This volume readily finds its place alongside other encouraging manifestations of the recent growth in neo-Latin studies, Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World (2 vols, 2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (2015), with all three acknowledging in sundry places their debts to J. IJsewijn and D. Sacré’s Companion to Neo-Latin Studies (2 vols, 1990–1998). The Guide, thoughtfully designed and assiduously edited by M., is no less substantial in relation to its subject of literature than the Encyclopaedia and Handbook are to the massive field of neo-Latin studies within which it sits. The Guide comprises the editor's introduction and twenty-three essays in four sections: Part 1, ‘Ideas and Assumptions’; Part 2, ‘Poetry and Drama’; Part 3, ‘Prose’; and a short Part 4, ‘Working with Neo-Latin Literature’. Each chapter closes with usefully brief and balanced guidance on further reading. Around half of the impressive line-up of contributors hail from Classics departments, the rest are drawn from English, Modern Languages and History. Three essayists in the Guide (the editor, M. Van der Poel and S. Tilg) supply pieces for the cognate part of the Handbook, ‘Language and Genre’. Only Van der Poel deals with the same topic, but his ‘Oratory and Declamation’ for the Guide takes a very different approach; indeed, his two pieces complement one another well. Another four essayists (S. Knight, F. Waquet, D. Marsh and E. Haan) contribute to later sections in the Handbook, and their discussions depart significantly, where not totally, from earlier offerings.

In her introduction, M. acknowledges the importance of the huge range of neo-Latin writings beyond the literary (theological, scientific, philological et al.) before deftly epitomising the literary-critical practices the volume seeks to encourage. How non-literary writings inform the interpretation of the various genres presented by the Guide is taken up in some chapters, including S. Kivistö’s consideration of medical writings in relation to verse satire. K. Sidwell, in ‘Editing Neo-Latin Literature’, stresses how that undertaking requires philological, historical and literary skills rarely combined in a single scholar and thus recommends collaboration. Paired with Sidwell's is C. Kallendorf's equally experienced guidance on finding and using manuscripts and printed books, and both contributors underline the methodological consequences of the particular material and historical conditions of neo-Latin writing: Kallendorf sets Jerome McGann's notions of textual fluidity against the ‘ontological splendour’ aimed at by followers of Karl Lachmann. Kallendorf's sage conclusions on the desirability or otherwise of editing neo-Latin texts using Classicists’ methodology are, like many speculative moments in the volume, the more stimulating for being couched as partial and provisional. Nevertheless, Sidwell's more pointedly polemical suggestion that more Classicists should acknowledge their debts to those figures who founded their discipline by studying and editing them is worth repeating. T. Deneire's essay may be seen as complementing these essays’ ideas through deploying the polysystem theory of I. Evan-Zohar to support ongoing and productive reconsideration of the relative and shifting positions of neo-Latin literature and the vernacular. Equally, Van der Poel and Sidwell both underline the need to explore neo-Latin usage beyond that of the strictly Classical through medieval lexica and early modern bilingual dictionaries. In these and other ways the volume fully presents the range of issues that intersect in the interpretation of neo-Latin literature.

The Guide’s temporal scope is mainly c. 1400 to c. 1700, but there are repeated forays into the eighteenth century. Waquet's essay, ‘The Republic of Letters’, despite backward glances at the Erasmian period, launches itself from the mid-seventeenth century into the public sphere of the Enlightenment (and more on its ideology and rhetoric than the realities), dovetailing chronologically with Knight's essay on the literary representation of pedagogical aims and experiences. Although Petrarca's name resounds at the head of several chapters (for pastoral, verse letters, the ‘new prose’ et al.), their temporal reach varies, with some reminding the reader that although neo-Latin was entwined with the Renaissance, it certainly did not disappear with the final demise of ‘late humanism’. P. Gwynne, moreover, uses the vehicle of panegyric to treat the reader to a richly supplied journey from late-antique to eighteenth-century Jesuit epic via the influential Walter of Châtillon (Petrarca is here just another episode rather than an originator), directing us to deeper currents of tradition to compare elsewhere with eddies of surprised rediscovery, as with, for example, Catullus, whose early reception remained strongly refracted by epigrammatic lenses.

The religious landscape is for the most part lightly and intermittently charted. J.H. Gaisser's lively and well-stocked chapter on lyric, just one example of a ‘capacious and varied genre that resists precise definition’ (p. 113), turns from erotic poetry (Pontano's accentuation of Catullan tropes prompts parallel considerations for other genres) to a comparative treatment of some odes on the seasons. The stimulating observation that the rise of the ode in the 1480s owed a good deal to religion could perhaps have been pushed slightly further, especially in the final turn to the hymns of Michele Marullo, Flaminio and Macrin, who composed in very different religious climates, with Flaminio and Macrin also publishing, like Buchanan, poetical paraphrases of the Psalms. The influence of Christianity is nevertheless noted in sundry places in the volume, whether producing problems for epic aristeia (modern weaponry might have been another), harassing the erotic or attempting to preclude some kinds of laughter in school, university or theatre. G. Manuwald treats Eobanus’ Christianised Heroides (1514) in her chapter on the verse epistle, and Kivistö deals with Naogeorg's Satyrarum libri quinque (1555) as she explores how ‘the Reformation produced conditions particularly conducive to satire and anti-clerical humour’ (p. 149) and also modified the ancient poetic models. J. Relihan's later chapter on ‘Prose Satire’, which is but one of three wanting to discuss the radically uncontainable Utopia of Thomas More, encourages reading across from prose to poetry. However, J. Glomski's focus on epistolary self-presentation in Erasmus, Muret and Lipsius, which connects well with T. Tunberg's stimulating essay, ‘Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature’, declines to break the bounds of Part 3 to prompt thinking about possible relations with verse epistles. The reader is thus often left to make connections: cross-referencing between the chapters tends to be sporadic, and the index is helpful, but stronger on names (an impressive feature) than topics. Yet the labour of learning how to use the volume is to be welcomed, and is the easier for the general liveliness, richness and readability of the contributions.

Manuwald and M. (on Latin didactic) are among several contributors who saliently define the goals and rationales of their essays and offer pithy synopses of the most important generic issues, the state of current scholarship and critical debate. Although some coverage and commentary are more routine, the volume offers healthy servings of literary material throughout to cultivate the appetite. The most successful essays present examples of interpretative practice based on generous quotation as they tease out matters of style and the elaboration of thinking about each genre. E. Haan, with exemplary concision and sureness of touch, extracts Renaissance pastoral's most important concerns from her reading of Milton's Epitaphium Damonis, before offering within this sturdy framework more finely delineated, fresh thinking about Milton's poem as ‘neo-Latin pastoral hagiography’. Other essays work similarly to combine expert briefings on the relationship between ancient and early modern expressions of a particular genre before turning to present latest findings and suggestions for further inquiry. This works best when canonical texts alternate with less well-known literary materials to interrogate generic assumptions. L. Houghton stresses the ‘new elements’ to elegy, how it broke with the past, the sheer volume and variety written, and its tremendous flexibility and resilience, where other kinds of poetry rose and fell with the times.

As Knight remarks, poetry was not formally part of the trivium of logic, rhetoric and grammar, and her essay touches pertinently on the contested value of poetry – dulce versus utile – among educationalists, only some of whom thought it contributed to intellectual and moral development. How readers and writers of neo-Latin were produced is scattered across several essays, rather than offered as a Part 1 piece on, say, commonplacing and imitation. On the latter, the index directs the reader only to the opening pages of the ‘Prose’ section for Tunberg's condensation of the Ciceronian debate. There is a bit more on the educational context in N. Griffin's chapter on ‘Drama’ (the only chapter on drama and performance, and short on tragedy). This gives considerable space to biblical drama and the revival of Roman drama before turning purposefully to neo-Latin plays and the ways in which those cultivating morality and piety approved the style but not the plots of Terentian comedy. A little more on tragedy, on, for example, Buchanan and Grotius, whose Adamus Exul is mentioned briefly in Deneire's essay, could have balanced the essay's final and justified turn to the massive corpus of Jesuit drama.

This handsome and relatively compact volume offers excellent coverage of genres, abundant and well-chosen quotation and thoroughgoing discussion in exemplifying the many significant issues arising from each kind of literature. There is some variation in style and challenge: some essays are more lecture-like, bullet-points and all, others closer to rigorous research papers. Yet the latter carefully frame more demanding discussion, and all the essays rise above flattening survey. Given the inevitable constraints of space, hard but productive decisions no doubt had to be made about what to emphasise, what to downplay. Part 1 could perhaps have included a few more topics: on the impact of Greek; on literary translation and its mapping of genre from the original to the target literary culture; a systematic introduction to treatises on literary genres and modes – Scaliger's Poetices libri septem (1561) and Casaubon's De satyrica (1605) are mentioned in passing – given the very problem of genre signalled by R. Cummings, Gaisser, Houghton and others. These are but quibbles. Writers understood their genres by reading and imitating examples more than from theoretical treatments, and that is what the volume tacitly emphasises. Y. Haskell's sophisticated and stylish chapter, ‘Conjuring with the Classics’, refreshingly resituates the issue of imitation in confronting the ‘remarkably persistent red herring’ (p. 18) that neo-Latin writing lacks emotion and sincerity. Her lively yet necromantic study of the use of Lucretius exuberantly compares writers who took possession of, became possessed by or walked alongside this dead poet. Overall the volume manages to convey a tremendous amount of information to the reader, who is afforded ample opportunity and encouragement to engage under expert guidance with a very wide variety of neo-Latin poetry and prose to prove whether some works, as Haskell says, ‘can and do live’. An affordable paperback edition would make it even more of a vade mecum, as it is difficult to disagree with M.’s opening statement: ‘This is an exciting time for the study of neo-Latin literature, especially in the Anglophone world’.