At the outset of their foreword, Prosperi and Ciccolella emphasize that the recovery of Homer's epics in Italy—initiated by Byzantine scholars for whom the Iliad and Odyssey continued to serve as the cornerstones of a literary education—was no “triumphant entry” (v) but, rather, that it was a slow and fluctuating process. In the first chapter, Braccini explores the earliest codices of the Iliad copied in early fifteenth-century Italy and the career of Sozomon who (despite being elected the canon of Pistoia in 1418) was not hindered by his clerical duties from commuting to Florence to pursue (profitably) his teaching of Greek. Braccini illuminates Sozomon's flair as a teacher in his discussion of Sozomon's library—which included ten codices that he had copied in his own hand—and examines Sozomon's use of these in his teaching. Indeed, the Byzantine humanist's skills in opening up accessibility to Greek texts, then as well as now (such as in introductory courses on Greek palaeography) is highlighted by the remarkable clarity of his hand (4).

The second chapter, “Imagining Homer in the Renaissance,” is an ambitious and imaginative study of the potential influences upon Raphael's depiction of Homer in The Parnassus. In raising the question “how much autonomy did Raphael have in depicting Homer?” (26), Fornaro and Viccei offer many persuasive and original insights into the formative role that Neoplatonism and humanist biographies of Homer (30–32), Poliziano's Latin translation of the Iliad (35–36), and Greek texts published by Aldus Manutius (27–28) had upon Raphael's figuration of Homer. In “The Italian Translations of the Iliad in the Cinquecento: Some Preliminary Notes,” Prosperi examines the eight Italian translations of Homer from the sixteenth century (compared to the forty-six that Craig Kallendorf identifies in A Bibliography of Italian Translations of Virgil [1994]).

The account of Niccolo Franco's translation is a particularly sorry one, since, as Prosperi mordantly puts it, his manuscript translation ultimately met with “the gnawing criticism of mice” (45). Prosperi's chapter is particularly engaged in determining the audiences of these translations: “For whom did Homer speak in the vernacular, and for what purpose?” (46). Prosperi prefaces her analysis of passages from the eight translations with the observation that—like North's Plutarch—their authors were likely working from an intermediary translation rather than directly from the Greek original, as they were all created after the publication of Andreas Divus's highly influential Latin translation (48). Sadly, the “common denominator” that Prosperi identifies between the eight Italian translation is “failure” (72).

But what one scholar views as a failure is another scholar's opportunity to illuminate what's been misunderstood. In his chapter on Trissino's Italia liberata da’ Goti, Di Santo claims that the work has been interpreted as a “total failure” on account of critics’ misunderstanding of Trissino's metrical and formulaic experimentation (84). Arguing that Italia liberata presages “four centuries before [Milman] Parry's” (91) groundbreaking scholarship on oral-formulaic composition, Di Santo states that “criticism has failed to highlight the centrality of this fundamental model, long considered secondary and limited in value” (92).

Detailed analysis of Homeric imitation in Tasso's Gerusalemme conquistata follows Di Santo's essay, in which Sarnelli provides a rich, fine-grained study of Tasso's imitation of Homer. Sarnelli's essay is particularly valuable in its careful elucidation of Tasso, not just as a reader of Homer but as a reader of Homer's commentators, including the Byzantine commentator, Eustathius of Thessaloniki (124–25). The next essay by Lovato also explores the influence of Byzantine Homeric commentators, in her case John Tzetzes. Just as Di Santo outlines the remarkable similarities between Trissino and Parry in spite of the gap of four centuries that separates their poetic and scholarly work respectively, “Re-Reading Homer in Paris and Byzantium” underlines how Samxon and Tzetzes—also four centuries apart—have a great deal in common in the ways they approach the Homeric texts: “both the Byzantine scholar and the French jurist have something new to say” (159).

Lastly, Ciccolella's chapter on Homer and the Protestant Reformation, and Silvano's short edition (with facing Italian translation) of an unedited prolusio can be read as a valuable, interlinked pair that explores the reception of Homer in Northern European universities: specifically, at Melanchthon's Wittenburg and at Vulcianus's Leiden respectively.