This is a work that long needed to be done, and, I am glad to say, has now been done well. Perhaps only cognoscenti will immediately recognize the large lacuna it fills, but scholars working on early humanists and their patrons in Northern Europe, from major figures such as Lefèvre d’Étaples, Erasmus, Reuchlin, Budé, and Cardinal Charles II de Bourbon, to lesser lights such as George Neville, John Shirwood, Michael Hummelberg, Tristan de Salazar, Germain de Ganay, and Louis II de Beaumont, will find this book invaluable. Students of Greek manuscripts, scribes, and émigrés, it goes almost without saying, will appreciate this book for the wealth of material it has brought together in a clear and methodical way.

George Hermonymos first appeared in Italy as a refugee from his native Greece about 1467, working in association with members of the Bessarion circle in Rome and even with Bessarion's enemy George of Trebizond. But by 1473 we find him in Northern Europe, and it is there, mainly in Paris, that he spent the rest of his life, dying sometime between 1508 and 1516. Quite apart from his students and patrons, George is also important for the large number of Greek manuscripts that he transcribed and that survive today in libraries all over Europe. Yet, despite George's obvious significance, the last attempt at a comprehensive study was Henri Omont's article in 1885. Although in the intervening years excellent work on George has been published by some outstanding scholars (including Omont in later articles), Maria Kalatzi is the first to pull all of this together and add a great deal of fresh material and sound judgment based on a deep grounding in the material. I am not convinced by her attempt to rehabilitate George as a teacher, and I am more convinced than ever of his mediocre intellectual ability; but Kalatzi's walk-through of all the evidence has put the study of George and his work on very firm footing.

A complicating factor in any study of George Hermonymos is that he was preceded in Italy by a relative, Charytonymos Hermonymos, who was also a scribe and an intellectual figure. As Kalatzi notes: “Round about 1467 Charitonymos seems to disappear from the scene and Georgios Hermonymos comes to the fore” (39). So Kalatzi dedicates the first chapter of her book to a study of the work of Charytonymos and includes the manuscripts he transcribed in her descriptive catalogue of manuscripts.

The greater part of the book (135–340) is in fact given over to a precious detailed description of all the relevant manuscripts. Virtually everything Kalatzi has to say in the first part about the students, patrons, writings, translations, and other activities of the two Hermonymoi has to be followed up by reading what she has to report concerning the manuscripts in the second part of the book. Kalatzi was also able to include a large number of reproductions: sixteen sets of plates at the end and another fourteen plates interspersed at various points in the narrative of the first part.

Bibliography is an endless enterprise, and, I am sure, new manuscripts and new data will come to light connected to the Hermonymoi. But for the moment at least, Kalatzi seems to me to have done a very complete job. I have only four criticisms to make. The first is that her bibliographical references to figures other than the Heronymoi can be terribly out of date, e.g., in speaking of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (73) she does not know Eugene F. Rice, Jr.’s collection of his letters; or, to take another example, when speaking of Guillaume Fichet's edition of Bessarion's crusade pamphlet (63), she seems ignorant of Margaret Meserve's study of Fichet's edition. Apparently because her attention was focused on the manuscripts, Kalatzi makes not a few historical errors, e.g., treating Giovanni Crastone as a Frenchman (109), saying George of Trebizond came to Rome in 1416 (42), and viewing Andronicus Contoblacas as a seminal figure (44; where she also overlooked my article clarifying his activities and writings).

Oddly enough, given her attention to the manuscripts, Kalatzi omits providing us with an analysis of the evolution of George Hermonymos's hand from his Italian to his French period, something that is of real critical value and that proved important to me when working on George of Trebizond. She refers to this development often enough and several times cites the manuscripts in which one can study the Italian phase (40–43, 269, 305), but does not give a detailed analysis, despite offering (115–30) tables and illustrations analyzing his letter forms, ligatures, and abbreviations.

Finally, the printing is bad at spots (80–81, 196, 308, 315), with chunks of text missing or mangled. But these criticisms reflect only minor blemishes on an otherwise superb accomplishment that will serve scholarship for a long time to come.