As its full title indicates, Classica et Beneventana is a Festschrift in honor of Virginia Brown, one of our great authorities in the fields of Latin paleography and the history of the transmission of classical texts. The volume is a fitting tribute, with its eighteen essays from friends, colleagues, and former students, written in Italian, French, and English, and reflecting the extent to which Virginia Brown has fostered a wide network of scholars who share the same scholarly passions; it shows, too, her important work in training the next generation of researchers who will keep the work alive.

The range of subjects covered by the essays recalls the sweep of Prof. Brown's own interests: the volume is divided into two great halves, one devoted to various tales of the transmission and reception of classical authors in the West, the other to Beneventan manuscripts. As the volume's blurb has it, the essays range from “the development and application of the Beneventan script, comparative codicology, use of early liturgical manuscripts, medieval artes and biblical texts and their readers” to “the reception and dissemination of classical texts during the Italian Renaissance.” The Festschrift genre's usual strengths and weaknesses are to be found here, of course, with some of the essays being stronger than others, some more focused than others, and some ever-so-slightly beside the honorand's point.

The essays by Brown's collaborators in recent years on the Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana are, however, notable for being so clearly related to her own work. Richard Gyug challenges the proposition that the reach of a script, like the Beneventan, and the geographical range of a specific liturgical praxis, like that of Montecassino, may be coterminous. It is an idea Brown herself had queried in her 1991 study of a palimpsested gradual that, while written in a Beneventan hand, contained a hybrid liturgy in which Franciscan elements were grafted onto Beneventan ones. Gyug examines a number of pontificals to confirm that exceptions do indeed seem to be the rule as far as liturgical manuscripts, the Beneventan script, and the idea of a shared geographical zone are concerned. An equally fine example of responding to Brown's work is offered by Charles Hilkins's essay, which draws our attention to the libelli containing martyrologies, necrologies, lessons, and schedules that were read from each day in monastic chapter rooms. Prof. Brown again provided the catalyst, in her study of the Kalendarium Tutinianum, where she provided a handlist of all Beneventan martyrologies and calendars and flagged for other scholars the important information these sorts of texts can supply. Roger Reynolds's contribution, focusing on one particular liturgical manuscript and the conundrum posed by one of its rubrics, affords not only an interesting foray into the codicological, paleographical, and liturgical world of Montecassino, but also an evocative picture of his summers spent with Prof. Brown making the daily pilgrimage to that monastery's great library. Luisa Nardini's essay on the mass for the Octave of Epiphany, Mario Iadanza's study of the inventory of the capitular library of Benevento, and Mariano dell'Omo's detailed description of a book of prayers from S. Domenico di Sora help to flesh out the second half of the Festschrift as three further studies that keep both the Beneventan script and the contribution of Virginia Brown in full view. For that very reason, this second half, the “Beneventana” portion of the volume, hangs together perhaps better than the first half.

That should not be taken as an unqualified criticism of the first part of the volume, however. The sheer range of topics explored here is a potent illustration of the breadth and complexity of the study of classical reception and the many forms it took. From Jacqueline Hamesse's survey of the inclusion of classical authors in medieval philosophical florilegia to Julia Haig Gaisser's examination of Boccaccio as a scribe and annotator of Apuleius and his role in introducing Apuleius to the Florentine humanists, these essays are a rich cross-section of current research. There are tidy focused essays on single manuscripts, such as the case Sandro Bertelli makes that a fragment of the Getica today in Lausanne is not, in fact, a remnant of the lost Codex Heidelbergensis, and Hope Mayo's recounting of the important role in transmission played by a copy of Apicius now owned by the New York Academy of Medicine. There is one edition of a text, Greti Dinkova-Bruun's careful presentation of an anonymous thirteenth-century addition to Peter Riga's Prouerbia Salomonis, and one transcription, Marianne Pade's of Pier Candido Decembrio's fifteenth-century essay on why Homer's poetry is rendered in Latin as prose (which she gamely, if erroneously, calls an edition). All remind us of Virginia Brown's own reputation as a paleographer and editor of texts, and that many young scholars have learned their trade from her. All in all, this is a very fine homage to Virginia Brown.