This beautiful two-volume monograph consists of twenty interconnected chapters about the pastoral genre in literature and the visual arts. It spans the genre's history from Virgil to the “Arcadian” garden of Helena Radziwiłł, but its real focus is on the period 1500–1700. With exceptional versatility, the study peruses both visual and textual evidence, encompassing a range of media—painting, but also drawing, print and sculpture—and languages—Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and German. A selection of primary texts is provided, in full or in large excerpts, both in the original and the author's own translation; interspersed between the chapters and printed on green paper, these primary texts form an anthology woven into the volumes. Remarkably, the work seamlessly integrates literary and pictorial manifestations of the pastoral into a unified analysis, though without overlooking medial specificities.

As the author admits, the title's reference to Arcadia is potentially misleading. The book really deals with the pastoral genre, also known as bucolic, a Western tradition depicting the simple life of pipe-playing shepherds set in an ideally tranquil countryside where agrarian work is indolent enough that matters of the heart take center stage. Virgil's Eclogues are the foundational model. Two of Virgil's shepherds are called Arcadians, supposedly coming from the mountainous region of the Peloponnese where Pan, the god of shepherds and pipe music, was said to reside. The Eclogues are not set in Arcadia, however, but around Virgil's birthplace outside Mantua.

Only in the early modern period did Arcadia begin to be associated with the setting of pastoral poetry, starting probably with Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia (1504). From then on Arcadia gradually became an archetype (like Elysium or Cythera) of the ever-verdant scenery of primordial innocence. Holberton deals with this history in chapter 11, but he also tackles larger questions. Beyond issues of geographical siting, he tests the essence of the pastoral, debates its limits, and, in a subtle dialectic, simultaneously anthologizes and rethinks it.

Holberton understands the pastoral as being essentially “a language,” namely a set of motifs passed down the ages for talking about the quest for earthly felicity. In his view, nature is only a stage here, but never the true subject matter. The pastoral's real topic is “the happiness to be enjoyed on earth, including the greatest human felicity, requited passion.” A Warburgian interest in recurring motifs leads Holberton to uncover rich intertextualities running through his corpus. Motifs occasionally define the corpus itself (Petrarch's Canzoni, for example, take precedence over the Bucolicum Carmen, certainly because they better reflect the stakes of the Holbertian pastoral). As a colophonic note explains, the twenty chapters are conceived as self-contained essays that need not be read in order (though they work their way through the corpus chronologically). This modularity represents both an opportunity and a challenge. It allows the author to do justice to the subtleties of each case study. No overarching thesis drives the book, however, making it easier to glean from the volumes than to read through them continuously.

The book's most pointed claims relate to the use of the term pastoral in reference to works of the visual arts. Ludovico Dolce said a painting by Titian alluded to an ekphrasis from Sannazaro's Arcadia; Filippo Baldinucci called pastorale a work by Claude Lorrain; and eighteenth-century French academic theory spoke of paysage pastoral. The book argues for a narrower scholarly use of the term: a landscape should only be called pastoral by virtue of containing shepherds in typically bucolic leisure (i.e., not in the act of herding, in which case the picture is georgic), and Northern art never pertains to the pastoral (the verse from the Eclogues captioning Pieter Bruegel's landscape print is meant ironically). Critical terms like idealization and locus amoenus (the latter popularized by Ernst Curtius) rarely apply to the pastoral.

While the study's multiple and interlocking lines of argument occasionally make it a demanding read, it should be celebrated for the wealth of material it assembles (including little-known evidence), the acuity of the author's observations throughout, and for its multilingual agility. It is animated by an undaunted spirit of Kulturwissenschaft that cuts across media and languages to offer a generous, polyglot panorama of the elusive genre of the pastoral.