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The Ysengrimus may be seen as the beginning of the medieval Western European animal epic. It is the first text in which the animal protagonists have proper names, a realm in which they all have their proper place and a shared history. The Ysengrimus had a major influence on the branches of the French Roman de Renart and, via those vernacular texts, the tradition of animal epics spread over large parts of northwestern Europe. Thus there is every reason to include an edition of the Ysengrimus in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, a facing-page translation series designed to make written achievements of medieval and Byzantine culture available to both scholars and general readers in the English-speaking world. The series intends to include classics of the medieval canon as well as lesser known works. The Ysengrimus could be said to belong to both categories. It is written in very sophisticated Latin, contains many examples of brilliant (although misused) rhetoric and shows an impressive grasp of the Latin classics, especially Ovid. It also has had a European-wide impact so it must be seen as a classic. However, nowadays it is only read and studied by a handful of specialists. It deserves to be known better.

Paul Wackers
The Medieval Review

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The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which Adam Kirsch has called “the best introduction the general reader has ever had to the ‘mother’ of Western Christian civilization,” presents both classics of the medieval canon and lesser-known works in their original languages alongside new English translations. Launched in 2010 and numbering now three dozen volumes, the series spans genres as diverse as biography, travelogues, scientific treatises, and epic and lyric poetry. As rising Harvard junior Jude Russo explains below, this spring’s additions to the series include a volume that’s about as timely as a medieval publication could be.

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“Nam quid respectu Francisci Iulius aut quid
gessit Alexander memorabile? Iulius hostem
uicit, Alexander mundum, Franciscus utrumque,
nec solum uicit mundum Franciscus et hostem,
set sese, bello uincens et uictus eodem.”

“For in comparison with Francis, what did Caesar or Alexander do that was worthy of memory? Caesar conquered the foe and Alexander the world, but Francis both. Nor did Francis conquer only the world and the foe, but also himself, conqueror and conquered in the selfsame battle.”

(Henry of Avranches, Life of Francis, 11-15, Trans. David Townsend, DOML 30)

A recent addition to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML), the Saints’ Lives of Henry of Avranches, begins with a life of Francis of Assisi. Written just a few years after Francis’s death, the biography elevates the saint to the company of the great conquerors of the classical world, and even beyond their company, as the saint subdued in himself the concupiscent passions that so famously consumed the ancient rulers. In fourteen books dedicated to Pope Gregory IX, Henry describes these struggles of the saint against the world, the foe, and himself.

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In 2011, Harvard University Press celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, the renowned series that presents accessible editions of ancient texts with English translations on the facing page. The covers of the Loebs—red for Latin literature, green for Greek—have become iconic, and generations of students and readers have found them the ideal way to access our classical heritage. In 2001, the press (HUP) launched a new series on the Loeb model, the I Tatti Renaissance Library, featuring Latin and vernacular texts from the fourteenth century and after. But between the latest Loeb—the works of the Venerable Bede, the English chronicler who lived in the seventh century c.e.—and the earliest I Tatti volume, there was a seven-century gap, representing an era of European history that is all too easily neglected: the Middle Ages.

The very term “Middle Ages,” in fact, implies that the period is significant merely as an interruption, or at best a transition, between the vital culture of the Greco-Roman world and the “rebirth” of that culture in the Renaissance. When the Middle Ages do come up in popular discourse, the terms are almost never complimentary. Last year, for instance, Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt published his widely acclaimed book The Swerve, which tells the story of the Italian Renaissance’s rediscovery of the Roman poet Lucretius (see “Swerves,”  July-August 2011, page 8). Central to Greenblatt’s argument is the idea that the Renaissance represented a long-overdue return to reason and sanity after the long religious delirium of the Middle Ages, a time of “societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of mass hysteria.”

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For nearly 70 years, Harvard’s scholarly outpost at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., has housed one of the world’s greatest collections of material relating to Byzantine studies, while also providing an academic home for some of the field’s foremost scholars (see “Home of the Humanities,” May-June 2008, page 48). As of this fall, after more than a decade of planning, it will also give its name to a new series of medieval texts published by Harvard University Press (HUP)–making a bit of Dumbarton Oaks more accessible in Cambridge (and everywhere else) than ever before.

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) is modeled on the 512-volume (and growing) Loeb Classical Library, whose distinctive, tidy green and red hardcover editions of Greek and Latin texts with facing-page translations have become an informal emblem of classical studies during the past century (see “Renewal of a Classic,” September-October 1993, page 48). The new venture began in the late 1990s with Porter professor of medieval Latin Jan Ziolkowski’s wish for a similar public face for medieval literature. Now general editor of DOML, Ziolkowski recalls that there “wasn’t really anything that could serve the same functions as the Loeb for the medieval period, and that was a frustration for me as I thought about trying to communicate my field to a wider public.” The project incubated until Ziolkowski was appointed director of Dumbarton Oaks in the summer of 2007, when he began to discuss the process of bringing it into existence with HUP.

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