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Long after medieval Christians had direct access to accurate knowledge of Islam, they nonetheless persisted in promoting falsehoods about the religion and its prophet. As this volume shows, stories about Mohammad grew in the telling, but certain elements of the narrative, like the role of an evil monk or hermit in supporting the prophet in his youth, were tenacious throughout this literary tradition. The editors of the Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad have done a good job of assembling a

In the preface to his collection of poems, the eleventh-century Byzantine intellectual John Mauropous (ca. 1000-after 1075) writes that he has selected the poems in question as a sample from his oeuvre at large and “offer[s] just these gifts to friends of words as a small taste of an array of wines.” In this excellent volume published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, Floris Bernard and Christopher Livanos have now made widely accessible Mauropous’ gifts to modern “friends of

Godden has provided scholars, students, and the public with a much-needed translation into Modern English of the Old English adaptation of Orosius’s History, which itself is a rewriting of the history of the world from a Christian perspective. A contemporary of Augustine, Orosius was a Spanish cleric who wrote “one of the most widely read accounts of world history through late antiquity and the Middle Ages”; that account had “an important influence on much later writing of history” (ix) (particularly

It is an immense pleasure to discover a text like this. This is a wonderful book that will be warmly welcomed by scholars and students of the ancient Graeco-Roman novels. The scholarship is current and thorough. The translations and observations on the Greek text are impressive. Christian Novels from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes is a tremendous addition to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. This book is highly recommended. Edmund P. Cueva The Medieval Review Read Full Article >>

A team of scholars from Seton Hall has produced an impressive and important volume in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series. It is impressive in its scholarly akribeia and erudition which is compressed into short notes. It is important for its witness to a period and a place where “Christendom and the church were understood as one, undivided, and indivisible, East and West” (xviii). Overall, The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano is an excellent scholarly contribution that will be

In their Introduction translators Adam J. Goldwyn and Dimitra Kokkini explain that Allegories of the Iliad was apparently conceived of to help introduce Bertha von Sulzbach (empress Eirene), the Bavarian bride of Manuel Komnenos (Byzantine emperor Manuel I), to the culture and language and most important literary works of her new world. While Homeric exegesis was fairly widespread at this time, […] the position of the text and this reading, historically, — distant from the original Greek context, but also almost a