's title might suggest. Michael Fontaine orients his reader within several areas of neo-Latin literature — such as Isidorean prose style, the rôle of puns and word-play, and the important literary concept of parodia — which, though now recondite features whose rôle will be unfamiliar to the great majority of scholars of Latin literature and early modern literature alike, all represent very significant and widespread aspects of early modern Latinity. For this reason, the introduction is well worth reading by anyone with an interest in neo-Latin poetics more generally, as well as by those with a particular interest either in Burmeister or in the reception of Plautus.

Burmeister's ‘inversions’ are related both to the cento and the parodia. A cento pieces together phrases and lines drawn from an authoritative ancient author, most often Virgil, in order to create a new and often explicitly Christian narrative; the best known examples, by Ausonius and Proba, date from Late Antiquity, but such poems were frequently produced in Latin, and sometimes in Greek, in Renaissance and early modern Europe. A parodia, on the other hand, retains the structural and as far as possible the syntactical integrity of the source text, which is typically a short poem, such as one of Horace's Odes: in this case, the author of the parodia seeks to produce a poem with a new meaning or one which is applicable to a new context (such as a contemporary political event) while altering as little as possible of the original text. There may be an implied contrast or even conflict between the occasion of the original poem and that of the parodia — for instance an Horatian ode of celebration transformed into a lament for the death of a prominent contemporary.

Burmeister's versions of Plautus, for which F. uses Burmeister's own term ‘inversions’, are close to the parodia form, in that they retain as much as possible of Plautus’ original text in order to tell a biblical story: the Aulularia, for instance, reworks Plautus’ tale of the Greek miser Euclio to tell the story of Achan and Rahab, from the book of Joshua; the Mater-Virgo, attested only in fragments, adapts the nativity of Hercules (Plautus, Amphitryo) to the nativity of Christ. F. also discusses two additional ‘inversions’ of Plautus’ Casina and Asinaria, which are attested but not preserved, and offers an overview of Burmeister's career and publications as a whole. Although modestly presented, this survey alone represents a great deal of original research.

F.’s readable English translation is presented in parallel text format with an edition of the Latin, accompanied by an apparatus criticus as well as fairly sparing notes largely confined to offering necessary background information or pointing out the most significant examples of puns and other word-play. The notes do not attempt to track in detail the relationship between Burmeister's text and his model in Plautus, but F. explicates this relationship clearly in the introduction, with several useful examples; moreover he draws attention to the sophistication of this procedure, in which, where a word is altered, the new word often puns upon or evokes the original word in some way (as for example by replacing bello with bellum). Burmeister's fondness for word-play, and especially for puns is, as F. demonstrates, both itself indebted to Plautus and also typical of Latin literature of the period throughout Northern Europe. F. also explains the ways in which Burmeister's ‘inversion’ of Plautus goes beyond the parodia, because the much grander scale of these plays (compared to the short poem typical of parodia) allows for plot and character development which both respond to and implicitly comment upon the original they transform.

F.’s enthusiasm for his subject is engaging, if sometimes slightly long-winded (a few points are repeated more than once); perhaps most of all this modestly presented volume, which makes no explicit claim to wider significance, illustrates how much work there is to be done in this field theoretically as well as in the editing and interpretation of individual texts. The cento, parodia and ‘inversion’ are plainly closely related phenomena; and anyone who has read widely in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century print and manuscript sources will be aware that literary modes of this kind are ubiquitous. Such poetry — and especially its popularity and devotional significance — poses a real challenge to our existing categories of analysis: the sophisticated models of allusion and intertextuality which have proved so fruitful in the study of Latin literature falter in the face of this kind of wholescale re-appropriation, and the study of classical ‘reception’ has so far barely attempted to meet the challenge raised by the intense (and at time intensely alien) Latinity of early modern Europe. Classicists may prefer to ignore works like Burmeister's Aulularia and Mater-Virgo; but no account of seventeenth-century aesthetics and poetics can afford to do so.