Nicole Eddy

The Moralized Ovid by Pierre Bersuire, edited and translated by Frank T. Coulson and Justin Haynes and published by Harvard University Press in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, represents a monumental contribution to the field of medieval literature and the study of Ovidian reception in the Middle Ages and early modern world.

Overall, Coulson and Hayne’s work is a remarkable achievement in editing and translation. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections of classical and medieval literature, medieval thought, theology, art history, and the history of textual transmission. The authors and Harvard University Press are to be commended for undertaking such a significant philological project that will, without doubt, shape and impact the field for the foreseeable future, opening up new insight into the age-old question of, What does Athens (or in this case, Rome) have to do with Jerusalem?

Sarah-Jane Murray
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Read Full Article >>

In another hugely useful volume from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Roy M. Liuzza makes Ælfric’s most important work widely accessible in an edition and translation that is informative, economical, and supremely usable.

The whole volume makes superb use of the best scholarship on Ælfric to shape an efficient and appealing presentation of the first homiletic cycle created by the most prolific writer of Old English. Liuzza’s translation is accurate and readable and in the process broadly recreates the style of Ælfric. What this volume has made so appealingly available is a tenth-century primer in Christian learning. If King Alfred famously initiated the translation into English of those books most necessary for all people to know, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies may show us precisely what people in tenth- and eleventh-century England did know, or at least were told across the course of a year. In all of this, as Liuzza observes, Ælfric’s special contribution is to present this story and the consequent moral doctrine through “a breadth of learning” and with “distinctive clarity and care.” These are qualities which Liuzza has now brought to Ælfric’s first and major work, making a voice that once sounded loudly in tenth- and eleventh-century England broadly accessible to a twenty-first century audience. 

Jonathan Wilcox
The Medieval Review
Read Full Article >>

The value of the pieces that are the focus of this volume lies in their allotting ample space to literary imagination and portraying saintly figures who transcend the limits of a life entrenched in social conventions. Readers will be transported to a literary landscape that typifies the branch of Byzantine hagiography closest to fantasy or magical realism.

All in all, Stratis Papaioannou has put his philological skills and his efforts to excellent use in presenting a sound edition of these Greek texts and producing a readable English translation. Collections of stories of the sort included in this volume contribute to making Byzantine hagiography accessible and available to an audience beyond that of experts.

Stephanos Efthymiadis
The Medieval Review
Read Full Article >>

This volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library gathers four of the main repositories of medical remedies from early Medieval England together with a plethora of other scattered recipes from the period. It represents a valuable addition to the already rich array of texts in the series, and one that will be of interest not only to those specialising in medieval English medicine, but also to a broader readership.

This new volume makes for compelling reading, from the encyclopaedic approach of the Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, “the greatest wealth of medical knowledge available at the time” (xviii), to the diverse collections found in Lacnunga and in Peri didaxeon, and to the concluding mosaic of miscellaneous items. One cannot but look forward to the second volume (by different authors), which will include a much-needed edition and translation of Bald’s Leechbook. Once completed, such a comprehensive collection of the medical corpus of early Medieval England will finally supersede Oswald Cockayne’s three-volume set, still important, yet outdated for contemporary scholarship.

Claudio Cataldi
The Medieval Review
Read Full Article >>

The International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England has announced the winner of its 2025 award for Best Edition or Translation: Medical Writings from Early Medieval England, Volume I: The Old English Herbal, Lacnunga, and Other Texts, edited and translated by John D. Niles and Maria A. D’Aronco.

“Niles and D’Aronco’s work is the first comprehensive edition and translation of Old English medical texts to be published since Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England in 1864-1866, and offers a new and welcome presentation of these fascinating and important texts informed by the most recent scholarship on early medieval medicine, social history, popular religion, and literary and manuscript studies.”

Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus (mid-fifth century to 518 CE), the bishop of Vienne, left us with a large letter collection, a biblical epic of five books, De spiritalis historiae gestis, and a poem addressed to his sister on the virtues of chastity, De consolatoria castitatis laude. With his translation, Michael Roberts aims for readability and accuracy while leaving room to make choices for the sake of fluency. He achieves his goal and offers a clear and uniformly excellent prose translation.

As expected from Dumbarton Oaks, this volume is of high quality. The layout is handsome and typos are very few. While scholars have shown much more interest in Avitus in recent years, Roberts also notes that more work remains to be done, especially on the De consolatoria. Roberts’s translation and notes will surely bring Avitus to an even wider audience.

Amy Oh
The Journal of Medieval Latin
Read Full Article >>