148 at all under VORSTIUS.One only becomes aware of the existence of these other copies of Vorstius's funeral oration by consulting the 'General index'! Other minor points: the epithet 'Polyglot' (i.a. under BIBLE)when only two languages are con- cerned is in my opinion rather overdoing it; M100 and M101 wrongly name MEUR3 sms, Joannes; the Elder as author: his concern with the portrait gallery of the Leiden professors only begins with the edition of 1625; sometimes also an entry has been omitted from the catalogue: I missed the edition of Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae (Leiden, J. Maire, 1620), which is certainly present in the British Library. Lastly, the edition of Thomas Aquinas which Miss Simoni dates 1602 (T80) is in fact of 1651. On the positive side, however, there are the ascriptions to particular printers, though these are too incidental and (as yet?) without any argumentation, and the provenance statements. The 'Index of printers and publishers, A: with reference to towns' and 'B: by place of publication' and the 'General index' are models of their kind. The only nits to pick here would be the odd misprints. As was to be expected, the holdings of the British Library within the defined limits are again splendid and contain many books not recorded elsewhere. The British Library owns 126 of the 151 Elsevier editions from this period listed by Willems, of the 62 editions of Jan Maire known to me, there are 38 (including the Boethius), and with the 96 books printed by the Raphelengii a considerable percen- tage of the total must have been brought together. Such a collection deserves, nay demands, a good catalogue and Anna Simoni has given it to us. All of us owe her our respect and gratitude. R. BREUGELMANS Briefer mention* IVSTI LIPSI EPISTOLAE[ILE] The fact that an academic edition of the correspondence of Belgium's greatest humanist, Justus Lipsius (Overijse 1547-Leuven 1606), is now being published, is something that thoroughly commands our respect. Along with De constantia, the let- ters continue to be among perhaps the most read of all of Lipsius's many works, and a great need has emerged for a carefully edited, annotated edition. The letters are not, of course, terra incognita. Lipsius himself published one-hundred of them already in 1586. Many, always enlarged editions were to follow. The last one was published in 1670 in the Opera omnia. This was finally followed in the 1720s by a sizeable collection in the first two volumes of Petrus Burmannus's Sylloge; it was 149 based on the 'Museum Lipsianum' which had just been purchased by Leiden University Library. The present new edition did not appear out of the blue: in 1968 the Inventaire de la correspondancede Juste Lipse, 1564-1606 was published, in which A. Gerlo and H. D. L. Vervliet attempted to provide as complete and reliable a list as possible of the letters. A fair amount of criticism was directed at various aspects of this work. Ten years later, the same team, together with M. A. Nauwelaerts, published the first volume of the letters covering the period 1564-83. In these letters we can clearly trace Lipsius's development to classical philologist in the broadest sense of the term. We learn various details about the period Lipsius spent in Cologne (1559-64) and his becoming a Jesuit there (something which he remained fairly silent about during certain periods of his life); about his years in Rome (1568-70), in protestant Jena (1572-4), and in Leiden from 1578. He was frequently resident in Louvain in the intervening periods. The first volume opens with a six-page introduction, three pages of which are devoted to 'edition techni- que'. The system of referring to the original and printed sources is the same as that used in the Inventaire, and in this case too I have the same modest reservations about the use of capital letters added to the dates of letters in order to make them 'unique', since these letters can denote various people-M, for example, is both Emperor Maximillian II and Henricus Molerus. Volume II, published in 1983 by M. A. Nauwelaerts 'iuvante S. Sue', covers the years from 1584 to 1587, i.e. the middle part of the Leiden period, while Volume III, published by Sylvette Su6 and Hugo Peeters in 1987, contains the letters right up to 1590. Thus we now have ac- cess to over 827 letters from and to Lipsius over a period of twenty-seven years. A critical examination of the publication reveals that the first volume is perhaps not the best to have so far appeared in the series. After a number of years it was deemed necessary to add four pages of corrigenda and addenda. Further im- provements were subsequently made, and eventually it was possible to produce a publication of a more acceptable standard, although harsh critics will still no doubt have something to say about it. There are only two points that I would like to add. Firstly, I am surprised that the first volume does not contain a bibliographical sum- mary of Lipsius's correspondence, and secondly, and in my opinion a much more serious objection, the commentary is written in Dutch. I am afraid that many potential users will consequently be unable to profit fully from this edition, which is particularly regrettable since the letters are such a rich source of diverse informa- tion, as I myself experienced in my search for data of Plantin's stay in Leiden-and this is only a minor point when viewed alongside the great wealth of information this correspondence offers. Practically everyone concerned with the second half of the sixteenth century will find ample material in this collection, the importance of which greatly exceeds one's initial expectations of a philological work. Let us hope that the next volumes will not be too long in following. The volumes are published by the Belgian Royal Academy of Science, Humanities and Fine Arts [Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie] and can be ordered from the following address: Paleis der Academien, Hertogstraat 1, B-1000 Brussels. .