This collection of ten essays on the topic of the Metamorphoses originated in a 2016 international meeting in Stockholm in conjunction with Ingvar Björkeson's new Swedish translation, and still bears the traces of that Anglo-Scandinavian collaboration, despite some of its chapters having been commissioned after the event. The volume proposes itself as a complement to the still indispensable but slightly outdated Ovidian Transformations (P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi and S. Hinds (eds), 1999), by adopting a similar thematic focus on change and transformation. As often happens with edited volumes, the result is somewhat idiosyncratic. The trajectories of individual chapters are often being pulled apart, rather than pieced together, by the energy of transformation, which confirms itself as a centrifugal force rather than the connective tissue that the editors propose to see in it in their cohesive introduction to the volume. Yet all contributions are engaging and enlightening, and the editors do an admirable job in connecting the dots among their various strands and diverse approaches.

Alessandro Barchiesi's opening chapter stands alone as Part I (‘Transformations into the Metamorphoses’) by virtue of being the only essay that deals with Ovid's reception of previous metamorphic material. Although some of its analyses would have benefited from further editing (the chapter is divided into surprisingly brief sub-sections), the contribution is illuminating in highlighting the innovative potential of Ovid's Metamorphoses in conceiving of ‘metamorphosis’ as a unified category of myth and thought, as well as in arguing that both the poem's self-fashioning and its history of reception have the ability to ‘falsify our perspective’ by imposing ‘a sort of retrospective illusion’ on the scattered and disordered metamorphic traditions that predated it.

Part II (‘Transformations in the Metamorphoses’) focuses on change within the poem. Alison Sharrock's opening chapter on scholarly approaches to gender and transformation is admirably adaptable to use in and outside the classroom: it provides a clear and helpful introduction to feminist approaches to literary theory, attempting a dialectic balance between what she dubs ‘resisting vs. releasing’ approaches or ‘optimistic vs. pessimistic’ assessments of the authorial position, and zooming in on several case studies (readers may want to supplement Sharrock's readings of Caenis/Caeneus and Iphis with the articles by Debra Freas, Classical Journal 114.1 (2018), 60–84, and Deborah Kamen, Helios 39.1 (2012), 21–36) to show how Ovid's text lends itself to seemingly irreconcilable interpretations.

There follow three chapters devoted to specific episodes, each of which move smoothly from the particular to the general. Andrew Feldherr's reading of Deucalion and Pyrrha continues the theme of gender with a complex analysis of how the episode posits and dismantles axes of difference, becoming paradigmatic for the conundrum of whether reality engenders or is created by representation. The question is of special urgency for theorisations of the linguistic/representational nature of ‘gender’, although readers expecting explicit engagement with gender theorists may end up slightly disappointed. The chapter also includes an exemplary close reading of the metamorphic scene, which highlights the mimetic qualities of Ovid's language and its synaesthetic ability to elicit in its readers a response to the text that, to echo a statement made by Barchiesi in the volume, reminds us that that we read the poem with a (gendered) body. Questions of gender continue to play a crucial role in the following chapters: by interpreting Arethusa both as a coloniser straddling Greek, Roman and Sicilian identities and as a migrating hero interweaving epic with elegy and pastoral, Eleni Ntanou carefully examines inversions of gender, genre, geography and temporality in the episode; while Aaron Kachuck, taking his cue from the popular observation that Byblis functions both as a double for the poet and as a figure for the birth of writing, takes the episode's Narcissistic qualities to their extreme (both self-referentiality and self-deception), to show the centrality of Byblis for the poem as a whole. (It is not by chance that she is also singled out in the introduction as the symbol for the volume.) Finally, Mathias Hanses cleverly detects an acrostic and telestich in the poem's first book, which he explains as forming an authorial signature in ring-composition with the sphragis and posing a direct challenge to the emperor's claim to immortality.

The book's final section (‘Transformations of the Metamorphoses’) is nominally dedicated to the poem's reception, but at least two of its four contributions include detailed analyses of Ovid's text. Monika Asztalos combines commentary on the history of the poem's textual criticism with close readings of three case studies, all of which include novel solutions and conjectures. Specifically, she focuses on modern editors’ predilection for suspecting interpolation in cases of repetition, contrary to ancient commentary on Ovid's fondness for tautologies (e.g. Sen., Con. Ex. 9.5.17; for a discussion of Ovid's use of syllepsis, see also G. Tissol's 1997 The Face of Nature). While some conjectures appear more attractive than others (e.g. nulli for nullo at Met. 3.400 is a very elegant solution, but I suspect Ovidians will find it hard to accept suam in place of sua in the famous epigrammatic statement of Met. 10.252), the discussions are all enlightening in bringing forward the potential for metamorphosis that is latent in Ovid's lines. Readers will also find hands-on discussion of ‘serpentine’ passages in the Metamorphoses in Philip Hardie's chapter, which provides a compelling pendant to Barchiesi's in focusing on some crucial aspects of the morality (or lack thereof) of Ovidian metamorphosis and specifically in its difference from Christian receptions ‘that operate on a fixed theology of crime and punishment’. The essay combines close readings of how the serpentine transformation of Satan, the devils and sinners in Prudentius’ Hamartigenia, Dante's Inferno 24–25 (sadly not surveyed in the original) and Milton's Paradise Lost borrow from Ovid's Metamorphoses (alongside Virgil and Lucan) to produce a mini-history of how the ‘spectacular’ snakes of pagan epic (one is reminded of the etymology of dracones from Greek δέρκομαι and of the character of Medusa) end up entangled in Christian moralising and become a symbol for the repetition of sin. By contrast, Robin Wahlsten Böckerman's chapter on the Bavarian Commentary (which he edited and translated into English in his 2016 PhD thesis The Metamorphosis of Education: Ovid in the Twelfth-Century Schoolroom) is completely focused on the medieval reception of the poem. The chapter includes a concise and useful summary of the poem's manuscript tradition and an excellent introduction to the main characteristics of the commentary, with hypotheses on its formation.

Louise Vinge and Niclas Johansson end the volume with side-by-side reflections (rather than a co-authored chapter) on their respective work on receptions of Narcissus at half a century of distance (Vinge's 1967 the Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19^th Century and Johansson's 2017 The Narcissus Theme from Fin de Siècle to Psychoanalysis), which provide both an excellent survey of literature on the topic and an insightful look into the variety of methodologies employed to read the poem and its reception from the second half of the twentieth century. Overall, this is no doubt a stimulating collection that will be indispensable for scholars and students alike when working on both general and specific aspects of the Metamorphoses and its critical and literary history.