Late Encyclopedic Approaches to Knowledge in Latin Literature

Histories of Latin literature have often treated the period from the second to the seventh centuries as an epilogue to the main action – and yet the period includes such towering figures as Apuleius, Claudian, Prudentius, Augustine, Jerome, Boethius, and Isidore. The Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature, with fifty chapters by forty-one scholars, is the first book to treat the immensely diverse literature of these six centuries together in such generous detail. The book shows authors responding to momentous changes, and sometimes shaping or resisting them: the rise of Christianity, the introduction of the codex book, and the end of the western Roman Empire. The contributors' accounts of late antique Latin literature do not shy away from controversy, but are always clear, succinct, and authoritative. Students and scholars wanting to explore unfamiliar areas of Late Antiquity will find their starting point here.

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 395 its own sometimes cumbersome and inelegant subtitle. The rationale for this is clear, but it does have the undesirable effect of significantly disrupting the reading process, a paradoxical quality in a work which seeks to deepen our fascination with the immersive potential of stories. University of Bristol Vanda Zajko The Reception of the HOMERIC HYMNS. Edited by Andrew Faulkner, Athanassios Vergados, and Andreas Schwab. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 409, 17 figures. As the HOMERIC HYMNS offer stories and epithets about the gods not found elsewhere in ancient literature, and as they were often (but not always) ascribed to Homer, one might have suspected that they enjoyed a wide circulation in the Greco-Roman world. But that was not necessarily the case. The longer hymns are certainly part of performance in the archaic and classical periods but, other than Thucydides’ reference to the hApollo at 3.104.2–6, direct quotations or clear allusions to them are scarce in the classical period. Plato, for example, never mentions them in spite of his frequent reference to hymnic poetry. The Library at Alexandria most likely preserved a collection of the Hymns in some form (although certainly not in the form we have today) but there is no clear reference to them by Hellenistic scholars. In Callimachus and Apollonius one can occasionally detect learned quotations or strong verbal echoes, again mostly to the longer hymns, but here again verbal evidence is far more scant than one might have expected. Philodemus in the first century b.c.e. “may have brought the collection to Rome,” as the editors write (21). But, again, in what form? Even then the relative paucity of strong verbal echoes in Latin literature is noteworthy. A single copy of thirty-one hymns survives into late antiquity, it being the sole ancestor of the later Renaissance manuscripts, but our understanding of the transmission of the Hymns in the Byzantine period is limited. Only from the Renaissance forward can we clearly speak of influence and imitation. All this makes the study of reception, prior to the Renaissance, spotty and problematic. The volume consists of an Introduction by its three editors and seventeen chapters arranged in five parts. Part I on “Narrative and Art” comprises a single chapter, by Jenny Strauss Clay, containing a fine discussion of “representation” of stories in texts and on Greek vases. Focusing primarily on the hHermes, Clay suggests that a Caretan blackfigure hydria (circa 530 b.c.e.) “combines and compresses” (46) numerous scenes from the hymn (the theft and hiding of the cattle, the dais, and Apollo’s attempt to bind his brother, among others) into a compelling narrative of its own. She also proposes that the hymn was performed in the context of the symposium. Part II on “Latin Literature” (five chapters) jumps abruptly to the Roman period, followed by Part III on “Imperial and Late Antique Literature” (five chapters) and Part IV on “Byzantine Literature” (two chapters) before the study of reception gains firmer ground in Part V on “Renaissance and Modern Literature” (four chapters), which in this volume ends in 1826. To the editors’ credit, all of the chapters are unusually well integrated, due to a gathering of all the contributors to discuss pre-circulated papers. Prior to the Renaissance, much in this reception story remains speculative. Hard evidence is often lacking; attested parallels are more often than not thematic or structural rather than verbal or textual. One frequently reads contributors describing influences or reworkings as “plausible,” “possible,” “detected,” or even “weak.” With the paucity of 396 PHOENIX firmer evidence, the editors in the Introduction are overly confident, in my judgment, in asserting the Hymns’ popularity in the Hellenistic period and in making claims about intertextuality in this period. In particular, they are too quick to dismiss S. Douglas Olson’s detailed argument (8, n. 35)1 that many of the repeated phrases detected in this period stem from commonplace archaic hexameter phrasings. In short, the volume would have been stronger with a full chapter devoted to reception in the classical and Hellenistic periods (rather than the brief summary it offers, 4–15). Especially when dealing with...

SE HA ESTUDIADO EL DIALOGO COMO GENERO LITERARIO TEORICO, SIGUIENDO EL MODELO DE SCHAEFFER. COMPROBADA SU DEFINICION COMO CLASE REGIDA POR LA MODULACION HIPERTEXTUAL, SE HA ANALIZADO LA SUBCLASE "DIALOGO NARRATIVO", CONCRETAMENTE LOS DIALOGOS DE SULPICIO SEVERO, QUE CONSTITUYEN EL PRIMER DIALOGO NARRATIVO EN LATIN. ESTOS HAN ACTUADO COMO HIPOTEXTO PARA LOS DIALOGOS NARRATIVOS DE GREGORIO MAGNO, EN LA ANTIGUEDAD TARDIA, Y PARA UNA LINEA GENEALOGICA QUE SE PROLONGA POR TODA LA EDAD MEDIA. SE HAN INTEGRADO EN LA SUBCLASE LOS TEXTOS PREVIOS (DESDE EL "DE POETIS" ARISTOTELICO, A LOS TEXTOS DIALOGADOS DE LOS PERIPATETICOS, PASANDO POR LA "VIDA DE EURIPIDES" DE SATIRO, Y ALGUNOS DE LUCIANO. EN HIPOTESIS SE HA TRABAJADO CON LOS FRAGMENTOS DE TEXTOS PERDIDOS, COMO EL "CATO MINOR" DE CICERON. ADEMAS, SE HAN TENIDO EN CUENTA TEXTOS TEORICOS SOBRE EL DIALOGO, COMO EL DE BASILIO DE CESAREA O EL DE ELIO TEON SOBRE LA NARRACION DIALOGADA. EL MODELO TEORICO HA SIDO EL DEL ARCHITEXTO DE GENETTE, EN EL QUE HAN ENTRADO, JUNTO AL GENERO LITERARIO UN ANALISIS SOBRE EL GENERO DEL DISCURSO (BAJTIN, TODOROV), CONCRETAMENTE EL PASO DE LA ORALIDAD A LA ESCRITURA EN LA ANTIGUEDAD TARDIA, Y LOS MODOS DE ENUNCIACION, CON UNA DIVISION DEL GENERO EN CUATRO SUBCLASES, Y UN ANALISIS NARRATOLOGICO DE TODO EL TEXTO.

In the late first century CE, the myth of Narcissus became one of the most frequently represented subjects in Roman wall painting. The well-known, often reproduced images from the House of Octavius...

The Roman official and intellectual Pliny the Elder’s Natural History constitutes our primary source on the figural arts in Classical antiquity. Since the Middle Ages, Pliny’s encyclopaedia has enraptured the imaginations of its readers with anecdotes and narratives about the lives and accomplishments of the great artists of the Greek past. This book explores the ways in which materials and artistic processes are constructed in Natural History. In doing so, this work reflects current developments in the study of Graeco-Roman art, where the scientific analysis of sculptural stones, pigments, and metal alloys, as well as a more detailed understanding of technologies and workshop practices, has imposed radical changes in the methods and theoretical models used to approach ancient artefacts. The argument considers the role of materials in discourses on Nature, as well as their semantics and the language used to account for artistic creation. Discussion of artistic techniques addresses the discovery of resources and technologies, and the discursive implications of creation and viewing. By focusing on particular passages and exemplary case studies, this book explores the ideological, moral, and intellectual preoccupations that guide Pliny’s construction of materialities and human ingenuity in a period characterised by a rapidly-evolving economic landscape. The material and performative aspects of artistic, manual creation provided this early encyclopaedist with the fundaments for constructing and explaining his view of Rome’s imperial mission and, more specifically, of his own strategies as a collector and recorder of ‘all’ the memorable facts of Nature. This book will be of significant interest to scholars of classical archaeology, Greek and Latin literature, social and economic history, and reception studies.

Reviewed by: The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari James Uden Aaron Pelttari. The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 190. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5276-5. “The space that remains,” according to Aaron Pelttari’s adventurous new book, is the openness that characterizes late antique Latin literature, its invitation for the audience to participate in the production of meaning. In direct contrast to the outmoded view of later Latin literature dominated by the slavish repetition of earlier tropes, Pelttari argues that the literature of the fourth century consistently celebrates presence–the presence of the reader, who is called upon to [End Page 581] play a vital, vibrant role in activating the meaning of the text. The Space That Remains shows us an era enamored not with the wit of individual poet geniuses, but rather with the power of readers to reinterpret and rearrange the building blocks of the Latin literary tradition. This is an exciting book. The first three chapters examine three distinct aspects of fourth-century literary culture. The first discusses commentaries on Christian and pagan texts by Jerome, Augustine, Macrobius, and Servius. Pelttari argues that these commentators emphasize the multiple layers of meaning in their source texts in order to create “the need for vigorous interpretation” by fourth-century readers. The second chapter focuses on the ways in which prefaces to the poems of Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius explicitly present the text not as a timeless artifact, but as grounded within a particular context, constructed according to certain parameters, and awaiting (and requiring) interpretation. The third chapter examines a series of fourth-century poems that, Pelttari argues, remain “incomplete” without readers’ participation: the mind-bendingly complex figural poetry of Optatian, the allegorical Psychomachia of Prudentius, and the centos, stitched together out of “patchwork” quotations of Virgilian verse. For Pelttari, far from illustrating the degeneracy (vel sim.) of late antique taste, these texts epitomize the period’s central literary preoccupation: exploring the power of the reader to construct new meaning from preexisting textual components. This is not a long book, and Pelttari moves quickly. There is sometimes a sense that he is surveying rather than closely analyzing his texts, but the fact that he has synthesized such a broad array of evidence into a coherent argument is impressive indeed. Far bolder is the book’s fourth and final chapter, which offers a distinctive late antique challenge to theories of allusion dominant in Latin literary studies since the 1990s. “Insofar as they resist the movement toward intertextuality,” Pelttari writes (160), late antique allusions “work in ways that are counter to received notions of the dynamics of appropriation in Latin poetry” (note the author’s own allusion to the subtitle of Stephen Hinds’s agenda-setting Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry [Cambridge 1998], an important interlocutor for this chapter’s discussion). Pelttari outlines different types of idiosyncratically postclassical forms of allusion: the “nonreferential allusion,” in which the words of the allusion have become separable from their source text and the reader is not challenged to remember its original context; “juxtaposed allusions,” in which disconnected fragments of classical texts are juxtaposed with one another; and the “apposed allusion,” which draws attention to its own lack of fit within its new poetic surroundings. Late antique forms like the cento, constructed entirely out of “micro-allusions,” seem to have reached a sort of intertextual overload. They surely call for a different approach, and yet Pelttari’s category of “nonreferential allusion” sits uneasily with the strong emphasis elsewhere in the book on the reader’s power to make meaning. Even the small textual patches in the cento form were said in chapter 3 to open the potential of referring back to their source text if the reader chooses to “follow that path” and interpret them (101). In this chapter and scattered throughout the book, Pelttari also broaches big questions about “classicism” and “postclassicism,” aesthetic categories intriguingly unmoored from chronology. These ideas perhaps needed to be articulated in a clearer and more unified way. Nonetheless, if...

This paper presents and discusses some aspects of Late Medieval Latin literature. The first part focusses on the peculiarities of its textual transmission. There is a huge amount of late medieval manuscripts, many of which have not yet been catalogued, let alone described. Yet it is safe to assume that there have been heavy losses, as late medieval paper manuscripts containing liturgy or pious texts were destroyed in great numbers during Reformation and the dissolution of monasteries in different European countries. The collectors of the early modern period usually preferred older parchment codices, although individual interests may have helped to preserve late medieval texts. These circumstances must be taken into account when trying to assess the distribution of a particular work. The second part concentrates on the readers of Latin literature. The flourishing research on literacy and on women’s monasticism has brought new insights into the uses and distribution of texts. Three examples show that Latin texts probably had more readers than it was once assumed. Finally, a third part argues for the necessity of considering late medieval literature as a whole in spite of all differences, and especially of taking into account the relationship between Humanism and Scholasticism. This leads to a better understanding of the circumstances which favoured the expansion of Humanism.

Let me start with a fascinating volume that Paolo Felice Sacchi and Marco Formisano have edited on Epitomic Writing in Late Antiquity and Beyond, the first volume in the new series sera tela, devoted to ‘Studies in Late Antique Literature and its Reception’, edited by Marco Formisano. This inaugural volume gets the new series off to a very good start. Sacchi and Formisano offer a new approach to epitomic writing, seen as a typical product of late antique literary culture. The aim of the volume is to focus not so much on what is lost and cut out in the process of condensation, but on the value of the epitomic as a hermeneutic category as well as on its aesthetic value, both textual and visual. The individual contributions follow this editorial lead admirably closely, examining the interplay of repetition, fragmentation, dismemberment and re-composition, cutting and re-uniting, and defamiliarization, and showing how epitomic writing can be playful and entertaining, how it can represent a sophisticated act of interpretation, and serve as a ‘tool for investigating the very borders and paradoxes of language’ (12), even for conveying a spiritual experience.

Reviewed by: Reading Late Antiquity ed. by Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Mats Malm Serena Causo Reading Late Antiquity Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed and Mats Malm, eds. Heidelberg: Winter-Verlag, 2018. Pp. 267. ISBN: 978-3-8253-6787-9 This book is a collection of thirteen contributions from the conference entitled “Reading Late Antiquity,” held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sweden in 2015, with the aim of exploring the current field of reception studies on Late Antiquity. Despite the different methodologies and the diverse content of the contributions, the collection succeeds in a remarkable coherence of purpose, through a functional partition of the volume in three parts, masterfully arranged to guide the reader from the most traditional interpretations to the most dynamic appropriations of late antique literary heritage throughout the centuries. Common to all the contributions is the willingness to assess the independence and uniqueness of Late Antiquity, in constant exchange with other historical periods. In the first section of the book, “Theoretical Outlooks,” traditional theoretical concepts related to Late Antiquity are reversed, thus offering new interpretations of late antique literature. For example, in “Untimely Antiquity,” James Uden subverts the cliché of “untimeliness” of the late antique and positively describes it as the ability of this literature to contain multiple temporalities, recalling the past and anticipating future spirits and periods. Another old trope is subverted in the study by Marco Formisano. He appropriates the past scholarly definition of “decadent” and turns it into an aesthetic paradigm of Late Antiquity which was responsible of producing a sense of instability and disruption with the earlier literary tradition, resulting in thematic and formal features (e.g. fragmentation, allegories, displacement and discontinuity) which are distinctive to this period. Jesús Hernández Lobato advocates Late Antiquity as a major parallel for the postmodern era in which a problematic relationship between philosophy and language turns into a condition of apophaticism, a pronounced mysticism, a tendency to deconstruction, expressions of a crisis of the “logocentrism.” The second section of the book, “Decadence and Decline,” expands the discussion of late antique literature to decadentism and investigates those views that shaped the common perception of Late Antiquity as a period of decline thereafter. Late antique aesthetic, poetics and sensibilities seem to find a close parallel in the postmodernist culture. Accordingly, Olof Heilo’s study convincingly argues that when Burckhardt in his early work Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen (1835) reinforced the idea of degeneration (ausarten) of late antique literature, he was projecting onto it the strong contempt of his own time, in which he experienced a similar sense of decadence and disharmony. In his own contribution, Scott McGill uses Huysmans’s novel, À rebours (1884), to demonstrate the marginalization of late Latin literature in nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle France, when late antique literature was charged with aesthetic value only among decadent movements; Des Essaints, “the decadent antihero” of the novel, is taken as the paradigm of this [End Page 269] marginalization. A comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the hegemony of modern Europe emerges prominently after the World War I, especially in O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. In his contribution Stefan Rebenich discusses the innovative perceptions of Late Antiquity developed by Spengler that transcend stereotypes and especially value the continuity of this period. Rutilius Namatianus and his unfinished poem De redito suo are the focus of Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed’s contribution. The narration of the melancholic travels of this fifth-century Latin poet through the ruins of the Roman Empire and his dreams of recovery of the past glory were praised in post-revolutionary France and even more during the Italian decadentist movement, where it gained great popularity in the fascist context. In the twentieth century the Viennese writer Alma Johanna Koenig chose Byzantium as the setting for her work Der Heilige Palast (1922), and Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla similarly set La Fiamma (1934) in Byzantine Ravenna. The vitality of Late Antiquity as an historical frame is among the motivations that underlie Henriette Harich-Schwarbauer’s contribution on Koenig’s work: she highlights how the empress Theodora of Der Heilige Palast moves in a...

This chapter offers an overview and summary of the study. It also provides an Epilogue that traces briefly some major changes and continuities in later Latin literature that bring out some of the distinctive features of these earlier representations and remind us that many of our conceptions of the garden are post-Classical. Most notably, the later literary tradition of gardens in Greek and Latin literature is dramatically altered by the influence of the Jewish and Christian traditions, which introduce new allegorical dimensions to the representations of gardens. There is, however, at the same time a remarkable continuity in the techniques and functions of garden descriptions, due to the similar writing and reading practices of late Latin poets with those of the classical past and their desire to associate themselves with the earlier literary tradition. The classical texts and their garden depictions surveyed in this study remained important models for the Latin poets of late antiquity. The cultural value of the villa and its grounds and gardens continues as an important feature of later Roman masculine self-definition. Garden imagery endures as a self-reflexive symbol of aesthetics and poetics, but it gains a Christian interpretation, either as a metaphor for the cultivation of the soul or as an earthly image of the Garden of Eden or Heavenly Paradise.

The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. The Poetics of Late Latin Literature attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.

Reviewed by: Confessions I–IV Ann A. Pang-White Augustine. Confessions I–IV. Latin Edition Edited with Introduction and Commentary by Gillian Clark. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. x + 198. $59.95 cloth; $21.95 paper. Clark’s text and commentary for Confessions I–IV aim to be usable by those who are new to Augustine and unfamiliar with late Latin, late antiquity, Christian theology, and the Scriptures. Therefore, this volume is mainly designed to offer a textbook for classroom use to students and teachers of Latin literature, theology and Church history. In this volume, C. follows the Latin text of CCL and James O’Donnell’s 1992 edition closely. There is no apparatus criticus for the text, since C. believes that there are few textual problems which seriously affect the reader’s interpretation. Nonetheless, when there are textual problems, they are given excellent discussion in the commentary. C. assumes that her readers have Henry Chadwick’s English translation in hand, so there is no facing translation of the Latin text in this volume. The introduction is concise and accessible to students who are unfamiliar with Augustine’s writing style and thought, and this is particularly desirable in an introductory volume. The commentary will be especially helpful to students who are quite competent in Latin and whose major is in Latin literature. It alerts readers to the verbal echoes and allusions in Augustine’s brilliant Latin. Since C. does not discuss in her commentary the grammatical structure of difficult Latin sentences, the commentary will probably be of limited help for students new to Latin. However, compared to O’Donnell’s three volumes, C.’s commentary will be more accessible to such students, since it is simpler and is mainly in English without quoting other Latin texts for purposes of comparison. Students and teachers in philosophy or theology will probably find the commentary somewhat disappointing. It is helpful but not deep enough. For example, though C. emphasizes in her commentary the importance of the theme of the threefold human weakness (1 John 2:16) 1 in the Confessions, e.g., 1.10.16, 2.6.13, etc., C. does not comment on its philosophical significance: for example, explaining how the threefold human weakness in itself is not necessarily sinful, but can be the contributing cause of sins. Her commentary on freedom in 2.6.14 and 4.4.8 has, I believe, similar limitations. The index is wisely divided into two sections: (1) important Latin words and (2) general concepts or proper names in English. For students, such an index is useful in indicating the contrast between Latin terms and their English translation. The general purpose of an index is to provide a handy reference to what can be found in the volume. However, some minor defects may hinder this expected function. First, in C’s index, the references to the text are not complete. For example, under the heading “freedom, dangerous,” instead of listing all the references one can find in Book I–IV of Confessions, C. only lists two of them. [End Page 126] Second, sometimes the reference to the text is incorrect. For example, one reference under the heading “freedom, dangerous” given by C. is 2.6.13. But the reader will not find anything about false freedom there. The text reference should be 2.6.14 which nonetheless is correctly given in the Latin index under the word libertas. Readers will however only find one text reference under libertas, which has an even more incomplete list than the one under the English heading “freedom, dangerous.” Third, the arrangement of the subheadings is at times not comprehensive enough. For example, under the heading of freedom, C. only gives one subheading “dangerous.” Since Augustine makes a distinction between true freedom and false freedom, it would be helpful if the subheading of freedom were enlarged to include “true freedom,” and if the references to this were given, such as 4.4.8. Moreover, for a book designed for classroom use and covering only four book of the Confessions, the price of this volume seems well out of the price range of most students. Despite these minor defects, C...

In the New Testament Vulgate, the Greek verb μισέω (“to hate”) is translated either as the Latin verb odi, or as the constructions with support verb odio habeo and odio sum. In order to understand the criteria that explain these three translations, we will analyze, from a diachronic perspective, the use of odio habeo and odio sum in the Latin literature from Plautus to Gellius. We will also discuss, in a synchronic view, their survival in late Latin, with special attention to the different translations of μισέω in the Vulgate and in the previous versions of the Vetus Latina. The semantic and syntactic differences between odio habeo and odio sum, on the one hand, and between these two collocations and the verb odi, on the other, constitute other purpose of this paper: whereas odio sum is the lexical expression of the passive of odi, odio habeo shares contexts with odi, but in complementary distribution.

Primarily a work of interdisciplinary history, Andrew S. Curran's The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment takes readers through a mosaic of ideas and epistemologies about the perceived qualities, potential, and taxonomic place of black Africans throughout the course of the eighteenth century. Amorphous to the point of chaos, European conceptualizations of nonwhite individuals recruited a staggering array of data from fields as diverse as anatomy, natural history, theology, politics, economics, literature, and art. Although Curran openly admits that “tracking a specific genealogy within Africanist thought is a daunting task” (7), he crystallizes his narrative around the consideration of anatomy, which, he argues, penetrated into nearly every realm of Africanist imagination throughout the eighteenth century. At the center of the resultant “protean construct” (15) emerges the “textualized African” (ibid.), a profoundly complicated unit of European ethnography dependent not only on anatomical representations of Africans themselves, but also on the re-presentations of Africanist discourses during the Enlightenment era.Curran's interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw from a wide variety of genres and sources, focusing predominantly on printed material. Of paramount importance is a cluster of influential texts originating in the “high culture” of the Francophone scientific world: Buffon's Histoire naturelle, the corporate effort of the Encyclopédie, Dapper's Description de l'Afrique, academic prize essays, and the writings of the Société des amis des noirs among others. Alongside these fairly well-known sources emerge a host of now little-known, yet contemporaneously momentous, anatomical treatises: Le Cat's Traité de la couleur de la peau humaine (1765) is one such example, as is Meckel's “Recherches anatomiques, sur la nature de l'épiderme, et du réseau, qu'on appellee Malpighien” (1755). Curran draws extensively from travel writing, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and epitomes throughout the work both for support of his particular arguments as well as for general contextual purposes. Visual evidence in the form of ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic engravings enters into his discussion at times, although these elements tend to be ambient and illustrative rather than adopted as discrete elements of an art-historical approach. This reader found Curran's research to be neither encyclopedic nor myopic, but rather a quite judiciously balanced selection from a seemingly endless well of potential sources.In analyzing this broad base of historical material, Curran adopts a sophisticated framework drawing not only from critical race theory—Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness comes to mind—but also from material history and the history of science. Uncommon for works dealing with the history of race, the overarching methodology of the work can best be described as a “readers' history” approach, seeking to “[replicate] the reading practices of an imagined eighteenth-century reader” (18) by starting “where most Enlightenment-era people presumably did: with travelers' accounts and compilations” (ibid.). Subsequent chapters deviate slightly from a strictly reader-based history, as for instance in chapter 3's engaging discussion of the theatrical showing of the 1744 albino. Yet the work's overall focus is very much on the French reading public of the eighteenth century.That said, the first of Curran's many conclusions is perhaps the most obvious: Africanist discourse during the eighteenth century was far from static, and indeed seems to undermine any notion of a cogent, centralized Enlightenment perspective on race (27). More ambitiously, however, Curran draws a broader contrast between the racial thought of the pre-Enlightenment era, when “the concept of blackness came into relief against a synthesis of biblical exegeses and vague physical explanations dating from antiquity” (223) and that of Enlightenment broadly considered. Throughout the eighteenth century, Curran argues, the concept of blackness had been “dissected, handled, measured, weighed, and used as a demonstrable wedge between human categories…. Blackness had become a thing, defined less by its inverse relationship to light than by its supposed materiality” (223–24). In this observation lies one of the book's central theses, namely that anatomical materiality increasingly became the fulcrum by which moral, intellectual, or political statements about black Africans were mobilized. Anatomy ultimately usurped other spheres of Africanist discourses as the perspective on race and its concomitant issues. Although distinctly reminiscent of Voegelin's 1933 work on the internalization of blackness in the eighteenth century, Curran's investigation reaches similar conclusions from quite different starting points. Broadly stated, his analysis centers on four themes emergent from the work's constituent chapters: textuality, sameness, difference, and natural history.Chapter 1, “Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450–1750,” traces accounts of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans from the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries, demonstrating persuasively Curran's initial premise that these largely travel- or pseudo-travel-based narratives “continued to play a critical role in the overall understanding of Africa during the eighteenth century” (31). Curran addresses a large number of texts with varying degrees of depth. Ca' da Mosto, Leo Africanus, Duarte Lopes, Edward Tyson, Olfert Dapper, Jacques Savary, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Cavazzi, Abbé Prévost, and ultimately Rousseau enter into his argument throughout the course of the chapter. Although his primary goal is to establish the textual backdrop against which later racial theories emerged, Curran ensconces within his narrative many of the key ideas that emerge later in his work. Most important among these is the recurrent tension between the Plinian legacy of Africa as the source of perpetual strangeness contrasted with the “desire for a more rational view of Africa” (43) evinced by a large number of early-modern authors.Chapter 2, “Sameness and Science, 1730–1750,” largely focuses on and contextualizes Buffon's account of black Africans in the third volume of his Histoire naturelle. A central paradox that Curran identifies is the fact that as notions of the black African diversified and became more complex (such as in the consideration of caffres, albinos, and blafards,) Buffon approaches a more fundamental sameness between humanity worldwide. Of great importance in this regard is Buffon's espousal of monogenesis, the theory of human origins that posits a single shared ancestor among what we would now term “racial groups.” Of equal importance is the fact that Buffon's text implicitly “[conjures] up a particular group of sensible and sensitive people” (116), an “ideal audience” constituted by an “enlightened readership able to recognize the pitfalls of ethnographic knowledge production and transmission” (ibid.) Such a readership, Curran implies, did not exist in earlier periods. One important corollary of this “sensitive” readership was the introduction of decidedly moral valences to the question of race: the concept of blackness, more than in earlier periods, came to include the “three overlapping realms” (118) of “the moral, the intellectual, and the physical” (ibid.)Chapter 3, “The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African ‘Ethnography,’ 1750-1775,” traces the unforeseen and brutal consequences of Buffon's “degeneration-based ethnography” (116) by shifting the analysis to the “increasingly authoritative and naturalized understanding of the nègre” (118) as essentially inferior to its white counterpart. Whereas diversity engendered a concept of perceived sameness in Buffon, writers such as Voltaire and Formey interpreted diversity as evidence of just that: fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the white and black races. Such destructive perspectives generally drew upon polygenicist ideologies, which ascribe different ancestors to different racial groups. Curran introduces a series of sensitive observations, but one that particularly stands out is that by the end of the 1770s there seems to have evolved a distinct understanding of blackness as a material phenomenon, the interpretation of which projected a definite moral stance in the viewer. On the one hand, this opened up (and, at least in part, emerged from) the “zoological” perspective of proslavery politics; however, the newly moralized perspective on race also allowed for better and more concrete articulations of antislavery positions.Chapter 4, “The Natural History of Slavery, 1770–1802,” coalesces Curran's interpretations of racial thought around the most poignant of issues during the era: that of black chattel slavery. As throughout the work, Curran notes that racial theorists “rarely operated in lockstep with proslavery discourse” (169), thus—with varying degrees of forthrightness—arguing against the common scholarly tradition of analyzing natural history simply as a “subplot within the larger and all-powerful history of slavery” (168). Rather, Curran demonstrates that natural history was wielded by different authors to much different moral ends. Blumbenbach's comparative study of human anatomy, for instance, “served,” in the hands of antislavery thinkers, “to refute the possibility of essential differences between human groups” (173); the very same work equipped pro-slavery thinkers with “the notion that the physical features of the African and other races were measurable [and] constituted the basis for real categories” (ibid.) However authors decided to utilize natural history in their discussions on slavery, the primacy of natural history as an interpretative lens through which to position oneself seems to have become solidified by the early nineteenth century. Curran concludes by meditating on Enlightenment thinkers' “general blindness to the biopolitics of representation” (221), arguing that the “distressing paradox” of Enlightenment slavery was not “the inevitable outcome of an intentional European hegemony per se” (220), but rather that it emerged from the complicated relationship between disciplinary compartmentalization and the rising importance of natural history.Evaluated from the standpoint of the critical philosophy of race, The Anatomy of Blackness serves as a valuable sourcebook for a period of racial thought that remains obscure and woefully understudied. Readers inclined toward system building and broad generalizations will find themselves challenged with the disparity of ideas in contemporaneous eighteenth-century thinkers: the fact of the matter is that eighteenth-century perspectives on race were hugely variegated, not just in their methodology and structure, but also in their moral and political aims. Curran's approach, while “far from morally neutral” (223), carefully traces the contours of eighteenth-century racial thought, especially the rising ascendancy of anatomy and natural history. At times this gives the work a certain feeling of hesitancy toward analyzing the overt power structures incumbent on the objectification and materialization of the black body; but that might also be Curran's point. The black African of Curran's work is profoundly textual, representational, and, in a sense, hypothetical to begin with. The enactment of these racial theories on the ground would be a different and much more jarring story. This reader would recommend Curran's work as a challenging and rich starting point for scholars seeking to understand the complex intersections of imagination, science, and politics in the fabrication of racial thought during the eighteenth century.

Pliny's Natural History is a peculiar book. The scope of its subject matter and the strangeness of its organising principles are almost unique in surviving Latin literature. But despite its apparent singularity, and despite Pliny's rhetorical insistence on its originality in his preface, there has been very little speculation as to where the Natural History might fit in the landscape of Roman historia . This is partly the result of the traditional marginality of ancient scholarship to Classical studies, but the lack of speculation about the provenance of the Natural History is in large part due to its self-evident but anachronistic recognition as ‘an encyclopedia’. The form and content of the Natural History have been naturalised as markers of an encyclopedic text; it is commonly called ‘an encyclopedia’ within the field of Classics, and maintains an important position in any attempt to trace the history of encyclopedism into antiquity. Genre has a diffuse influence on the expectations which we bring to the text, and the methods of reading we apply to it. It provides an important framework for understanding the terms on which we should approach the work, suggesting a context for its production or performance and parameters for its content and conclusions. But once we move outside the well-policed genres of ‘high literature’, we can run into difficulties. There has been much debate as to how particular branches of historia demarcate their boundaries; these new studies have been concerned to examine the interactions between different types of prose writing, to discover the disjunctions and continuities between fiction and non-fiction, biography, and history, rhetoric and philosophy.