The book under discussion contains thirteen essays on the practices, methods, performance and means of dissemination of the Byzantine commentaries on ancient texts. While also commenting on the works of less known authors, it focuses on some of the best known Byzantine scholars, such as John Tzetzes, Eustathios of Thessalonike, Maximos Planoudes, Manuel Holobolos and John Pediasimos. The chronological perspective adopted (explained by van den Berg and Manolova in the introduction) makes the book a true history of exegetical literature in the socio-cultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods (from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries). The volume covers different types of commentaries on ancient literature within the different (yet complementary) contexts of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. Finally, the contexts of knowledge transfer, patronage and authorial identity are stressed, important as they are for the understanding of the Byzantine intellectual milieu. Although none of these subjects is new, it is, as far as I know, the first time that they are united in such a monographic way; this makes the volume a very appreciated work.

P. Agapitos's chapter provides an enlightening synthesis (with the necessary bibliographical references) of the crossroads of Byzantine commentaries on ancient texts. It stresses the connections between scholars, patrons, textual genres and subjects, but also the contexts of production and dissemination of these works, providing a less well-known material example of such an intricate process – the codex Alexandria, Patriarchal Library 62, a late thirteenth-century example of the material used in a teaching context that contains a true synthesis of twelfth-century exegetical production, both pagan and Christian. M. Trizio's long contribution focuses on the commentaries on Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, looking mostly for an understanding of the functioning of authorial practices in a widely competitive environment, an environment common to all the Byzantine scholars mentioned in the book. Trizio also offers a welcome list of manuscript sources for what he calls ‘hidden treasures: unknown or little-known philosophical texts from the Komnenian period’ (pp. 80–1). The pleasure of knowing the previously unknown is exactly the feeling provided by F. Nousia's chapter, especially when editing the scholia to Ὑπὲρ Ῥητορικῆς Α’ & Β’ from the Vatican gr. 1899, fol. 184r–234r, an autograph by Theodora Raoulaina, from the early-Palaiologan period.

M. Tomadaki's contribution discusses the literary sources of Tzetzes’ Theogony. On the one hand, it comes as no surprise when we are told about Tzetzes’ recourse to the texts of authors such as Homer, the extant and even some lost works of Hesiod, Pindar, Theocritus, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and others. Of most of them, he composed large commentaries, or even poetic re-elaborations, and there is no doubt about the level of his bibliographic resources. On the other hand, one misses a deeper discussion of the eleven manuscripts said to transmit the Theogony (their formats, the other texts they copy, their scribes and the public), a not so difficult task that would probably make certain the possibility that ‘Hesiod was occasionally part of the Byzantine school curriculum and that professional teachers, like Tzetzes, could have used Hesiod's Theogony as a textbook’ (p. 142). This has been shown by, among others, M. Cardin and F. Pontani (‘Hesiod's fragments in Byzantium’, in: C. Tsagalis [ed.], Poetry in Fragments: Studies on the Hesiodic Corpus and its Afterlife [2017], pp. 245–87) – cited in the bibliography.

With no room for an appreciation of every chapter of the book, particularly good pieces of research on their own Byzantine subjects and authors, the index should be highlighted: from ancient, Byzantine and modern authors to their works and the manuscripts that transmit them, it is a useful resource for the academic use of this book.