In this collection Susanna Gambino Longo has brought together thirteen essays (three in Italian, the other ones in French), most of which were presented at a conference in Paris in 2009. Although still indebted to Arnaldo Momigliano’s seminal studies, these essays add effectively to our understanding of the multifaceted reception of Herodotus in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Strikingly, Herodotus’s reception in the Renaissance at first turned out to be one of rejection. Ever since antiquity, the Father of History was forced to cope with the fallout of a dichotomy that opposed his ethnographical, antiquarian approach to Thucydides’s allegedly superior historiographical model. Plutarch’s cutting judgment about Herodotus’s “malignity” seems to have remained influential as one of the causes of this prolonged patricide, notwithstanding an obvious and possibly attractive relevance for fifteenth-century readers: in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, one might have expected a more fertile ground for Herodotus’s fascination with the barbarian, one that could easily have been perceived as mirrored in the Turkish advance threatening Christendom.

The first four contributions of this fine collection take a philological angle. Stefano Pagliaroli gives a critical edition of the preface to the first Latin translation of Herodotus, by Mattia Palmieri, which survives in only three manuscripts, and was to be eclipsed by Lorenzo Valla’s version from the 1450s. Jean Eudes Girot studies both the Latin defense of Herodotus and its more influential French counterpart published by Henri Estienne, whose rebuttal of Herodotus’s detractors is characteristic of the reversal of fortune that the Father of History eventually experienced in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, Girot nicely illustrates how Estienne considered himself a modern Herodotus in his travels through barbarian Italy. Dennis Looney transcribes the marginal annotations from a Modenese manuscript of Boiardo’s Italian translation of Herodotus, which was based on Valla’s Latin version (a specific study of which is unfortunately absent from this volume). Luigi Alberto Sanchi focuses on the use Guillaume Budé made of Herodotus in his own philological and philosophical writings. The great French humanist, it turns out, was interested in the Histories mainly because of the encyclopedic material they provided.

Two contributions then follow that I found — along with Gambino Longo’s own first-rate introduction to the volume — the most compelling of the whole collection: Carlo Varotti’s “La leggenda e la storia: Erodoto nella storiografia tra Quattrocento e primo Cinquecento” and Pascal Payen’s “Hérodote et la modélisation de l’histoire à la Renaissance.” Varotti discusses Herodotus as a historiographical role model, especially when the age of the discoveries brought a shift toward ethnographical interests, and provides a very interesting study of Herodotus’s influence on local humanist historiography all over Italy. Payen studies the role played by the various Latin and vernacular translations in Herodotus’s reception and highlights his possible influence on Jean de Léry.

The remaining articles are specific case studies. Alice Lamy tentatively suggests that Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s “historical geography” was a breeding ground for the increasing reception of Herodotus and his innovative narrative forms by later humanists. Jean Boulègue sees a possible echo of Herodotus’s hydrography of the Nile in fifteenth-century Catalan maps and in a sixteenth-century Portuguese description of Northwestern Africa. Brigitte Gauvin analyzes Herodotus’s (very limited) influence on Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Legatio Babylonica (about his mission to Egypt) and his more relevant role in the same author’s De Orbo Novo. Frank Lestringant explores the role of Herodotus’s plea for autopsy in the cosmographical literature of the Renaissance, and more specifically his influence on various writings by André Thevet. Violaine Giacomotto-Charra studies Herodotus’s minimal reception in Renaissance natural history, concentrating on Conrad Gesner and Pierre Belon. Susanna Gambino Longo herself effectively explains the Cinquecento’s fascination for antique funerary rites and the role played by Herodotus’s exoticism in these writings. Finally, Antonio Guzmán Guerra gives an overview of Herodotus’s mostly indirect reception in Spanish Renaissance literature.

The editor of this nicely produced volume should be complimented for having the contributors provide translations of all Latin citations. The usefulness of this rich collection would surely have been enhanced by adding indexes, but the only really false note is the number of typographical errors in the few Greek quotations, some of which are riddled with missing or wrong breathing marks and accents.