Review: Apocalpyse, by pseudo-Methodius; An Alexandrian World Chronicle
This volume in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series presents two historical works: an Apocalypse, long wrongly attributed to Saint Methodius of Olympus and originally written in Syriac, and the Excerpta Latina Barbari, also of (different) unknown authorship, here presented as An Alexandrian World Chronicle, originally written in Greek but here presented in the Latin translation. Apocalypse is a fairly short work, a chronicle from biblical beginnings—Adam and Eve leaving paradise—through then-modern history and a promise of what is to come (yes, the apocalypse). It’s
Holiday Shopping Discount: 30% Off
From now through December 31, 2020, all DOML volumes are 30% off on the Harvard University Press website when you enter promotion code HOLIDAY20 at checkout. This includes our new Fall 2020 volumes, as well as our entire catalogue of medieval facing-page translations. Homilies, by Sophronios of Jerusalem, is edited and translated by John M. Duffy. Sophronios, born in Damascus around 560, was a highly educated monk and prolific writer who spent much of his life traveling in the Eastern
Review: Tria sunt
Martin Camargo’s edition and translation of the Tria sunt (a late fourteenth-century rhetorical treatise written in Latin) will be a staple for specialists in medieval rhetoric as well as for those early in their study. The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series as a whole is excellent, and this volume is no exception. A functional edition and translation would have sufficed, since no full edition as yet existed, but what impressed me most about the volume is its balance: the textual apparatus is
Review: Old English Lives of Saints, by Ælfric
In the ten years since its launch, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) has proved itself a stalwart, unhoped-for champion of quality print editions accessible to all. If anyone still thinks of the Old English texts in the series as classroom adaptations rather than leading editions, these three volumes may well change their minds. They constitute both the first complete edition and the first complete translation of the Lives of Saints in 120 years, and the editors show themselves cognizant
Digging into the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library: Spotlight on “On Morals, or Concerning Education”
What is the value of the humanities in a time of crisis? The question weighs in one way or another on a lot of minds these days. But it’s by no means a new one, as the recent publication of On Morals, or Concerning Education by Theodore Metochites (Harvard University Press, 2020) amply demonstrates. Sophia Xenophontos’s translation for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library makes this work, composed just over seven hundred years ago, available to English-speaking readers for the first time at
Review: Tria sunt
With Martin Camargo’s excellent edition and translation of the text known as the Tria sunt, medievalists, and anyone interested in the history of language study, can now appreciate the scope of this late fourteenth-century manual of composition. It is a comprehensive and ambitious writing course, compiling teaching from the twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuals by Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Gervase of Melkley, John of Garland, and others, while also adding further materials. In sixteen chapters of uneven length it covers how
