The volume edited by Manfred Landfester, The Reception of Antiquity in Renaissance Humanism, is a vast reference work covering multiple disciplines, such as the history of art and culture, intellectual history, philology, linguistics, literature, the social and educational sciences, politics, economics, painting, sculpture, architecture, the empirical and mathematical sciences, philosophy, religion, and the occult lore of astrology, alchemy, and magic.

In times of evolving online dictionaries and encyclopedias, some of which achieve outstanding academic results, perhaps the most remarkable aspect to highlight in this volume is its original approach to the Renaissance period, unusual for a reference work, which addresses each issue from the perspective of Rezeptionsgeschichte, the history of reception. Because of the innumerable historiographic controversies about the Renaissance, students and scholars are usually baffled by the difficulties in setting clear limits for the period or in defining the spirit that enlivens it in a way that is universally accepted. For that reason, meticulous study of the transmission of texts, documents, and objects and dynamic analysis of the survival and transformation of knowledge, customs, and institutions offer a vantage point to understand the profound vicissitudes occurring at the dawn of modernity.

This innovative approach to the period, however, contrasts somewhat with the principles outlined in the volume's brief introduction. The editor opts there for a rigid division of the period and proposes quite narrow and debatable definitions of the historiographic categories of the Renaissance and humanism. He also echoes some old illuministic prejudices regarding the cultural and philosophical mediocrity of the medieval period as a whole or the anti-Christian character of the entire humanist movement, both of which by now should frankly be considered obsolete. However, these limitations are not transferred in general to the voices of the lexicon. For example, the derogatory vision of the Middle Ages and the stark anti-religious conception of humanism are completely absent in Günther Frank's article, “Christianity and the Church.”

The great majority of the lexicon's texts introduce an author or a subject briefly, usually giving an account of their status quaestionis. Some other entries, more stimulating, describe and systematically elaborate unexplored problems. Although it would be impossible for a single reader to properly ponder articles and lemmas from such diverse and numerous disciplines, I would especially like to point out the originality and depth of voices like “Medicine,” by Maike Rotzoll (whose name and surname are unfortunately reversed in this article, both in the original German and in this English version), “Translation,” by Peter Kuhlmann, and “Dream,” by Albert Schirrmeister, which recalls the great hermeneutic potential of the Warburgian tradition.

Being a reference work, the task of translation becomes particularly difficult. Sometimes the titles of the articles or even the names of the disciplines or literary genres in German do not have an exact match in English. The present translation is generally fitting, but can often be too literal, tied to the grammatical structures of the German language, and sometimes rather imprecise. A striking example of omission is the absence of the word lexicon in the book's title, whose original version was Renaissance-Humanismus. Lexicon zur Antikerezeption (2014). While the volume is included among the supplements of an encyclopedia, the omission of the term lexicon may suggest to the reader that this is not a reference work, but a monograph. Perhaps a more exhaustive proofreading process would have avoided these slips and corrected some minor mistakes in the German edition.

Notwithstanding these negligible setbacks, the book succeeds in offering a concise, interesting, broad-ranging introduction to the Renaissance period, useful for students and specialists but also suitable for a general audience. Particularly helpful are the indexes of people, places, and subjects at the end of the volume, since authors and cities are sometimes spelled differently in different articles, and many of them are not treated in a specific lemma but are mentioned in others. The book also includes a rich and updated bibliography for every lemma and valuable cross-references to other subjects in the body and at the end of each article.