This massive work of reference is curated by the same prolific authorial and editorial team that has already brought us The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (cf. CR 71 [2021], 128–30). Their new Clavis, the editors tell us, ‘collects all works of historiography from Late Antiquity (300–800 ce) in all cultures that experienced classical influence and hence can be legitimately called late antique. Taking language as a proxy for culture, this means that we seek to offer a full inventory of works written in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian and Coptic’ (p. xii). They do precisely that, with the laudable intention of breaking down barriers between scholarly traditions that are a product of the way in which modern academic disciplines evolved, particularly through the privileging of a narrowly-conceived Classical canon and the fencing off of whole literatures along religious and/or philological lines.

Any work of this sort needs an organising principle within which to lemmatise its corpus. Here, Van Nuffelen and Van Hoof posit four core genres (secular history, ecclesiastical history, sacred history and chronicles), each with several subgenres; several affiliated genres that introduce substantial amounts of non-historiographical material into one or another of the core genres; and neighbouring genres that are frequently compared or contrasted to historiography (oratory, poetry, epistolography, reports, geography, exegesis, biography and novels). As well as genres, the authors posit four forms that histories can take (epitome, translation, compilation and excerpt collection) that should not be thought of as genres, though they often are, but rather as formats in which texts in multiple genres could be presented. Lest one imagine that this gargantuan scope is essentially unfeasible, the editors assure us that they ‘only strive for completeness in the core genres’ (p. xiii). They even offer a handy tabulation (p. lxxxi) showing what receives full, what partial and what no coverage.

Van Nuffelen and Van Hoof are candid about their exercise being ‘primarily a pragmatic venture’ (p. lxviii) because ‘it is difficult to define the nature of late antique historiography’, but they say this having spent the better part of 50 pages offering definitions. The problem with their accommodating and catholic approach is that it leaves space for generic nomenclature that flatly contradicts the genre definitions they themselves endorse. Byzantinists and western medievalists sometimes use the word ‘chronicle’ in a lax way, with little regard for the ancient genealogies of the genres they thus variously label. Van Nuffelen and Van Hoof do not dispute that laxness, but they are prepared to tolerate it. Similarly with antiquarianism – they spend several strong pages explaining that this is a valid heuristic device but not itself a genre, only to accept continued use of the genre label because it is sanctioned by long usage. The problem is compounded by their habit of burying important insights in footnotes, for instance a devastatingly cogent paragraph demonstrating that ‘the label origo gentis is inadequate and needs to be abandoned’ (p. xliii n. 150). In short, the ecumenism embraced here will satisfy no one, because, where it outlines precise generic categories, it declines to enforce them, and where it rejects rigid scholarly constructions as anachronistic or misguided, it still gives them room. One cannot help but commend the spirit in which the ecumenism on display is intended, but it is unlikely to break the philological and chronological straitjackets that created such incompatible discourses.

As to the meat of the book, the lemmata for the various late antique authors and their works, only long use will really tell. Spot-checking throughout as well as a more complete read of the entries on Spanish authors and texts suggest a high standard of accuracy and a low tolerance for the kind of speculation that attributes the short version of Isidore's Historia Gothorum to Maximus of Zaragoza. That said, one has to ask whether this volume invites the sort of repeated consultation by which a researcher's prized reference works accumulate annotations, additions and corrections. It is not just that the eye-watering price is a deterrent, but that all the content is freely available online, at https://www.late-antique-historiography.ugent.be/database/, with excellent indexing, easy searching and filtering, and a browse function that is less cumbersome than the norm. To be sure, there are a handful of dictionaries and encyclopaedias that reward browsing in print form despite also having searchable electronic versions, but the information in this Clavis is presented so austerely that flipping through its pages fails to add new dimensions to what one can find online. Let me underscore that this is not to criticise the larger concept and project, which is excellent and very useful: I have the CHAP website bookmarked and refer to it regularly with great profit. It is to suggest that the print volume might rather be seen as a commercial venture by Brepols than a necessary tool for the reference shelves of personal or institutional libraries.