Here is a case of corpus linguistics – or better to say, corpus metalinguistics – of a kind facilitated in our time by electronic tools but traceable for the corpus in question as far back as the Index linguisticae or ‘Index of linguistics’ published in 1864 as volume ccxxi of Migne's Patrologia Latina. Taking its cue from Migne, Denecker's study, based on a 2015 KU Leuven doctoral dissertation, reports and discusses the findings or ‘values’ occurring at the intersections of an ‘analytical grid’ in which, as he explains, ‘research questions’ formed the rows and Christian Latin authors from Tertullian to Isidore of Seville the columns (p. 4). After an introduction explaining this methodology and other assumptions underlying the work, its contents unfold neatly in the three parts laid down in the grid: language history – the origin and nature of language, the primeval situation, the origin of linguistic diversity; language diversity – appraisals and uses of linguistic diversity, appraisals and uses of multilingual competence, interpretations and uses of ‘unnatural’ multilingual competence; language description – the language level, the sentence level, the word level, the letter level. The downsides of a data-trawl of this kind are predictable: a deadening sense of analytical schemes imposed from outside the thought-worlds and discursive arenas of interest, the shoe-horning of oddball figures into available slots, an overall lack of narrative impulse as one discrete topic yields to another. But all scholarship is heuristic compromise and the upsides in this case are considerable too. Long-studied ‘special’ issues such as exegesis of the Babel or Pentecost stories, Jerome's Hebraism or the ‘lexicographical exoticism’ of the Bible in its Latin versions are recontextualised with a wealth of illuminating detail. The quirks or tics of particular authors – for example, Augustine's seeming ambivalence on the question of whether it would be better for there to be a single world-language in the present (pp. 145–7) – stand out with fresh clarity. The linguistic notions of lesser writers and practitioners of less centrally ‘theological’ genres (such as the poets Claudius Marius Victor and Cyprianus Gallus, the bibliographer Gennadius of Marseille, or the odd-jobber Eucherius of Lyon) flash in the interstices of sections devoted mainly to heavy hitters (Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Isidore). Clusters, ‘hubs’ and networks of shared opinion loom into view around singular authors (Jerome, notably, but also Cassiodorus) and in certain geographical orbits (such as Gaul, with a ‘micro-network’ centred on the island monastery of Lérins). The effect of these serial and parallel, compounding mises en relief is not only to historicise and sociologise the ‘ideas of language’ that are the focus of the present study but also to add a dimension to other histories-in-progress of the culture(s) of the late ancient Mediterranean world, beginning with those of a ‘literature’ or literatures no longer simply divisible along sectarian (Christian–‘pagan’–Jewish) lines.

This is a book that few will read from beginning to end with steady attention but to which many will repeatedly and gratefully turn, always at the risk of being held for several more pages than they need to cite in a given case. A short review can usefully direct readers first to the author's general summary of ‘findings’ (pp. 388–92), and give a heads-up that the ensuing three-and-a-half-page proposal of a ‘general model for the transmission of linguistic ideas throughout early Latin Christianity’ is of livelier interest than that phrasing might suggest. Stripped down, the model states that Augustine is every bit as important as we have always assumed but that there is a lot more going on than we could guess from a study of the content and reception of his oeuvre alone, that ‘Jerome's contribution to the study of language in the West – in contrast to that of Augustine – deserves more attention than it has until now received in scholarly literature’, and that the Augustinian position ‘in its simplified and codified form was ultimately fixed by Isidore, most importantly in his Etymologiae’ (pp. 392–4). Stepping outside the terms of reference set by Denecker's study, we might ask what roles its actors played in the longer-term process of accrediting the ideas of a ‘Latin West’ and of ‘Western’ or ‘Latin’ (early) Christianity on which it reposes, and whether the defective ‘disciplinarity’ diagnosed by him in ‘reflection on language in early Latin Christianity’ (p. 390) might not be remedied at a stroke by admitting to his database – as part of the ordinary intellectual equipment of Latin-educated individuals of the time, irrespective of any religious belief or profession – the ‘language manuals’ (p. 4), rhetorical and grammatical, that those actors took for granted.