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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

If the name Neilos of Rossano does not immediately ring a bell, then a new book will remedy that most splendidly: The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, ed. and trans. by Raymond L. Capra, Ines A. Murzaku, and Douglas J. Milewski (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press, 2018), 388pp. In the past, I’ve interviewed one of the editors and translators, Ines Murzaku. She graciously agreed to an interview about this new book, and also brought in one of her colleagues, Douglas

The novelty of approach in this book, which contains six texts from late tenth-century Byzantium, lies not only in offering well-constructed editions and parallel English translations of texts that have hitherto been deemed unworthy of such enterprise, but also in insisting on giving them a new generic label. The “novels” edited and translated in this wonderful volume from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library have for a long time lived a humble life as rhetorical redactions of old saints’ lives—in other