There will be no-one in the Society who does not know Professor R.H. Robins, and very few who have not learnt a great deal from him. Vivien Law's account of his career with which this Festschrift opens is somewhat more than a résumé of his professional development and of his contribution to the history of linguistics; it traces the changes in the discipline of intellectual history over the last fifty years, and from Professor Robins's career it derives a historiography of linguistics which lays particular emphasis on relating language theory in its historical contexts. This vita is followed by a list of Professor Robins's publications. The articles then follow in chronological order, beginning in the early Middle Ages and finishing in the twentieth century. The book finishes with an Index Nominum.

The first three articles highlight how Donatus and Priscian were received at different key points of the Middle Ages. Anders Ahlquist's exploration of early treatments of grammatical gender begins with Dionysius Thrax, passes to Donatus and his contemporaries, and finishes with Irish writers on both Latin and Irish. Anneli Luhtala examines how Carolingian logicians and grammarians, in particular Alcuin and Eriugena, resolved their difficulties with Priscian's analysis of the parts of speech, and in so doing began preparing the ground for the grammatica speculativa of the thirteenth century. Probably the most important of the early speculative grammarians was Boethius of Dacia, whose theories on the parts of speech are analysed by G.L. Bursill-Hall. Though these articles are concerned primarily with the development of theory, they give a good idea of how the intellectual climate of a period shapes the legacy of the past, and of how originality and progress can come from biassed interpretation of revered authors.

The sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century articles are concerned with both linguistic theory and applications of linguistics. Vivian Salmon introduces us to an English follower of Petrus Ramus, Charles Butler (1561?-1647), a polymath who should be better known for his innovative textbooks of rhetoric and grammar. He helped lay the foundation for the more formalised world of philosophical models of language and education we see in Joseph Subbiondo's article on the contribution of Francis Bacon and John Wilkins to educational reform and the philosophical language movement in England. Given that Comenius's ideas on language were of considerable importance in English classrooms at the time, it is right that this should be followed by Jana PrÍívatská's description of the pedagogical aspects of Comenius's views on language and education. The rather uncertain fortunes of Leibniz at the hands of eighteenth-century editors and linguists as described in Klaus Dutz's article are a warning on what posterity with its changed intellectual climate can read into an influential figure, even of the relatively recent past.

The rest of the book bears witness to the variety of language study after the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century was a time of increasing interest in national and minority languages. John Flood's discussion of eighteenth-century style-manuals for German printers shows how in a time of shifting language standards attempts to establish linguistic norms are often balanced against the more mundane considerations of convenience and cost. Though the influence of English theorists of language on Dutch philologists is Jan Noordegraaf's major concern, he shows how fruitful and rich the eighteenth-century philological movement was in Holland. There are similar themes in Werner Hüllen's account of how classical scholarship was made to serve the increasing respect for the mother tongue in Germany and England between 1600 and 1800. In his article on the unfortunate William Shaw and his grammar of Scottish Gaelic, Analysis of the Gaelic Language (1778), David Cram sets out the academic and social problems faced by a tactless man doing linguistics in a hostile climate. Except for E.M. Uhlenbeck's analysis of the place category, process and productivity hold in twentieth-century theories of morphology, the nineteenth and twentieth-century articles all deal with figures who have in some way shaped modern linguistics. Andrew Linn avoids the better known work of Rasmus Rask on historical linguistics in favour of his English textbooks for Danish learners; the late Paul Salmon sets the Müller-Whitney quarrel against the intellectual movements of the nineteenth century; and Brigitte Nerlich gives solid account of the anthropological linguistics of Malinowski and Gardiner, its postulates and its background.

The wide range of this book - from language analysis to applied linguistics and language policy and standardisation - makes its own point about Professor Robin's influence on the historiography of linguistics. Like him the authors are careful to place language study in a context, intellectual and at times social; for history is not only what but also why. The attention paid the formative and teaching function of the past is worthy of Erich Auerbach. In short, this is a Festschrift written with a good eye to the diversity of the man it honours.

L.G. Kelly, Cambridge