This is a learned book, and I learned much from it. In exploring interrelationships between Latin and English elegiac poets – and in being willing to work outside of the idea of chronological influence to consider contemporary readerly experience which may be ahistorical – Grant constructs her own intertextual readings ‘which are nuanced, selective and, sometimes, revisionary’ (p 189). She makes excellent use of sixteenth-century commentaries on Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, which, when combined with her accounts of Wyatt, Donne, Philip and Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and – refreshingly – Nashe, offer a breadth of view of the alternative and inconsistent characters of the Latin elegists as perceived in the English Renaissance. She writes especially well about Renaissance approaches to Sulpicia (the woman poet to whom several of Tibullus’s poems are attributed, albeit unsafely); a section (pp 73–7) comparing the versions of the fictional Lesbia and historical Clodia in Catullus and Cicero is remarkably enlightening.

However, there are tactical risks in Grant’s avowed choice to supply ‘detailed readings of a few carefully selected and juxtaposed texts highlight[ing] the interpretational value of reading these chosen poems together’ (p 10). Why choose these and not others? Grant’s observation of the ‘untroubled “pick-and-mix” approach of sixteenth-century poetics’ (p 191) to the Latin elegists might be seen to sum up her own methodology. I sometimes regretted the absence of particular intertexts: in discussing Catullus 83 (pp 68–70), Donne’s ‘Jealousy’ sprang to mind, as did ‘His Picture’ or ‘The Relique’ in her commentary on Propertius 1.19 and 4.7 (p 99). It seemed odd to find no mention at all of Petronius, while Lucian also made it into neither Bibliography nor Index, even though he is quoted by Spenser in a gloss Grant reproduces (p 58).

I was more troubled by an absence of evidence of much enjoyment of the comic wit of the English writers (a pleasure better evidenced in her writing about the Latins) and an almost moralistic tone in regard to male protagonists; Grant is more willing to acknowledge ‘authentic female voices’ (p 153) in Sulpicia, Mary Sidney or Mary Wroth than any equivalent masculine authenticities. Choosing to overlook the narrative experience of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Petrarch’s sonnets in the Rime Sparse, Grant reads backwards, claiming from the conclusion of Astrophil that ‘[f]rom his opening sonnet, the aim of Astrophil’s poetry is shown to be corrupt’ (p 113) and that Petrarch’s ‘sonnets turn out to be purposeless, almost comically mistaken, and Laura’s revelation [in The Triumph of Death] throws the Petrarchan mode into existential crisis’ (p 151). What these retrospective readings ignore is the temporally lived experience of reading Petrarch and Sidney; we may in the end be educated out of desire into spiritual enlightenment, but there is a lot of fun to be had along the way.

There are minor errors: the Field of the Cloth of Gold did not take place in France (p 55), but within what was at the time the English Pale around Calais, and Petrarch wrote the Trionfi not Triomphi (p 171). The decision to modernise English texts sometimes destroys the metre (especially in Chaucer: pp 49, 88), and it might have been better to use Marlowe’s version of Ovid’s Amores rather than the archaistic Loeb. There are careless misquotations (pp 111, 171, 176, 180–1) including words omitted – again wrecking the metre – from two of the lines from Golding’s Metamorphoses which act as epigraph to Grant’s ‘Conclusion’. Less nigglingly, when Grant writes (p 182) of the ‘blazoning’ of Cleopatra’s body in the final act of Mary Sidney’s Antonie, ‘[i]n the absence of a male body to blazon’, she overlooks both the lines indeed blazoning his body (5.1986–90) and the fact that Antony’s physical body is actually – imaginatively, since this is probably a closet drama not intended for performance – on stage throughout the scene.

Notwithstanding these reservations, Grant’s monograph remains a valuable achievement, and offers subtle and scholarly readings not only of the movement of Latin into Italian and English, but also of Greek into Latin. This sophisticated conspectus of the development and intertextuality of the elegiac genre represents a genuine advance on previous theoretical work in the field. In Grant’s own elegantly paradoxical formulation, ‘two-directional, “backwards reception” is, surely, the way forward’ (p 193): in David Lodge’s academic satire Small World (Reference Lodge1984), budding academic Persse McGarrigle proposes an MA thesis on ‘The Influence of T S Eliot on Shakespeare’. Cometh the hour …