Nicole Eddy

Producing out of the different [Old English] chronicles an accessible, coherent edition is a formidable challenge. Producing one in which the Old and modern English appear together doubly so. The editors of The Old English Chronicle have, in this initial volume, sensibly decided to offer a facing-page translation simply of the “A-text,” the annals’ oldest surviving version. Editorially, we are in the safest – and most distinguished – of hands. Their translation is predictably fluent; the accompanying introduction and explanatory notes are reliably helpful. The students the edition has in mind will no doubt find it a fantastic resource.

Pablo Scheffer
Times Literary Supplement
Read Full Article >>

Roy M. Liuzza and Dumbarton Oaks have given the reading public the first complete translation of the first series of Ælfric of Eynsham’s Catholic Homilies in almost two hundred years. This bare fact alone makes this an exciting publication for anyone interested in Old English literature and Benedictine culture. Liuzza, a prolific scholar and writer himself, has provided a clear and helpful volume for anyone interested in monastic culture in the medieval West, early medieval England generally, or the Church’s long tradition of preaching. To have an accessible Modern English translation alongside a fresh and straightforwardly presented edition of the Old English text is an ideal way to make the riches of Old English literature available to people who may have an active interest in Ælfric’s project but who have not had the time to dedicate to mastery of Old English.

Amidst the ongoing contemporary devaluation of the humanities and the study of ancient languages, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library and Liuzza have, rather, committed to the value of both, to the benefit of anyone desiring greater knowledge of early medieval culture and language as well as anyone open to the wisdom of this Benedictine abbot from a millennium ago.

Jacob Riyeff
American Benedictine Review
Read Full Article >>

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 >>