Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts. Bryan C. Keene, ed. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019. x + 286 pp. $60.
forms of metrical Latin, and Tom Deneire employs “computational stylistics” (a branch of the growing field of digital humanities) to test Erasmus’s claim in the Ciceronianus that Filelfo’s letters hewed closer to Cicero’s style than did his orations. Notwithstanding a couple of exceptions, this collection does not dispel my doubts about the value of publishing conference papers, which often default to a certain brevity and lack of scope (e.g., Marsh’s five-line conclusion). The setting for the collection would also have been improved if De Keyser had offered even a brief biography of Filelfo rather than just surveying the scholarly production on him in the past century. Still, the areas treated in the essays certainly add to our knowledge of Filelfo’s substantial output in Greek and Latin (including some edited documents from Claessens and Humble), and may even point the way for a new, full treatment of his life and work.