Does the discipline of classical reception studies shirk questions of distinctiveness and value? Such is the gauntlet thrown down by Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow in their 2014 magnum opus, The Classical Tradition. Full consideration of this important work must be reserved for a later issue. It is nonetheless worth rehearsing its opening distinction between ‘the classical tradition’ and ‘reception’, since thinking about it has informed our reading of a number of the books reviewed below.

The first title in this issue's batch of classical reception publications sees Lucy Pollard take us on an engaging and colourful tour of early modern travellers' experiences in Greece and the Levant. This area of scholarship is well trodden, and many readers will be familiar with David Constantine's Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (1984); but Pollard brings new material to bear by her extensive use of the unpublished diaries of John Covel, the Cambridge scholar and minister who served as chaplain to the Levant Company in Constantinople in the 1670s. These are supplemented with accounts of other seventeenth-century travellers such as George Wheler and Paul Rycaut. Successive chapters cover the logistics of travel, scholarly and archaeological approaches, and perceptions of Greeks and Turks. Pollard tends to let her sources speak for themselves; her arguments about the emergence of a ‘proto-archaeological’ approach to antiquities in the last third of the century, about the importance of perceived religious affinities between Anglican travellers and Orthodox Greeks, and about admiration of the Ottomans as a model for empire are interesting, but made with a light touch. Above all, this provides us with a richly detailed survey of the experiences, challenges, and preoccupations of early modern Englishmen travelling east.

It might seem unduly cautious to consider reception as still an ‘emerging’ sub-discipline within Classics, but a selection of publications from recent years provides evidence of its continuous development and diversification. Edited volumes (the preferred format in reception studies’ infancy) are still very much in evidence, but, as this subject review indicates, an increasing number of monographs bear witness to the confidence and rigour of new work in the field.

As Vout (2006) has recently reminded us in this journal, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's History of the art of antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 1st ed. 1764) is widely considered to be a foundational text in the history of art. Advertising itself as the first ‘systematic’ account of ancient art in relation to its geographical, social and political circumstances, Winckelmann filled out the well-known Plinian chronology of artists with a new analysis in terms of a succession of period styles, providing a satisfyingly scientific justification for the preference his contemporaries were beginning to accord to the art of the Greeks. Small wonder then that the book was lauded as a classic as soon as it appeared in Germany and was quickly translated into French and Italian. Nevertheless, it is also hardly surprising that this text, which promised nothing less than a ‘new paradigm’ for the study of antique culture, has always presented problems to its readers. These are partly caused by its magnitude of ambition. Titled, first and foremost, a ‘history’, Winckelmann's magnum opus in fact attempts to be many things: part systematic exploration of the social and physical factors that condition the development of all art; part impassioned disquisition on the essence of beauty; part antiquarian catalogue of the greatest surviving works of Greek and Roman art; part manual of aesthetic taste for aspiring contemporary artists. Few books since Winckelmann's History can have combined bold claims about their importance as historical scholarship with detailed instructions on how to draw a perfectly beautiful face.