More than a century ago, Ludwig Traube famously distinguished the tenth and eleventh centuries as the “age of Horace” (aetas Horatiana) in contrast to the Carolingian period, when Virgil’s poetic influence was dominant, and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Ovid’s style reigned supreme. The importance of Horace’s poetry in monastic reading communities around the year 1000 is most apparent in the number of surviving commentaries devoted to his work. Some of these commentaries were Roman in origin (the author refers to them collectively as Σ), but original monastic annotations began to appear from the ninth century onwards. In general, Σ commentaries and their medieval descendants originated as schoolroom texts, the purpose of which was to explain unusual aspects of the poet’s grammar and prosody and to provide information about aspects of Roman culture (politics, religion, law, and so on) that may have been unfamiliar to the reader. As the book under review shows, a late tenth-century manuscript of Horace’s complete works produced in Bavaria (British Library, Harley 2724) stands out in this tradition because its extensive marginal scholia do not share the concerns of schoolroom annotations of Horace. Rather, they place a much greater emphasis on explaining aspects of myths, history, geography, and ethnography raised by the poet. While the scholiast of Harley 2724 made use of some information drawn from the Σ tradition, the author claims that his preference for non-Σ materials offers “a new contrasting perspective [that] documents the reading of Horace beyond the schoolroom as part of wider adult culture” (xvi).

After a short introduction that guides the reader through the history of late antique and early medieval Horace commentaries, describes the layout and contents of Harley 2724, and provides notes on the editions of the texts of the non-Σ sources treated in the book, the author’s analysis of the manuscript’s non-Σ scholia unfolds over the course of three chapters. Chapter 1 catalogues the twenty or so sources of the non-Σ annotations in Harley 2724. Seven of these sources are named explicitly by the scholiast: Servius, Martianus Capella (by way of Remigius of Auxerre’s commentary), Cicero, Dares Phrygius, Solinus, and the apostle John. Unattributed excerpts from the works of the following authors also inform the non-Σ scholia: Orosius, Eutropius, Paul the Deacon, Dictys Cretensis, and Isidore. Echoes of the writings of Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Sallust, Hyginus, Macrobius, and Bede round out the scholiast’s impressive fund of sources. Having identified these sources, the author then considers the evidence for their availability in Bavaria around the turn of the first millennium. While she finds that most of them were accessible in well-documented monastic libraries at this time, it is worth noting that Harley 2724 seems to represent “the first surviving witness to the presence of Eutropius and Dictys in Bavaria at the end of the tenth century and one of two earliest Bavarian manuscripts of Remigius’ commentary on Martianus” (30).

Chapter 2 examines the ways in which the scholiast curated the non-Σ annotations in his commentary. In general, he favored long extracts, often numbering many hundreds of words. A case study of a selection of his historical notes draws attention to their effusive length in comparison with Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid, sometimes to the point where the “volume of information goes beyond what is needed to gloss the Horatian lemma and context” (35). While the scholiast copied much of this information verbatim from his sources, on occasion he also composed his annotations by stitching together fragments of different texts, a process that implies “painstaking research” on his part (42). This chapter concludes that the scholiast used historical and ethnographical annotations drawn verbatim from other commentary traditions, especially Servius’s commentaries on Virgil, primarily to gloss proper names that appear throughout Horace’s poems.

Chapter 3 attempts to reconstruct the scholiast’s perspective on the ancient world based on his annotations. Historical errors abound in the scholia, which remind us of the distance separating the medieval reader from the context that informed Horace’s poetry. In his commentaries, we find the scholiast confusing the sequence of events in Roman history, conflating historical individuals who have the same name, and mixing up official Roman titles like consul and proconsul. His attitude toward pagan culture is decidedly ambivalent. On the one hand, the author argues that his rationalization of pagan myths was not “inspired by Christian sensitivities” but rather a carry-over from the interpretative methodologies employed by his source material (106). On the other hand, the scholiast’s emphatic denial of the notion that rulers like Caesar and Augustine became gods after their deaths betrayed a decidedly Christian worldview.

The conclusion to the book reiterates the unusual characteristics of the Harley manuscript annotations. While they were undoubtedly the product of a monastic scriptorium, these scholia showed little concern for providing philological analysis of the text of Horace’s poems, as contemporary schoolroom commentaries did. Who, then, was the intended audience of these historical glosses on Horace’s poetry? Here the author offers the hypothesis that the manuscript was created for the use of its compiler(s), who sought to supplement their learning through private study. One wishes that the author had provided a more thorough inquiry into the audience and use of this Horace manuscript above and beyond the superficial comments expressed in the book’s introduction and conclusion. While this study does a good job of explaining how the annotations in Harley 2724 differ from those of other Horace manuscripts, it fails to tackle the difficult question of whythey were different and what this difference meant for a monastic reading community in Bavaria in the decades around 1000.

Reading Horace’s Lyric offers a close textual study of the historical scholia adorning the works of Horace in a single Bavarian manuscript from the late tenth century. The book successfully catalogues the scholiast’s sources, offers insight into the ways in which he composed his annotations, and underscores his limits as an interpreter of Roman culture, but the narrowness of the author’s scope of inquiry leaves many questions unanswered. In particular, this study misses the opportunity to reconstruct the broader intellectual milieu in which these annotations were meaningful to the monks who produced and read them. As such, while the book offers a detailed analysis of the annotations of this one particular manuscript, it does not yield any broader insights into the role it played in the reception and understanding of classical poetry among monastic readers at the turn of the first millennium.