In an elegy on the miserable condition of the teachers in Paris, the Neo-Latin poet George Buchanan (1506–1582) paints a picture of a particularly threatening Renaissance schoolmaster. Sweeping into the classroom with his cloak streaming behind him, Buchanan's teacher carries his devices of torture with him: ‘His right hand is armed against the students with a cruel whip; his left holds the work of weighty Virgil’ (‘Dextera crudeli in pueros armata flagello est: | Laeva tenet magni forte Maronis opus’). The couplet captures the teacher at his most frightful, but its full terror is only apparent to someone who has looked at the material forms of early modern Virgil. Magni … Maronis may mean ‘of great Virgil’, but it also denotes the bulk of the folio editions that were often used in Renaissance schoolrooms. In this couplet it is hard to know whether the whip or the book is the more physically threatening object. It is the implications of the materiality of Virgil's works, and often their lives in the schoolrooms, that Craig Kallendorf sets out to study in his latest book, The Protean Virgil, which tells the story of the material forms that Virgil's poetry has taken over the past two thousand years. Tracing the incarnations of Virgilian texts from the moment they were drafted on wax tablets, through their lives in papyrus rolls, parchment codices, printed books and finally computers, K. considers how material history can contribute to our understanding of the radically different ways in which Virgil has been read.

The first chapter of The Protean Virgil sets out the central argument of the book. Classical scholars still tend to rely upon ideas of intertextuality that assume a disembodied and immutable text. In contrast, K. argues that material history can help us break down the grand narratives of textual and hermeneutic stability. The following four chapters then chart ways in which Virgil has been read from the Middle Ages to the present day. K. sees all interpretations (including our own) as links in a hermeneutic chain, but he also argues that ‘it is not true that every past interpretation links on to the chain that reaches us’ (171). Accordingly, he wishes to draw out approaches to Virgil that seem ‘strange and wonderful in their very otherness’ (172).

If there is a leitmotif that runs through the book, it is the reception of Virgil in education. Schools were responsible for the majority of copies that have survived (59–60, 88). In ch. 2, K. explores some of the 750 surviving manuscripts of Virgil from the Middle Ages, when Virgil's rôle in church-organized education led to editions suited to Christian pedagogical needs. In chs 3 and 4, the focus turns to printed books. From 1469 to 1700 there were over two thousand printed editions of Virgil. In the Renaissance alone there were roughly 1,781,250 copies in circulation (83–4). These figures would be daunting to most, but K.’s scholarship is built on decades of research cataloguing these editions, which has led to his invaluable Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil (2012). The Protean Virgil is in many ways an interpretive companion to the bibliography. In ch. 3, K. focuses on how students in the Renaissance were taught to break poetry apart, identify phrases memorable for content or style, commonplace them and then work them into their own compositions. Marks of this reading process are found in many print editions until the eighteenth century. K. eloquently relates how the disappearance of such annotations shows this Renaissance mode of reading gradually dying out. A fourth chapter on illustrations explores how visual supplements reflect the ideologies and interests of the intended audiences. Finally, a speculative and provocative fifth chapter takes us into the digital age. K. regards computers as a centrifugal medium, as opposed to print, which is centripetal. Computers allow readers more power, and, as hierarchies give way to egalitarian social structures, K. envisages a future that will nurture the pessimistic readings of Virgil that have flourished in the past fifty years.

The Protean Virgil is the latest in a series of works by K. that have fundamentally reshaped how we write and think about Virgil's afterlife. At the end of this book, K. remarks that he hopes ‘this study has shown us something new about Virgil’ (172). It seems to me, however, that the chief virtue of The Protean Virgil is not really in saying something dramatically new. Much of the book repeats compelling arguments for material history that K. has made in previous works. Instead, the value of The Protean Virgil lies in its presentation of his arguments in a form that will be of interest to a wide range of students and scholars. Not every classicist will be interested in the reception of Virgil in Renaissance Venice; but an overview of the full material history of Virgil's works will attract many readers. Since the book is short (five chapters in 172 pages) and covers such a range of material, it is inevitable that there are topics that could not be included. One consideration that could have contributed substantially to his ‘destabilization’ of Virgil's works, however, is how the Virgilian canon itself changed over the past two thousand years. Medieval manuscripts and early modern books often include works that we no longer consider Virgilian. Attention to fluctuations in the Virgilian canon would support K.’s account of the ‘strange and wonderful’ Virgilian tradition, which is doubtless sound. All in all, the book is a useful study that provides an overview of Virgil's fascinating material history.