Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period. Edited by Jon Whitman. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 101. Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, 2000. Pp. xv + 513. $125.

For anyone interested in a grand historical and cross-cultural perspective on allegory and hermeneutics, the value of this volume is unmatched. While there are many important studies of allegory as poetic device, or as tropological or theoretical category, there has been no survey, let alone systematic history, of allegorical interpretation from antiquity to modernity in Western culture. Jon Whitman, the editor of this volume and a distinguished scholar of the history of allegory, argues that a systematic history of allegorical interpretation from Greek and Roman antiquity and of the origins of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics through the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and modern periods, would be an impossibly vast undertaking, equivalent almost to tracing Western cultural change itself and ever hampered by lacunae in our knowledge (lost, unidentified, and unedited texts).

Rita Copeland
University of Pennsylvania