Virgil's reception in the Renaissance has been the subject of recent and important studies, especially the monographs of Kallendorf and Wilson-Okamura. One of the strengths of Virgil and Renaissance Culture is that its authors draw frankly, frequently, and gratefully on this body of work, positioning the collection as a useful supplement and addition to existing scholarship. Houghton's excellent introduction sets the tone for the volume. Through a witty interrogation of its title, he challenges a canonical approach to the topic, arguing that “the chapters which follow possess a value that does not depend on any one overarching definition of the Renaissance, of culture, or even of Virgil” (5).

As promised, the subsequent studies offer a very pleasing variety. Peter Mack elucidates the ways in which Agricola, Erasmus, and Melanchthon employed Virgil as a model of style and used his poetry to develop their conceptions of rhetorical copia. It was Virgil's career, as well as his poetry, that inspired Guarino Veronese and his circle. Fabio Stok claims that Guarino authored the Donatus actus, an “enhanced and interpolated version” of Donatus's life (31), and indicates how the Virgil of the updated biography validated and ennobled the position of court humanists in Quattrocento Italy.

Some of the most innovative chapters in this volume explore Virgil's influence in non-literary contexts. Lisa Vitela argues that Isabella's D'Este's twenty-three-dish service simultaneously reminded guests of her learning and taste and served as an impetus for moralizing discussions. Examining the use of Virgilian quotations on medals and tokens from the Low Countries in the second half of the sixteenth century, Cécile Arnould and Pierre Assenmaker assert that “Virgil's verses were a still living cultural heritage that everyone was free to use and adapt in order to bring it closer to the political and ideological context of the time or merely to produce a coherent association of image and text” (73). Evan McCarthy details the wide variety of attributes that writers on music emphasized in their descriptions of Iopas, Dido's bard. In different ways, all of these essays develop the recent work of Sarah Ross, encouraging readers to think of the classical tradition in the Renaissance as a pervasive, although highly differentiated, element of culture, rather than as the monopoly of a small group of humanist authors and their patrons.

The majority of the essays in the second half of the volume are more literary in focus. Giovanna Laterza's discussion of pathetic fallacies in Virgil would be more in keeping with the focus of the volume if she spent less time on the Aeneid and more on her Renaissance examples. Turnus's role in Maffeo Vegio's Book XIII is the subject of an interesting chapter by Anne Rogerson, who demonstrates that the supplement is not as pure a work of epideictic as many studies have claimed. Adam Foley identifies connections between Landino's earliest commentary on Virgil and Ficino's selection of Platonic dialogues for translation. Arguing that “the figure of Aeneas for both Ficino and Landino represented the ideal philosophical exegete” (145), he considers the ways in which philology and philosophy overlapped in the work of the two humanists. Helen Lovatt examines the complex web of Virgilian and Dantean allusions in Ugolino Verino's epic Carlias. George Tucker describes the verbal gymnastics employed by the authors of Virgilian verse centones, most especially Lelio Capilupi, as well as the repackaging of Lelio's work to suit the new standards of Counter-Reformation Italy. In the volume's final chapter, L. B. T. Houghton demonstrates the extent to which humanists cast their descriptions of a Renaissance within the language and concepts of Virgil's fourth eclogue: “Evocation of the fourth Eclogue and its distinctive prophecies played an integral part in the articulation of the idea of a Renaissance” (221).

Virgil's ubiquity in the Renaissance is not news, but this volume offers thought-provoking studies of the extent and nature of his influence. More generally, it provides a valuable illustration of the diversity within Renaissance appropriations of the past.