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The poems of the sixth-century poet Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus sometimes seem to have flown under the radar of the late antique and early medieval studies. Certain poems are well known while the context from which they come, and the collection as a whole, is rarely considered. A full English translation of the poet’s work has been a scholarly desideratum for a while. Michael Robert’s splendid translation is the first to render all eleven books of Fortunatus’ verse into English

The volume under review is a welcome addition to the literature in English on the medieval “empire” of Trebizond. The editor, Scott Kennedy, chose to combine two very different sorts of texts: the late fourteenth-century chronicle of the imperial secretary Michael Panaretos, “a drab but reliable narrative” in the words of A. A. Vasiliev, and the consciously literary, fifteenth-century encomium of Trebizond by the future cardinal Bessarion but written at a time when he was still only a Basilian monk. Kennedy’s

What do you get by crossing social satire with a sweeping epic quest? If you’re Johannes de Hauvilla—12th-century intellectual, scholar, and teacher at an important cathedral school in France—the answer is Architrenius, an allegorical epic poem about a young man’s quest to find Nature, take her to task for society’s sins, and petition her to repair mankind’s weakness and his own. Newly published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, Architrenius (Harvard University Press, 2019) appears in a fresh translation by Winthrop Wetherbee,

Who is the strongest Avenger? The question is interesting not so much because of its answer—no Endgame spoilers here!—but because of the discussion it prompts about the strengths and weaknesses inherent in different kinds of heroism and power. If today’s pop culture explores such questions under the guise of space aliens or tech-loving billionaires, the science-fiction veneer is a futuristic packaging for much older debates on the nature of virtue and leadership. Perhaps the question that would have occupied medieval readers of

The start of a new university semester means many things: reconnecting with friends, working out a class schedule (including when to get in a snooze), and, of course, the last-minute dash to the campus bookstore to track down back-ordered textbooks for the first week’s reading. Student life probably looked a lot different in the Middle Ages—although there were likely still some naps—but then as now, textbooks played an important part in college education. One of the most important such manuals

The mysterious and gilded Empire of Trebizond has for centuries cast a spell on observers. Cervantes called up the city and its emperors in the same breath as serpents, monsters, swashbuckling women, and “enchantments of every kind” as examples of the exotic and fantastical fare to be found in the chivalric tales deluding his hero Don Quixote—equal parts impossibility and allure. The capital city of a Byzantine successor state founded after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Trebizond (modern Trabzon