In a directive for the publication of his collected works Erasmus of Rotterdam classed the work on the text of the New Testament as the sixth ordo (Epistle 1341A in the Collected Works of Erasmus, volume 9, and Epistle 2283). It comprised a Latin New Testament text, revised from the Vulgate and published by Erasmus in 1516 and four more times, with corrections, during his lifetime (1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535); the first Greek text to be made available in printed form, prepared from manuscripts Erasmus had available to him; and a supporting project, the Annotations, in which he defended his alterations of the Vulgate on the basis of the Greek text, secondary evidence about early Latin and Greek texts as attested by the fathers of the Church, and the Latin usage of classical authors. When the Conseil international pour l'édition des oeuvres complètes d'Érasme in Amsterdam began the modern critical edition, familiarly known as ASD, of Erasmus' works in 1969, his own arrangement of ordines was maintained, though volumes have been published as they are ready, not in the sequence of the original arrangement. So, with ASD VI, 5 we now have a critical text and a thorough set of notes for the annotations on the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is part of what will be nine volumes in ASD VI, four for the New Testament Greek and Latin texts and five for the Annotations.

Hovingh precedes the text with a 50-page introduction (in English, as are the notes to the text). Here he covers the publication history of the Annotations, other contemporary projects for texts of Scripture in its original languages, and the course of Erasmus' interest in biblical scholarship before 1516. He does not take a stand on the question of whether the Greek text or the Latin revision was Erasmus' main concern but provides the reader with enough bibliography to follow up on that debate. Though more detailed discussion is reserved for the ASD New Testament volumes, Hovingh also reviews the Latin manuscripts cited by Erasmus in the Annotations and the Greek ones he is known to have used. Here Hovingh contributes the intriguing suggestion that an unidentified manuscript Erasmus mentioned seeing in the priory of St. Martensdaal in Louvain may be one now in the British Library (7). A particularly valuable section is devoted to the reactions, especially the negative ones, sparked by his textual revisions and by the Annotations, and Erasmus' responses to them, either in separate published writings or in subsequent editions of the Annotations. Hovingh also summarizes what his notes will display in detail, the specific sources Erasmus drew on for annotating each of the three Gospels, and adds a list of morphological and syntactical features of his Latin, as well as ones explaining less-common stylistic terms Erasmus uses or senses of words particular to him. All of this is generously documented with references to bibliographic history and modern scholarship.

From the first edition in 1516 to the last in 1535 Erasmus revised and expanded the Annotations extensively, mostly because of objections raised by elements in the conservative Catholic establishment. Hovingh represents the complicated history of the text by using a different letter of the alphabet to signal the edition in which material first appears (the system already used in the ASD Adages) and by separate notes in the apparatus criticus. Anne Reeve had already done the same task, publishing a facsimile edition of the 1535 text hand-marked with a set of symbols and marginalia to show additions, changes, and deletions (Erasmus' Annotations on the New Testament. The Gospels, London: Duckworth 1986). It is useful to have Hovingh and Reeve for purposes of comparison. On the annotation "guttae sanguinis decurrentis in terram" (on Luke 22:44), for instance, I note that Hovingh attributes to the 1522 edition material that Reeve divides over 1522, 1535, and 1527; my own photocopy of the February 1522 Basel edition has only the first sentence of the ASD text.

The Annotations are presented in a format adapted to the modern reader: bracketed verse numbers and paragraphing by verse make finding individual annotations easy, and punctuation is modernized. A reader familiar with the Annotations only from the Opera omnia of Leiden 1703-06 (LB) may not realize that the "footnotes" there were originally a separate work appended to the New Testament volumes, as they will now be again in ASD. And the novice should be warned that Erasmus' textual lemmas, his only guide below the level of chapter division to the passages he is annotating, quote not his own revised text, as a modern reader would expect, but the Vulgate.

A look at some representative pages will show the admirable utility of Hovingh's notes. On 595, the notes (covering annotations on Luke 22:40-44, including the one just mentioned) refer to works by Ambrose, Theophylact, Sulpicius Severus, Jerome, Lorenzo Valla, and Hilary. They also cite other passages in Scripture, note an occurrence of the dative of agent not expected by the classically trained (with a reference to that entry in Hovingh's introductory material), and refer to J. Chomarat's Erasme. Oeuvres choisies (1991). There are crossreferences to other parts of the text and to other parts of the notes, as well as brief explanations of allusions to topics that come up in other of Erasmus' writings, with references. On 551 (covering annotations on Luke 12:21-42), in addition to items in the same categories, we find a phrase Erasmus uses referred to a line of Terence, and Erasmus' misattribution of Adages 569 to Socrates traced to its apparent origin in Xenophon. Elsewhere, as appropriate, there are references to modern critical texts of the Greek and Vulgate New Testament.

Everywhere notes also show how Erasmus' comment in the Annotations affects or does not affect his wording of the revised Latin New Testament at that point - wording which, like the content of the Annotations, can vary from one edition to the next. In fact, though, there is not complete consistency about reporting reading in Erasmus' New Testament. For instance, in spite of his comments in the Annotations, we are not informed whether he printed "plantare" or "transplantare", or "obediet" or "obedisset", in the text of Luke 17:6, or duo in agro in Luke 17:36, or how he rendered the Vulgate's "descendentium" in Luke 19:37. It is not easy to see what principle guides the decision to report or not report. But perhaps it is not important, for when the ASD New Testament text appears, readers can easily compare the individual annotations in their various forms with the textual history of the Erasmian version of each passage.

The volume ends with a convenient collection of thumbnail biographies, with bibliography, of persons - ancient, medieval, and early modern - whose names come up in Erasmus' text or in Hovingh's notes. Then there are five sets of abbreviations: authors and their works, books of the Bible, Erasmus' own works, and "Other" (books and authors from the sixteenth century to modern times). The whole offers the scholar an accessible edition of an important Erasmian text, made vastly more useful by thorough introduction and assiduous documentation. ASD has once again provided us with an indispensable tool for research.

Jane E. Phillips