Press

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

This volume is a significant addition to the translations of Byzantine texts that make up the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series. Its primary importance lies in the fact that it makes the collection of rhetorical exercises (progymnasmata) by Nikephoros Basilakes accessible in English for the first time, thereby opening up avenues for more in-depth research on Basilakes himself and the intellectual culture of his age. The book is prefaced by a concise account of Basilakes’s life and public career (including

Dumbarton Oaks’s 2018 Kalamazoo programming got off to a tremendous start with a session cosponsored by the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) and Platinum Latin, the community of late antique and medieval Latinists based at Universität Wien. “Encountering Muhammad in the Medieval West” drew a standing-room-only crowd, with audience members seated in the aisles and standing along the back wall to hear papers by Jessalynn Bird of Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, and Julian Yolles of Harvard University. The session