Charles E. Fantazzi has spent the better part of his career translating, editing, and annotating Neo-Latin texts. Much of this work has been devoted to the pivotal sixteenth-century figures Juan Luis Vives and Erasmus, although he has also contributed two strong volumes on earlier poets to the I Tatti Renaissance Library. His current multivolume translation project of the correspondence of Erasmus will appear in the Collected Works of Erasmus, a series to which he has already made significant contributions. In early 2011, an impressive array of established scholars of Neo-Latin literature convened at East Carolina University to honor his life and scholarship, with the revised proceedings published in this volume. This is an excellent book that will be of interest to scholars of premodern Neo-Latin literature, particularly after 1500.

Timothy Kircher’s introduction sets out the ambitious goal for the book, namely to “illustrate the cultural force of Neo-Latin” (19). The book succeeds in showing the true range of ways in which Neo-Latin literature was significant in premodern Europe, but also the diverse methodologies that scholars now use to approach these texts. All of the contributions in this book are excellent — a rare accomplishment in multiauthor edited volumes. Highlights include James Hankins’s essay, which makes a compelling case for the current vibrancy and interest in the field of Neo-Latin literature. Ronald Witt’s contribution links the differences between monastic and clerical culture in Northern Italy versus France, with the differing success of the twelfth-century Renaissance in the two distinct geographical areas. Timothy Kircher shows, in practice, the different ways that Renaissance translators interpreted their general rule of thumb to translate Greek works ad sententiam rather than ad verbum.

The remainder of the book focuses on writers and developments after 1500. Of particular note, Jeanine de Landtsheer and Marcus de Schepper publish and translate several intriguing epitaphs to Juan Luis Vives. Paul Grendler demonstrates that the Jesuits varied in their response to the works of Vives, a reception that changed over the Cinquecento from wary acceptance of Vives’s pedagogical materials to formal prohibition in the later 1500s. James Estes offers a history of the development of the Collected Works of Erasmus and a strong, compelling argument for the importance of the project to scholars and nonscholars, Latin literate and illiterate alike. Finally, Enrique González traces a fascinating biography of Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, a sixteenth-century polymath who participated in the strong Neo-Latin culture in sixteenth-century Mexico. The book concludes with a published speech in praise of Charles Fantazzi written in the style of the Neo-Latin authors central to premodern European culture.

This book is very much a work of intellectual history, with most of the essays focusing on the interpretation of texts rather than the broader social or political context from which they originated. Yet it is a form of intellectual history that readers cannot help but be drawn into. Few readers — beyond, of course, Charles Fantazzi — will be able to claim deep familiarity with all of the authors, times, places, and topics discussed in this book — topics that range across four centuries, multiple European countries, and two continents. Yet, like the scholarship of the man whom they honor, the essays are accessible in terms of style and content without losing their deep erudition. This book makes a strong case for the inherent interest of these texts and the push to make them more accessible to more readers. It is a fine tribute to a man who has worked tirelessly to encourage and contribute to the fascinating modern renaissance in publishing, translating, and annotating Neo-Latin texts. Historians and the broader reading public are and will remain in his debt for his lifetime of fine scholarship.