The Oxford Handbook of the Latin Bible. Edited by H. A. G. Houghton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, xxxvii, 526 pp.

The past decade or so has witnessed a marked increase in scholarly interest in the reception history of the Latin Bible in the European Middle Ages, including Pierre-Maurice Bogaert’s contributions to the first two volumes of the sprawling New Cambridge History of the Bible (2012–2013), Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly’s edited collection The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages (2011), and books like Frans van Liere’s An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (2014) and H. A. G. Houghton’s The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its History, Texts, and Manuscripts (2016). The volume under review escapes the confines of medieval Europe by offering thirty-one short essays that chart the longue durée of Latin translations of the Bible from their inception in third-century North Africa to the Nova Vulgata project of the late twentieth century. Although at times very technical and therefore not always accessible to a general audience, scholars of Christian history have much to gain from this thoughtfully conceived and well executed volume in the Oxford Handbook series.