The title of this volume aptly represents the vast array of Andrea Alciato’s intellectual accomplishments that made him a figure of international importance during his own lifetime. The editors have produced a volume that is as abundant in scholarship as it is lavish in format. Beginning the collection are two chapters by Anne Rolet and Stéphane Rolet, respectively, that provide a clear road map of the contributions cross-referenced to a useful chronology of Alciato’s reputation and intellectual biography. Twenty-four additional essays follow, divided into five parts, each well researched, erudite, and informative. The first part, dealing with Alciato’s earliest writings, shows him already developing his philological methods, emphasizing the historical context of texts combined with geography, lexicology, numismatics, and onomastics. As one sees in Lucie Claire’s study, a number of these traits can be found in Alciato’s In Cornelium Tacitum Annotationes, where Alciato praises the historian for his elegantia and moral utility. Denis L. Drysdall treats the rarely examined satirical invective In Bifum, where Alciato excoriates his elementary-school teacher Giovanni Vincenzo Biffi for pederasty. Jean-Louis Charlet offers an essay remarkable for the depth of its linguistic analysis, examining the verbal structures of Alciato’s Latin translation of 168 epigrams from the Greek Anthology followed by five pages of tabular charts on metrics.

The second part highlights Alciato’s methods, practices, and genres of law. Bruno Méniel points out the role of practicality in the first part of the De Verborum Significatione, which functions as a praelectio with the didactic aim to organize what would be scattered subjects into useful topics. Juan Carlos d’Amico, focusing on Alciato’s concepts of empire, nicely nuances the interactions of pope, emperor, and the community of Christians that tip the balance to papal supremacy. Fascinating is Olivier Guerrier on Alciato’s reliance on the analogical and fictional logics of “as if” (“comme si,” 169) to clarify the law. Anne Rolet’s long, multifaceted essay demonstrates how a single emblem of Alciato, Nupta contagioso, creates a nodal point for law, medicine, Virgil’s Aeneid, syphilis, and women’s plight in legal forced marriages.

The volume’s third part addresses relations between Alciato and his contemporaries. Christine Bénévent studies Alciato’s anxieties about the possible public reaction to his controversial Contra Vitam Monasticam, and Richard Cooper pinpoints Alciato’s divided loyalties and vagabondage between Italy and France caused by his calculated, unending pursuit of security, fame, and financial profit. In a bibliographical study Raphaële Mouren concludes that given 124 editions of Alciato’s works produced in Lyon, many for the first time, one cannot hold that his principal printers were at Basel. The fourth part of the volume widens the reader’s knowledge of Alciato and the arts. Stéphane Rolet proposes new sources for the genesis of Alciato’s famous emblem Vertuti fortuna comes in a device of Ludivico Sforza and in a medal of Johannes Secundus related to drawings of Leonardo. Paulette Choné places Alciato’s emblem In colores in relation to its depiction in various different editions of the Emblemata and to the Parerga and finds that, rather than in abstract symbolism, the connotations of colors are best understood in the vignettes of emblems. Michael Bath reports on the present state of emblem research in the decorative arts and with twenty-seven illustrations tracks down adaptions from Alciato in tapestries, paneling, ceilings, and lintels from England, Scotland, France, and Switzerland.

The fifth and final part concerns the editorial evolution of the Emblemata, their diffusion, and posterity. Mino Gabriele considers visual mnemonics key to the success of the Emblemata, and David Graham uses the words “Hercules triplex” (411) to mark three key developments of the emblem genre: Alciato’s influential creativity, Claude-François Menestrier’s typology of emblems, and the historical criticism of Daniel Russell. Alison Adams’s concise, punctilious study of the emblem Nupta contagioso gives telling lessons on how its vernacular translations into French, Spanish, and German have rhetorical aims that differ from Alciato’s, from one another, and from the expectations of modern readers. Alison Saunders, noting that no printed edition of translations of Alciato’s emblem book appeared in English until the twentieth century (those of Whitney and Palmer being adaptions), brings to light a late sixteenth-century English manuscript translation in pen and ink, illustrated, partially colored, and aesthetically valuable in its own right. Closing the volume is Gloria Bossé-Truche’s detailed study of the last Spanish Renaissance translation/commentary of Alciato’s emblems by Diego López de Valencia, titled La Declaración magistral sobre los Emblemas de Alciato (1615), aiming to enforce Catholic orthodoxy.

This volume is highly recommended for providing valuable, updated scholarship traversing Alciato’s life and multifaceted legacy that reevaluates historiography and criticism, brings new works to light, engages the arts, and tracks contemporary and latter reception.