G. Sears, P. Keegan and R. Laurence's edited volume is a fascinating examination of the ways in which text, space and time interacted in the Latin West. This collection of essays is formed around a core of six papers delivered at the 2009 Roman Archaeology Conference in Ann Arbor.

The volume is broken into four parts. The first part, ‘Writing, Reading, Movement and Time’, contains four papers that ‘seek to understand the everyday actions of writing against the concepts of physical movement in the city and the role of time’ (2). This section starts with a useful translation of the first chapter of M. Corbier's 2006 book, originally published in French, here entitled ‘Writing in Roman Public Space’. It provides an admirable overview of the types of texts with which inhabitants of Rome would be faced when moving throughout the city. Of particular interest are the distinctions she makes between permanent and temporary texts, and between official and unofficial texts, and her concluding remarks about ‘weak literacy’. In the following chapter, Keegan uses an example from Isola Sacra to highlight both the diversity of the suburban funerary landscape lining the roads outside Rome and the depth of demographic and cultural information that can be drawn from funerary monuments.

In the third paper, D. J. Newsome introduces time as an aspect of written space in the course of his discussion of the appropriation of ‘official’ spaces through non-official texts. He applies Michel de Certeau's theories of ‘spatial tactics’ to the city of Rome. Newsome demonstrates the means by which official spaces and texts could be subverted by graffiti and manipulation of official texts. His discussion of clandestine and mostly nocturnal production of non-official text is particularly interesting and raises intriguing questions about official space and time. This last issue is taken up in R. Hannah's contribution which outlines the relationship between Fasti Anni, Fasti Consulares and Fasti Triumphales, and provides some further discussion of the significance of Augustus’ Horologium.

The second group of papers is given the subtitle ‘Written Space and Social Groups’. In this section, T. Hillard analyses the literary evidence relating to the policies of Tiberius Gracchus, the suppression of Gaius Gracchus and the assassination of Julius Caesar. Hillard demonstrates very clearly that graffiti could have a meaningful effect on policy and politics in Rome. R. S. Garraffoni and R. Laurence's contribution changes gears by employing graffiti as a means to illuminate the use of public space by identifying locations used for education and recreation in Pompeii. Emily Hemelrijk picks up on the theme of examining segments of the urban population by exploring the rôle of women in ‘written space’ by showing that while women are very under-represented in epigraphy, they assumed greater prominence as recipients of honorary statues and as dedicators of statues and public buildings throughout the first three centuries of the Empire and that the epigraphy of these women betrays concerns with social status, civic merit and female virtues. To conclude this section, E. Baldwin, H. Moulden and R. Laurence return to the idea of using graffiti to reconstruct the use of spaces and individual movement by attempting to recontextualize the graffiti from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae by the use of quantitative analysis, space syntax and visibility graph analysis. Their results suggest the ubiquity of children, reveal the movement of slaves in the villa and demonstrate the great potential of such detailed analysis.

In the section ‘Written Space and Building Type’, F. Trifilò examines thirty-four inscriptions to establish that platea may refer to a broad monumentalized street or a small open square. He further suggests that the epigraphic recognition of plateae is both ‘place-making’ and transformative. That is to say that inscriptions formalize pre-existing spaces by labelling them in public texts. In the following chapter, A. Cooley reconstructs the epigraphic experience of visitors to baths and demonstrates that writing on and within Roman baths in the form of monumental inscriptions, statue bases and mosaics, served not only to commemorate benefactors, the imperial family and deities, but also to advertise the amenities of particular baths and to promote their use as sources of health and enjoyment.

Sears’ chapter provides a well-considered analysis of Severan influence on the written spaces of North Africa. The article is of particular note for its thoughtful statistical analyses of the relatively high numbers of Severan inscriptions to be found in North Africa. He notes, however, that this is partially in line with the gradual increase in commemorative and dedicatory inscriptions throughout the imperial period. He also demonstrates that new ‘epigraphic spaces’ such as fora and plazas were codified in the Severan period, as a function of increasing urbanization and wealth in North Africa, but that they rarely replaced previously dominant venues of aristocratic and imperial display. S. Esmonde Cleary argues that cities were unique as non-military epigraphic spaces in the West. He conducts a case study of Aquitania which supports his case but also introduces the possible exception of rural shrines. The article also includes discussion of epigraphy as a lieu de mémoire for local communities and the demographics of commemorators and commemorated. Louise Revell conducts a detailed examination of the fora of three towns in Baetica in order to show that they played an important part in demonstrating these towns’ commitment to the Roman ideal of urbanism. She also argues that the fora communicated this message of urbanism to locals and visitors alike.

Each of these articles is well-written and informative and the whole collection is bound together by a stimulating introduction by Laurence and Sears and a fascinating afterword by Keegan, both of which are worthy of close attention. As a whole, this volume rewards reading cover-to-cover, although certain chapters will undoubtedly draw the attention of specialists. For example, the current reviewer was particularly struck by the contributions of Newsome and Hillard because of their concern with the temporality of space and the effectiveness of graffiti. One could argue for a different arrangement of the contributions but the current order highlights some themes common to adjacent chapters. Nevertheless, there are surprising and provocative connections to be made throughout the volume and one is almost guaranteed to find something of interest in it.