There is a strong case for making a new edition of Priscian's eighteen-book Ars grammatica. The last edition was published in 1855–59 by M. Hertz under the title Institutiones grammaticae. Since that date, a ninth-century witness of what is possibly an independent, south-Italian branch of the text's tradition has been discovered in the Vatican library and various other codices of Priscian's grammar previously believed to date from the tenth century have been assigned to the ninth. In addition, in the space of more than 150 years, scholars have proposed various amendments to the text which need to be discussed. Nevertheless, editing Priscian remains intimidating because it is a challenge to do better than the previous editor: Hertz worked for fifteen years on his edition; he benefited from the help of a whole network of German scholars across Europe and even some form of international cooperation; he himself went through the libraries of the German lands and France to see and carefully select the manuscripts he would use. The major achievements of his edition are the division of the textual tradition into two branches, a continental (Carolingian) one and an Irish one, and the editing of Priscian's numerous Greek quotations from the manuscript witnesses only, thus putting an end to the habit of supplementing the manuscripts’ lacunae with Greek quotations the editor thought Priscian should have elected. In these conditions, it is no wonder that the new edition, already projected in Italy in the late 1970s, has languished for so long. It appears now to have been resolutely revived by R.

R. plans (Prisciani Ars, pp. v and vii) to oversee a commented edition of the eighteen books of Priscian's Ars grammatica, of which she would be, or so it seems, the general editor, and colleagues and students would be in charge of the commentary. To date, this project has produced two books, here under review, centred around the final part of Book 18: a collective volume of preliminary studies on the Greek quotations (2014) and the edition itself (2015); the corresponding commentary is scheduled for the near future. As anyone not familiar with Priscian's Ars grammatica probably needs to be reminded, Book 18, the last of the grammatical treatise, can be roughly divided into two parts, one dealing with the syntax of inflected nouns and verbs, the other one a kind of bilingual lexicon illustrated with quotations from classical writers, both Greek and Latin.

The first volume, Greco antico nell'Occidente carolingio, is the proceedings of a workshop held at Rome to gather all the scholars who accepted to research the Greek of the final part of Book 18 for R.’s project. B. Rochette was invited to give a general introductory speech, the redacted version of which is the only essay of general scope in an otherwise tightly focused collection. The papers are parsed under four headings: ‘il contesto della tradizione lessicografica greco-latina’, ‘struttura e caratteristiche del lessico sintattico di Prisciano’, ‘citazioni da singoli autori o gruppi di autori nella fonte di Prisciano’ and ‘la tradizione manoscritta e a stampa del lessico sinttatico di Prisciano’.

The papers of the first two groups deal with the relations between Priscian's and other lexica and contribute greatly to emendations and the apparatus of loci paralleli for the edition. Both G. Ucciardello and S. Valente track similarities to Priscian in Greek lexica of the Imperial and Byzantine eras and both point to interesting, if sometimes overlapping, parallels. R. Ferri and E. Spangenberg Yanes scrutinise, from different viewpoints, the most fundamental character of Priscian's lexicon, namely its bilingualism. In his multifaceted and insightful essay, Ferri illuminates Priscian's method through confrontation with the Latin grammarians’ poetic figure of Hellenism and the syntactic entries of the Etymologicum Symeonis. Meanwhile, Spangenberg Yanes provides a fine study of the way translations and broader equivalences contribute to the making of the bilingual lemmata. E. Mazzotti closes the section with a paper on the recurring Greek quotations, i.e. those that appear both in the lexicon and in the more theoretical part of the grammar.

Then comes a series of studies on the lexicon as an indirect witness to the Greek classics. The fragments of Greek comedy, Plato, Isocrates and the historians are studied by M. Sonnino, M. Menchelli, M. Fassino and A. Visconti, respectively. Meanwhile, there is no study on the quotations from the Homeric poems, Aristophanes, tragedy, the minor Socratics and other Attic orators. These essays come to the expected conclusion that Priscian, pre-dating the formation of medieval traditions, does not fit into the stemma of the writers’ direct traditions when there is one. All in all, Priscian appears to be rather accurate in his quotations, but this fact seldom translates into an authoritative reading against the direct tradition. The asides are more interesting and original: Menchelli finds a tight correspondence between Priscian and one scholion on Plato's Apology; Fassino puts forward a sophisticated and convincing interpretation of the quotation from Isocrates’ Aeginetic in GL 3, 325.9–12.

The material side of the text's transmission is dealt with in four essays and two ‘schede di manoscritti’. The division of the essays is chronological. The first one, by D. Bianconi, deals with the possible outlook of the original copy, made in the sixth century in Constantinople. The following contributions deal with the preserved testimonies to the last part of Book 18, with R. handling the Carolingian manuscripts, M. those of the eleventh–twelfth centuries and D. Baldi the printed editions up to the 1527 Aldina. Their conclusions confirm the general dynamics of the tradition as delineated by the previous editors: the Greek parts of the lexicon are still copied in the ninth century, albeit in a limited number of manuscripts; some highly corrupted fragments of it survive occasionally in eleventh–twelfth-century codices; then, we should assume that all the lexicon's Greek had been lost in the later Middle Ages, since the first printed editions fill its place with their own choice of Greek quotations; eventually, the successors of Aldus Manutius began the long and tedious work of retrieving Priscian's choice of Greek quotations from (presumably) Carolingian manuscripts. The two sets of manuscript descriptions, by S. Ammirati and C. Ruzzier, offer rather minute descriptions of the ninth and ninth–tenth books of the Ars studied by R., with a focus on the description of scripts and general appearance of the text in each codex.

Finally, in an 80-page appendix, R. gathers all the 71 otherwise unattested or fragmentarily attested quotations from the lexicon, accompanied with a collation from the manuscripts she and M. studied. This appendix, she claims, is intended for the use of editors of Attic fragments, but it serves as well the purpose of giving the reader a hint of the textual tradition and running a trial for the edition. Despite its narrow focus, the volume lacks a conclusion (there was a concluding speech to the workshop by M. De Nonno, but it did not make its way into the proceedings) as well as any kind of index.

The edition, as hinted above, makes good use of the results of the workshop. The introduction begins with some general observations on Priscian, his grammar and the putative history of its reception. Following the lead of M. Passalacqua in her edition of Priscian's opera minora, the editor retains only the ninth- and tenth-century manuscripts (in spite of M.’s claims about the relevance of some tenth–eleventh-century testimonies for establishing the text). Nineteen of them are used, for they transcribe all or part of the lexicon. Their description occupies 54 pages, since it covers all the peculiarities of their text (lacunae, lectiones singulares, confusions of Greek letters). R. then proceeds to the reconstruction of the history of the text stricto sensu. She argues first for a stemma, drawn on p. cxvi, an earlier version of which was published in the 2014 book. She supposes a subarchetype α, from which all the extant manuscripts of the lexicon derive, including L, the only representative of the so-called ‘recensio scottica’ for this part of the text. This codex α was, in her view, written in a minuscule script for the Latin part, in a more or less fossilised uncial for the Greek part, by a copyist who was already ignorant of Greek. The method of the present edition rests on the premise that the Greek text, being copied blindly by scribes who did not understand it, could give a clue to the textual tradition; thus, the stemma is, in great part, built on errors of Greek, most of them uncial faults (confusion of letters of similar shapes, divisions or fusions of letters), of a kind well attested in Greek texts as well. Secondly, R. deals with variations of some length (from one complete lemma to one noun phrase) in the text, which do not square into her stemma. Having pronounced upon the genuineness on mostly internal criteria (whatever includes Greek is genuine; repetition of Latin quotations used elsewhere by Priscian can be later additions), she purports to make sense of them by a combination of early (pre-archetypal) contamination and marginal transmission of a mix of Priscian's second thoughts and his readers’ insights. After a very quick overview of the history of the edition of the last part of Priscian's Ars, and the statement of the principles of the edition, there follows the edited text (pp. 7–115).

R. does not provide a list of departures from the previous edition. The major innovations are, if I am not mistaken, three integrations into the text and one suppression – this last one including a possible fragment of Accius, and thus likely to trigger some criticism. In addition, there are returns to the text of the archetype and conjectures based on published literature, in particular from R.’s own articles and Greco antico nell'Occidente carolingio. It is not easy, from the resulting text, to assess R.’s principles regarding textual emendation. She prints a highly probable but rather bold emendation by Ferri at GL 3, 364.17 (101.9 R.); she completes a Homeric quotation in a very traditional, pre-Hertz, way at 287.12 (16.14). Meanwhile, Bücheler's, and even Hertz's, quite obvious emendations to 356.13 (92.3) are left in the apparatus; at 339.11 (74.1), R. puts a crux back into the text whereas Hertz had made sense of the quotation's departure from its source in a plausible way. In matters of modernised presentation, R. prints the text on the basis of one paragraph per bilingual lemma, and she separates the apparatus criticus from the apparatus of references and loci paralleli. The progress, relative to the previous edition, lies there, that is in the further identification of parallels and the widening of the manuscript basis. The text itself appears more clearly, but it has not changed much. Contrary to the volume of proceedings, the edition offers a plethora of indexes: not only the obvious index of quotations, but one for the lemmata in the order of the text, one for the lemmata in alphabetical order and one for Latin terms.

By and large, the volume of proceedings is a feast of erudition, always informed and informative. Occasionally, some of the authors stumble into the failures most associated with that quality, over-interpretation and hair-splitting, by, for instance, calculating statistics in percentage points on 28 quotations from Isocrates or writing a full, highly learned paper on the (still unsubstantiated) hypothesis that Priscian's Ars grammatica could have been written in the B-R uncial script. These, nevertheless, remain minor faults. The book exhibits an outstanding sense of collective work and purpose, by the standards of any collection of individual essays. The only real oddity lies in its title: none of the articles, not even the one written by R. about ninth–tenth-century manuscripts, engages seriously with the ‘Carolingian West’ and its attitudes to ancient Greek; so why mention it in the title?

Meanwhile, the edition warrants a more nuanced judgement. There are doubtlessly positive sides: the presentation of the text makes it readable at first sight, contrary to that of the Grammatici Latini, which is difficult to go through; R. makes a good case for a Western archetype by pointing to shared confusions between Greek majuscule and Latin minuscule letter shapes (p. xxxvii). On the other hand, the description of the manuscripts is divided between the proceedings and the edition proper and, in a general way, the edition appears almost as an appendix to the proceedings, constantly sending the reader back to it for further information and bibliography. Speaking of bibliography, a general point, should be made, namely that the peer-reviewed scholarly material published online, on institutional websites, with an author's name is, just like any other scholarly publication, to be looked for, engaged with (refuted, if needed) and credited. In particular, the new online manuscript notices of the BNF are scholarly work, they are informative, were published before both books under review, and they are not anonymous; so they should be credited under the name of their author. Still, the most potentially misleading part of this edition is its apparatus criticus. R. chose to include in it neither the unique readings of each manuscript, which are listed under the edition's description of manuscripts, nor the unique readings of each manuscript family, meaning the unique readings of the first level of reconstructed codices. This last part is problematic on two counts. First, the apparatus is thus limited to the readings of the archetype α, highlighting the conjectural interventions of the editor, which is fine, the readings of γ, occasional groupings of families, both all right, and the rather numerous readings that run against the stemma, which is unfortunate. Second, the reader cannot deduce the reading of a particular manuscript, or group of manuscripts, from the apparatus criticus, but should systematically check both the description of manuscripts for singular readings and lacunae, the last ones quite common (in fact, no part of the edited text is transmitted by all the manuscripts), and the stemmatic reconstruction, for family readings. I am not sure that a reader unfamiliar with that particular tradition could use the edition properly. In short, R. should be praised for putting forward her proposals after more than 150 years without a new edition of Priscian's Ars grammatica. Now, the partial edition she has produced remains a book for the specialist rather than a reference for all classicists.