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There’s a certain state of mind I call crossword brain: It’s both intuitive and counterintuitive, knowing when to turn away from the seemingly obvious solution, but also knowing when to trust your instincts and go with the answer that feels good. Yet as The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, a comprehensive new collection beautifully edited by the Oxford professor Andy Orchard, demonstrates, everything you need to know about crosswords you can learn from Anglo-Saxon riddles: Riddles are the ür-crossword puzzles. Riddles

These volumes have been long needed. They contain one of the major works of the single most prolific Old English author, Ælfric of Eynsham, yet have not been edited in more than a century. They fit with Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library’s mission of making new, carefully edited and beautifully presented editions and translations of medieval texts available to specialists and general readers alike. Since 2010, this series has established itself as the place to publish accessible translations with critical editions

This volume compiles seven hagiographies of less-well known male saints in Greece from the ninth and the tenth centuries CE, and prints the Greek texts with facing English translations. This work falls under the overall publishing purpose of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library which aims to offer “the classics of the medieval canon as well as lesser-known gems of literary and cultural value to a global audience through accessible modern translations based on the latest research by leading scholars in the field.” The

Ælfric of Eynsham was one of the most prolific and politically engaged prose writers in early medieval England. His alliterative prose Lives of Saints (ca. 994-998 CE), composed during a turbulent era of Viking attack and church reform, has generated extensive scholarship on a range of topics, including lay piety, medieval gender relations, and the boundaries between Old English poetry and prose. Although Ælfric’s writings have long been recognized for their centrality within early English literature and culture, the main scholarly edition

Johannes de Hauvilla was a master of the important Rouen Cathedral school at the end of the twelfth century. His only known work is the satirical poem Architrenius [The Arch-Weeper], composed in 1184 and preserved in its entirety in twenty-six manuscripts, fourteen of which date to the thirteenth century. Divided into nine books, the Architrenius spans 4361 hexameters describing, in elaborate and often opaque Latin, the travels of the young protagonist as he searches for answers that will help him