The cover image for Andrew Wallace's The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs, taken from the work of the Welsh modernist poet and artist David Jones, encapsulates Wallace's temporality-defying ambitions and his promise to avoid the all-too-common tendency of conflating Britain and England.

Wallace seeks to return some nuance to the familiar trope that Rome is both a place and an idea. He accomplishes this not by marching through a chronological account of British writers’ reflections on Rome, but instead by exploring a series of interconnected themes that appear repeatedly in medieval and early modern writing. Wallace argues that, in this period, Rome functioned as a site for contesting the concept of the human. This contestation occurred through individual writers’ experiences of various aspects of Romanitas: the reality of living in a space once occupied by Rome (chapter 1); the Latin language, which governed how writers defined the self and shaped the individual selves who learned it (chapters 2 and 3); and, finally, the Roman theology that guided how the living should treat the dead, and by extension, how the living should understand what it meant to be human (chapter 4).

Wallace thus pursues a chiastic structure: chapters 2 and 3 are concerned with humans looking inward at themselves, while chapters 1 and 4 show humans looking outward at the world around them. Yet Wallace carefully weaves through-lines from one chapter to the next: for example, the physical remains at the heart of chapter 1 lead into chapter 2's discussion of writers traveling and reacting to the physical city of Rome. This structure results in a richly textured exploration of the book's central concept. Readers gain from the book a strong sense that, to medieval and early modern writers, Rome is always both/and: both familiar and other, both within us and beyond us, both something we desire and something we wish to escape.

That sense of both/and extends to the texts Wallace examines. Each chapter contains some mixture of medieval and early modern writing, though the proportion varies widely across chapters. In the introduction Wallace grounds his theorizing of Rome's presence on the medieval Dream of Maxen Wledig. Similarly, chapter 1, in which he discusses Gildas, Bede, Beowulf, “The Ruin,” and Sir Thomas Browne, is primarily medieval. In contrast, chapter 2 foregrounds the Renaissance, examining the works of Janus Vitalis, Du Bellay, Spenser, Donne, Thomas Wilson, Petrarch, Montaigne, Bacon, and Milton. In the final two chapters, Wallace distributes his materials more evenly, though Renaissance writers (and the late antique writers who influenced them) still predominate: in chapter 3 he studies Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, Roger Ascham, Erasmus, Luther, Augustine, and Saint Paul, while chapter 4's lineup includes Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Catholic and Protestant prayer books, More, and Shakespeare. English authors and their mainland European inspirations receive most of the attention, but Wallace does try to avoid treating England as a synonym for Britain, for which he should be praised.

Yet Wallace's greatest contribution in this book comes from his ability to identify and illuminate themes shared across a wide-ranging set of materials. Chapter 3 is particularly compelling as he shows how grammatical and rhetorical study of Latin shaped constructions of the self across the medieval and early modern periods. Wallace is most effective when developing subtle threads of connection across texts, such as when he traces the reception of Du Bellay in chapter 2 or the ties between Chaucer's “Prioress's Tale” and the Roman Office of the Dead in chapter 4. However, readers should be aware that, despite the promise of its title and cover image, this book is directed primarily at early modernists. As Wallace states in his introduction, his goal is to rectify “a tendency that remains surprisingly robust in Renaissance scholarship, whereby Medieval approaches to the remains of Roman rule in Britain are still too frequently viewed as unmethodical, slapdash engagements with matters that really ought to have been appreciated in a more profoundly (or even simply more properly) intellectualized manner that is said, in England at least, to have emerged only during the late sixteenth century” (11).

As a medievalist, I applaud Wallace for his efforts; but I also wonder whether, in seeking to open the eyes of early modernists, Wallace has missed an opportunity for truly transhistorical work. Wallace's chosen themes are intriguing, but he emphasizes Renaissance writers, and his comparatively few medieval examples are drawn almost exclusively from early and late medieval Britain. As a result, Wallace's study of Rome's vestiges essentially skips over the central Middle Ages—the high point of medieval humanism—in favor of relying primarily on the sorts of texts that tend to represent the Middle Ages in classroom anthologies. To be clear, I am not faulting an author for failing to comprehensively cover over a millennium's worth of material in a single book. Instead, I am noting that Wallace's choice of materials overlooks relevant medieval texts, while creating the potential for misperceptions. For example, much of what Wallace says about Renaissance education and Romanitas in chapter 2 (“The Self”) could also be said about medieval exempla. Chapter 2 would have been more powerful had Wallace examined, say, the Ancrene Wisse or even the Gesta Romanorum alongside his Renaissance texts. His argument would also have been clearer, for by leaving medieval exemplarity unexamined, Wallace ends up implicitly reinforcing the now-contested idea that the Middle Ages lacked a fully fledged concept of the self, and that medieval and early modern writing differs on those grounds (even as Wallace argues the opposite elsewhere in the book).

Still, there is much to praise about Wallace's refreshing take on the familiar Rome-as-place-and-idea trope. I expect this book will enrich the chorus of voices calling for a rethink of the medieval/early modern paradigm. However, I also expect that those seeking insights into Rome's medieval presence will need to read further.