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One book published this year, by which I was both edified and delighted, was The Life of St. Neilos of Rossano, translated into English by Raymond L. Capra, Ines A. Murzaku, and Douglas J. Milewski. The period in which St. Neilos lived in Italy, the 10th century—which saw Muslim incursions and advances, Byzantine assertions of power and political authority, piracy, and all manner of intrigue—by itself guaranteed the read would be captivating. The translators, however, provide the reader with an elegant

One of the most important and substantial bodies of texts emanating from late sixth-century Gaul is the corpus of poetry and prose by Venantius Fortunatus, most of which is to be found in the twelve-book collection known as the Carmina [Poems]. Selections have been translated and published by, among others, Judith George and Joseph Pucci, but many important poems have remained untranslated. This has now been remedied by the long-awaited translation of the entire Carmina by Michael Roberts in the Dumbarton

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 >>