D. contends that by displaying the effects of sin on the world in his didactic poem, the Hamartigenia, Prudentius aims at creating a reader who is responsible for his/her moral decisions and their consequent effect on the world. He argues that the poet attempts to accomplish this ideal through a continued process of literary decision-making induced by biblical and generic strategies embedded in the poem. The responsible reader is thus made more receptive to the ‘argument’ of the poem in such a way that (s)he internalises and experiences the burden of responsibility.

The preamble of the book comprises acknowledgements, a list of abbreviations, manuals and works of reference, as well as notes on the Bible texts, classical texts and electronic resources used, the names of Biblical characters and the vocabulary and style.

In Chapter 1, ‘Prudentius Counts’, D. gives a detailed account of the importance of Prudentius as an early Christian poet, followed by informative notes on Marcion (the second-century theologian and addressee in the Hamartigenia), touching on his irreverence towards the Bible and his antithetical understanding of God. The Chapter further comprises a discussion of early Latin versions of the Bible and a detailed overview of D.'s approach to the interpretation of the Hamartigenia. This latter part of the introduction (pp. 16–38) is one of the highlights of the book, since it serves both as a preview and overview of his argument, and as a clear framework – although D. emphasises the possible shortcomings of such an overview (p. 17). The immediate appeal to the responsibility of the reader creates or calls into being a reader that is indeed more receptive to the ‘argument’ of the poem (that the human moral agent is responsible for the state the world is in), and of D.'s book (that the reader is called to responsibility through a literary and textual strategy embedded in the poem, p. 18). The introduction concludes with a succinct and insightful line-by-line summary of the poem.

D. then presents the body of his argument in three chapters. Chapter 2 explores three preliminary stages to an understanding of the vocation of the responsible reader: he guides the reader to understand (i) the power of the human will and its effects on the world, as opposed to Marcion's discounting of human responsibility; (ii) the distinction between the landscape of original sin and the landscape of actual sin; and (iii) the way in which actual sin is presented in the Hamartigenia in ‘insistently sexualized and eroticized terms’ (p. 17). D. uses the exemplum of the Fratres Gemini (lines 789–801) both as a significant bridge between the different parts of the chapter and as an interpretative frame in his argument that ‘humanized’ landscape in the Hamartigenia reveals the effects of human choice – ‘landscape reveals choice, which reveals responsibility’ (p. 43). D.'s detailed analysis of this exemplum focusses the reader's mind on the issue of human responsibility and the construction of a responsible reader. At the same time D. alerts his reader to the complexity of the allusion to particular genres, which will be explored in the fourth chapter. In view of D.'s reading of erotic content into several passages of the poem, he demonstrates at the end of Chapter 2 that the metamorphosis of Loth's wife into a salt effigy in the Flight from Sodom epyllion (lines 723–68) should be read as the result of the transgression of gender boundaries. He bases his argument on Prudentius' use of a specific vocabulary, in particular rapiens sua quemque libido (line 776), which can be seen as an allusion to Virgil's Eclogues 2.65. I am, however, not fully convinced that the sins referred to in the Biblical Sodom are mirrored in Loth's wife's implied ‘sex-change’ (p. 94) when she is turned to stone and acquires ‘some masculine solidity’ (p. 92) – it is my view that Prudentius presents this episode merely as an illustration of the result of the exercise of human free will when making choices. The reading of erotic content in the Cain and Abel panel at the beginning of the Preface, due to the chosen vocabulary which lends a homoerotic colouring to line 1 (Fratres ephebi fossor et pastor duo), is equally unconvincing. D. concludes this chapter with the question whether Prudentius' allusion to characters and texts of his pagan predecessors leave his reader disorientated and confused, and then he continues to direct the reader to the biblical strategy in the interpretation of the poem, just as Prudentius directs his reader to the Biblical text.

Chapter 3 explores the poem's biblical strategy for calling a responsible reader to understand and fulfil his/her vocation. D. argues that the Hamartigenia, through expansions, contractions, reversals – in short the manipulation – of both New and Old Testament texts, calls the reader to make an exacting choice, to undergo an apocalypsis of understanding (p. 25) and thereby become a responsible reader. By using scriptural texts, and in particular those parts of the New Testament which are virtually centos of the Old Testament to create a responsible reader, the Hamartigenia ‘confronts the textual basis for Marcion's dualism’ (p. 105).

In Chapter 4 D. explains how the heterogeneity of genre in the Hamartigenia sustains the poem and becomes one of the principal strategies for creating a responsible reader. The uncertain genre of the Hamartigenia, the oscillation of the poem between ‘didactic’ and ‘satire’ and between ‘epic’ and ‘pastoral’, the ‘transvalorisation of the pastoral landscape’ (p. 21), the complex allusiveness to Latin literary antecedents and the sexualised landscape depicted in the poem, all contribute, according to D., not to the creation of a confused and disorientated reader, but to the creation of an engaged and responsible reader (p. 27).

D.'s summarising comments in the conclusion in Chapter 5 are a welcome relief after his continuous insistence on the active reader response which the poem, and his book, demand. The engaged, sometimes overwhelmed, reader experienced a catalytic encounter with the ‘world of the text’ paralleled by an encounter with the ‘text of the world’ (p. 246). The disordered poem does create ‘a reader whose vocation it is to be responsible’ (p. 16). However, D. fails to note in the conclusion that Prudentius also called to justice the irresponsible reader, Marcion, who discounts all human responsibility as the source of moral and cosmic disorder.

The conclusion is followed by two appendices (a note on the title of the Hamartigenia, and a brief note on the date and circulation of the Vulgate Genesis), an extensive bibliography and an index.

D.'s book constitutes an important and extremely valuable contribution to the study of Prudentius, and of the Hamartigenia in particular. His book bears witness of thorough scholarship and contributes substantially to the corpus of Prudentius studies.