In the eighth canto of the Inferno, as he stares unknowingly at the light from a strange signal, Dante appeals for an explanation from his guide Virgil, ‘[i]l mar di tutto ’l senno’, ‘the sea of all wisdom’ (quoted on p. 10). The honorary title develops a long tradition, stretching from antiquity through the Renaissance, that praised Virgil for the capaciousness of his learning – his skill, as Macrobius declared in the Saturnalia, ‘in all branches of study’ (Sat. 1.16.12, quoted on p. 11). This volume turns that capaciousness into a prompt for multidisciplinary scholarship, analysing the ‘expansive character’ of Virgil's Renaissance reception across several different spheres of knowledge: rhetoric, pedagogy, art history, literary criticism, musicology, numismatics and philosophy (p. 18). Plural, inspiring and unstable, as the volume explains, the Renaissance Virgil ‘infiltrated every corner of artistic and scholarly endeavor’ (p. 9) and assumes a cultural significance that reaches past any of his works alone. The course of Virgil's afterlife, so the volume argues, can also tell stories about the ‘world of the Renaissance itself’ (p. 14). The eleven essays each provide for that argument several rich examples and show with varying degrees of detail Virgil's centrality in complex processes of Renaissance self-definition.

The volume defines its originality against a robust scholarly tradition, most relevantly exemplified by D. Wilson-Okamura's Virgil in the Renaissance (2011), which centres attention on Virgilianism in ‘literary criticism and adaptation’ (p. 15). In response, the contributors connect their Renaissance Virgils with a more general field of culture, including but not limited to literature, and provide collectively a reception history that extends beyond the usual poetic suspects. Accordingly, the volume contains no mention of the venerable Virgilians Edmund Spenser, Pierre de Ronsard and Luis de Camões, makes only passing reference to the adaptations of Ariosto and Tasso, Shakespeare and Milton, and concentrates instead on potentially less familiar sites of Virgil's sprawling ‘diffusion’: decorated ceramics, personal letters, tokens and medals. That focus, Houghton suggests, creates ‘a broader perspective, arguably, than any existing volume on the subject’ (p. 18). The breadth appears predominantly in the range of discourses discussed, rather than in the geographic, temporal or linguistic terrain traversed. Many chapters concentrate on the Italian scene or the early Latin humanists and only intermittently match the same expansive movement across time and space of, say, Wilson-Okamura's surveys of European Virgilian imitation – or of the even wider panorama of languages in S. Braund and Z.M. Torlone (edd.), Virgil and his Translators (2018). Invariably, however, the chapters’ specialised analyses add relevant facets to the Renaissance Virgil's ‘kaleidoscopic variety’ (p. 3) and show how much of that variety flourished outside canonical traditions of vernacular poetry.

P. Mack examines Virgil's impact on Renaissance rhetorical theory, shows Virgil's verse functioning as a model for teaching ideal Latin usage and demonstrates that Virgilian poetry may have prompted Agricola, Erasmus and Melanchthon to develop innovative perspectives on persuasion, emotion and imitation. F. Stok describes the fifteenth-century augmentation of Aelius Donatus’ fourth-century Life of Virgil, connects the augmentation with the Ferrarese circle around Guarino of Verona and suggests that the biography's additions match concerns representative of humanist culture: court patronage, princely advice, library access and Platonic philosophy. L. Boutin Vitela examines early sixteenth-century ceramics painted with Virgilian scenes, analyses the historical and contemporary significance of their iconography and argues that they enabled their owner, the brilliant patron Isabella d'Este, to assert both the prestige of Mantua and her own humanistic expertise. C. Arnould and P. Assenmaker discuss quotations of Virgil's poetry on sixteenth-century medals and tokens in the Low Countries, explore the repurposed quotations’ connection to their original Virgilian contexts and demonstrate the freedom with which designers adapted Virgil to suit contemporary political affairs. E.A. MacCarthy tracks the reception in Renaissance Italy of the Aeneid's musician, Iopas, demonstrates his varied role as a model for prophetic poetry, divine harmony and convivial recreation, and suggests that he represents a didactic, cosmogonic capacity for music usefully distinct from the more famous supernatural power of Orpheus.

G. Laterza studies Virgil's use of sympathetic and antipathetic fallacy, coins the term ‘counter-pathetic fallacy’ to describe apparently positive moments coordinated with negatively characterised landscapes (p. 106) and shows that several Renaissance poets capitalised on the ambiguity of action and setting in Aeneid 4.160–72, around Dido's cave. A. Rogerson reads carefully Maffeo Vegio's 1428 Supplement to the Aeneid, complicates its apparent polarisation of good and evil, and uncovers a more nuanced depiction of Turnus than scholarship has previously acknowledged. A.T. Foley elucidates Cristoforo Landino's allegorical interpretation of Aeneas’ journey, connects Landino's adaptation of linear order with Marsilio Ficino's idiosyncratic organisation of Plato's dialogues and demonstrates that Aeneas models for both Landino and Ficino ‘the ideal philosophical exegete’ (p. 145). H. Lovatt describes in impressive detail Ugolino Verino's late fifteenth-century epic, Carlias, suggests the epic's interdependent representation of Virgilian and Dantean underworlds and argues persuasively that Verino's literary genealogy permits a combined meditation on Christian faith, imperial power and transtemporal desire. G.H. Tucker surveys the development of the Virgilian verse-cento in early modern Europe, describes the form's variously controversial, political and divinely-sanctioned status and suggests that its combination of textual fragments befits the Protean changeability of all worldly matter. Houghton focuses on the afterlife of Virgil's fourth eclogue, analyses thoroughly numerous citations of its golden age prophecies and argues cogently that its imagery of epochal rebirth helped humanists articulate the idea of the Renaissance as a historical period.

Unlike Houghton's related monograph, Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance (2019), the present volume does not group its chapters into structural parts or thematic clusters. At times, the consecutive presentation suggests the unordered miscellaneousness typical of published conference proceedings; at others, however, the loose structure allows for resonance between apparently distinct topics. MacCarthy's description of Iopas’ song, for example, echoes Boutin Vitela's earlier discussion of Virgilian ceramics, since both address the significance of communal banqueting. Just as Iopas performs his song in Aeneid 1.740–7 at Dido's royal table in Carthage, so too do the ceramics adorn Isabella's banquet table at the Mantuan court. In fact, before he features in MacCarthy's analysis, Iopas has already appeared as part of an illustrated ceramic scene, reproduced as Boutin Vitela's figure 1 (p. 57), in which he plays his cithara on a pillar bearing Isabella's impresa. Here, as for MacCarthy later, Iopas crosses imaginatively from ancient poetry into sixteenth-century history and so brings into focus a permeable border between Virgilian fiction and Renaissance fact. A similar connection obtains between Stok's treatment of Virgilian biography and Lovatt's reading of Verino's literary ancestry: both demonstrate Virgil's received role as an interpretative guide. This Virgil, Stok shows, might interpret Augustan political policy as adroitly as he interprets the parentage of horses; he can guide Dante through hell and purgatory, Lovatt explains, even as he guides Verino towards ‘an authentically classical vision’ (p. 162). The connection gains additional resonance in the volume's introduction, which brings Virgil's interpretative capacity into the present. The poet serves, Houghton states, ‘as our guide’ too, helping trace ‘the landscape of learning and taste, of artistic and literary imagination’ (p. 14). The guide of past poets becomes the guide of present scholars, as the volume continues the same tradition of Virgilian reception that it analyses.

The contributors show further connections in their interpretative methodologies, many of which involve productive attention to issues of diction, form and syntax. That focus befits the volume's period of study, since, as Mack explains, Renaissance rhetoricians themselves most frequently discuss Virgil in their ‘treatment of style’ (p. 20). The volume's most persuasive analyses demonstrate similar precision, as when Rogerson interprets Veggio's Lucretian phrase, quicquid id est, as a mark of alternate philosophical possibilities (pp. 133–5); or when Lovatt identifies a chiasmus of ‘classical and Christian inspiration’ in the structure of Carlias 1.1–11 (p. 161); or when Laterza connects spondees in Aeneid 4 with the newly altered ‘rhythm of life’ in Dido's Carthage (p. 108); or when Arnould and Assenmaker find the subject of a simile from Aeneid 12 in the image represented on a sixteenth-century token (pp. 81–2). The same technical attentiveness applies in the volume's own prose composition, the style of which sometimes helps advance parts of the argument. Explaining the logic behind the volume's title, for example, Houghton expresses the editors’ choice of several complex, oft-critiqued words, here embracing a style at once cautious and unapologetic:

The form of this 65-word sentence, with its parentheses, subclauses and qualifications, collides usefully with the opposing aesthetic of ‘concision’ – and the collision continues immediately thereafter, on p. 6, in a sentence stretching across 103 words (‘If the shepherds …’). The combination of concision and copiousness exemplifies the editors’ twofold commitment, in the introduction as in the volume as a whole. They recognise, on the one hand, the importance of condensing intricate phenomena into digestible concepts: the Renaissance, Virgil, culture. On the other, however, they acknowledge the necessity of expanding such concepts to admit heterogeneity, internal inconsistency and potential contestation. That process of expansion, as Houghton suggests, remains incomplete (p. 18); and the present volume, however useful, detailed and ambitious, offers only another step in an ongoing scholarly project: to uncover still more Virgils, in more times and place, in even more ‘branches of study’.