What J. Porter did for the sublime in The Sublime in Antiquity (2016), Hollis and König do for mountain studies in Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity. They not only expand and complicate the modern conceptualisation of the cultural meaning of mountains, but their dialogic approach significantly revises many current historical and literary assumptions. F. Fleming titled his history of Alpine exploration, Killing Dragons (2000), describing the Alps before the nineteenth century as ‘a source of terror and superstition’ (Fleming, p. 4). Hollis and König set out to disprove this idea, to challenge Fleming's modern notion of exploration as climbing to a summit and to consider the cultural role of mountains beyond the Alps, in Sicily, Greece and the Middle East, for example. Contemporary writers like Fleming and R. Macfarlane in his Mountains of the Mind (2003) have been following a historical and cultural dichotomy established by M.H. Nicolson's influential book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959). Hollis and König might have pointed out that Nicolson's handy dualism was based upon a misreading of J. Ruskin's Modern Painters IV, in which gloom is created for Ruskin by crucifixes and peasant superstition, ‘so that’, Ruskin makes clear, ‘it is not an evil inherent in the hills themselves’ (E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn 6.40). The editors do, however, clearly demonstrate that, prior to the glorification of mountains by romanticism, mountains have not been constructed negatively as popular historians would have us believe. Indeed, at any time since antiquity writers have thought of mountains by reference back to more nuanced constructions remembered from their education in the Classics. This is the nature of the dialogue that this book explores: between ages, cultures, geography, national and regional identities, science and arts, gender and environmental responsibility, to name a few of the book's recurring themes. In his chapter D. Whalin writes that ‘the “classical tradition” was not a bridge spanning a chasm anchored on either end by the Second Sophistic and the Renaissance, but a path across a slope, explored and maintained by thinkers of every generation who perpetually had to consider anew their relationship with the past – be it enshrined in literature or in the landscape itself’ (p. 104).

In order for the reader to appreciate the accumulating dialogue between these themes and the texts from which they materialise, the book's twelve chapters are not grouped into sections. As in other respects, this indicates how carefully this book has been thought through, and the editors’ introduction alone would impress a time-limited reader with the magisterial clarity of its articulation of its aims and achievements. Unsurprisingly, the name of Conrad Gessner, the sixteenth-century botanist, becomes one touchstone of this book, resolving, as he did, to climb each year for pleasure in the modern sense, but looking to Graeco-Roman texts for orientation whilst being both scientifically curious and aesthetically appreciative. Following Porter's backward extension of the sublime, D. Hooley argues that ‘Gessner's sublime mountains may seem to exist in a kind of open diachronic and even organic continuum rather than as specimens in the superseding and displacing march of intellectual history’ (p. 33). That Gessner was not, as Fleming treats him, an isolated aberration in that march, is demonstrated by S. Ireton's chapter on Gessner's contemporary Josias Simler. The American Victorian alpinist W.A.B. Coolidge translated Simler's 1574 work De Alpibus Commentarius, which consulted all extant ancient Greek and Roman texts that made reference to the Alps. Simler's 150-page Latin text was translated, expanded and updated in Coolidge's 1904 French text running to 900 pages. Additional texts included by Coolidge required 63 pages of notes on these appendices. Once again, Ireton argues, assumptions about ‘pre-modern’, ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’ boundaries are demolished as ‘thresholds of mountain modernities’ are challenged (p. 80). In 1574 Simler was apparently knowledgeable about avalanche survival, roped glacier travel, guides, hypothermia, glacier goggles and crampons.

On the matter of mountaineering techniques such thresholds are challenged elsewhere in the book. H. Archer's chapter ‘Mountains, Identity and the legend of King Brennus in the Early Modern English Imaginary’ quotes a passage from John Higgins's compilation of verse histories, The Mirror for Magistrates (1587):

Archer wonders how a vicar who spent most of his life in South Somerset could ‘have found inspiration for this startling and evocative passage’ (p. 207). Her answer is Silius Italicus’ description of Hannibal's crossing the Alps, which she quotes, thereby proving, yet again, ‘a provocative interaction between Roman texts and ancient British history’ (p. 208).

The editors claim that some corners of research in the book are blanks on the map of the history of scholarship, and certainly C. Bray's chapter ‘Mountains of Memory: a Phenomenological Approach to Mountains in Fifth-century bce Greek Tragedy’ breaks new ground in mountain studies. Euripides’ Bacchae, Bray argues, evokes an apparently contradictory response in the audience, who recognise its mountains as both mythological fantasies and powerful landforms they remember as bodily experience. On the other hand, some famous apparent memories of ascents turn out to be possible fantasies shaped by the texts of antiquity. G.D. Williams examines Petrarch's 1336 ascent of Mont Ventoux (a 300-year early aberration for Macfarlane), Pietro Bembo's 1493 ascent of Etna and particularly Patrick Brydone's account of his 1770 ascent of Etna to consider ‘that delicate transition point between “real” description high up the mountain and the giddy sublimity of a heightened inner condition’ (p. 166). Brydone's account, writes Williams, ‘is arguably informed by what he knew to be the many ingenious symbolic meanings that had been attributed to the volcano from Hesiod onwards’ (p. 179). C. Duffy explores those ‘ingenious meanings’ in his chapter ‘“Famous from all Antiquity”: Etna in Classical Myth and Romantic Poetry’, which concludes by producing a contrast between Erasmus Darwin's positive use of volcanic processes in his poem ‘The Economy of Vegetation’ (1791) and Anna Seward's response in her critique of the industrialisation of natural beauty in her poem ‘To Colebrooke Dale’ (1799), in which ‘grace’ and ‘bloom’ now have ‘their silent reign | Usurped by Cyclops’ (p. 49). Duffy points out that ‘Virgil's descriptions of Etna in the Aeneid and of the Cyclopes in the Georgics seem the obvious precursor texts here’ (p. 49).

The geographical and historical reach of this book are completed by four chapters that also demonstrate its intellectual originality. Whalin's overview of late antique Christian constructions of mountains deals with actual locations of biblical associations and those associated with specific saints’ cults, although Whalin surprisingly observes that ‘sacred topography was not a static resource’ in that a living tradition continued to create new holy spaces (p. 98). Many of these spaces were mountain sites of retreat, the subject of J.H. Koelb's chapter ‘Erudite Retreat: Jerome and Francis in the Mountains’, in which a discussion of the paradoxes of asceticism – ‘there is no point in discouraging activities that tempt nobody’ (p. 111) – leads to important insights, such as: ‘Oros enfolds an ancient understanding of mountains as liminal spaces that mediate between opposing forces: civilisation and barbarism, culture and nature, the familiar and the alien, the human and the divine, the past and the present, and later, the Christian and the pagan’ (p. 127).

Of course, revisiting summits of sacred or classical association developed a nineteenth-century Mediterranean travel literature that König explores in relation to Edward Dodwell's book on his tours in the Peloponnese. König argues that Dodwell, an Irish traveller and painter, saw both the picturesque and the classical with an aesthetic appreciation of a continuing past from the mountain tops of Greece. Taking Dodwell's book seriously as mountain literature and drawing conclusions from reading it intratextually for its mountain experiences has been another neglected area of research. Thomas Jefferson's Romantic mountainscapes are better known, and A.M. Jordan's chapter on them does not avoid his dependence upon enslaved labour. Jefferson's classicising vision of the mountaintop villa Monticello he built as an Epicurean retreat in Virginia might have been more literally linked by Jordan to his following in a historical tradition of slavery in building classical civilisation, rather than it being just an unfortunate context of a life ‘surrounded by slavery’ (p. 143). Certainly, Jordan points out that ‘this double character of Thomas Jefferson as both planter and pastoralist speaks to the complexity of his mountain landscape as a place of both beauty and exploitation’ (p. 143). But a black American reader might feel, as this white British reader does, that more needs to be said. Indeed, ‘slavery’ is missing from the index to the book.

The final chapter by P.H. Hansen takes Mont Ventoux as ‘a standpoint to reassess some contemporary representations of the Anthropocene’ within a longer continuum (p. 216). Archaeologists have found a succession of summit chapels on the mountain indicating a continuous reinvention of its cultural meaning. The local poet and wartime Resistance leader René Char wrote in protest at the 1965 decision to locate nuclear missile silos on the summit. ‘Stone man and space man were succeeded by “scorched earth man” in a Char poem of 1968’, Hansen reports (p. 223). In 1990 UNESCO declared Ventoux a ‘biosphere reserve’ that combines conservation and sustainable development (p. 224). It is tempting to read Hansen's view of the plural and overlapping histories and meanings of Ventoux in the dilemmas and contradictions of the Anthropocene as a re-running of the seventeenth-century debate that Hollis charts in her chapter. ‘We will never depend wholly upon their credit, nor assert any thing upon the authority of the Ancients which is not first prov'd by natural Reason, or warranted by Scripture’, wrote Thomas Burnet in 1684. Hansen's chapter invites a questioning of what might now be considered ‘natural Reason’ or ‘the authority of the Ancients’. Burnet championed a flat mountainless Christian paradise against the view from the mountaintop in the Aeneid, and he denigrated the Golden Age of Ovid's Metamorphoses. If mountains still offer spaces for contemplation in the Anthropocene, one text that is in urgent need of our understanding is Ovid's, cited here from Ted Hughes's Tales From Ovid (1997). After the creator instructed ‘the mountains to rear up | Humping their backs’, he ‘sculpted man from his own ectoplasm’ ready for the Age of Gold: ‘This age understood and obeyed | What had created it. | Listening deeply, man kept faith with the source’ (Hughes, p. 8). From Mont Ventoux Hansen might ask: What is ‘the source’? What constitutes ‘listening deeply’? What would ‘understanding’ demand of us?