Nicole Eddy

Michael Roberts’s goal is to produce a readable and accurate translation of Fortunatus’s Latin, printed with some changes from Friedrich Leo’s MGH edition. His versions of the poems are in prose, and literal rather than free. Since roughly half of Fortunatus’s poems fall under the categories of epithalamium, consolatio, encomium, epitaph, hymn, or ecclesiastical commemoration, this approach energizes a volume of many strengths.

Readers with some or no Latin now have incomparable interpretive tools to ponder the poetic riches of Venantius Fortunatus. This translation is a monument in the history of Latin letters and to Roberts’s singular place in its ongoing articulation.

Joseph Pucci
Speculum

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One book published this year, by which I was both edified and delighted, was The Life of St. Neilos of Rossano, translated into English by Raymond L. Capra, Ines A. Murzaku, and Douglas J. Milewski. The period in which St. Neilos lived in Italy, the 10th century—which saw Muslim incursions and advances, Byzantine assertions of power and political authority, piracy, and all manner of intrigue—by itself guaranteed the read would be captivating.

The translators, however, provide the reader with an elegant rendering of a classic work in a genre little known outside academic circles: Italo-Greek monastic spiritual biography. The translation faces the carefully prepared Greek text of the Life, which is helpful and delightfully challenging.

Christopher R. Altieri
The Catholic World Report

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One of the most important and substantial bodies of texts emanating from late sixth-century Gaul is the corpus of poetry and prose by Venantius Fortunatus, most of which is to be found in the twelve-book collection known as the Carmina [Poems]. Selections have been translated and published by, among others, Judith George and Joseph Pucci, but many important poems have remained untranslated. This has now been remedied by the long-awaited translation of the entire Carmina by Michael Roberts in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

All in all, this is a great moment in Fortunatus studies. There is a vast amount of work yet to be done on his writings. He still remains too little known. But the greatest obstacle to a flourishing of English-language study on Venantius Fortunatus has been removed with Roberts’s superb new translation of the Carmina. For this, as much as for the excellence of the translation, Roberts deserves thanks and praise.

Benjamin Wheaton
Journal of Medieval Latin

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Long after medieval Christians had direct access to accurate knowledge of Islam, they nonetheless persisted in promoting falsehoods about the religion and its prophet. As this volume shows, stories about Mohammad grew in the telling, but certain elements of the narrative, like the role of an evil monk or hermit in supporting the prophet in his youth, were tenacious throughout this literary tradition.

The editors of the Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad have done a good job of assembling a diverse array of polemical Latin accounts of the life of the prophet. Scholars and students with an interest in Christian-Islamic relations and religious polemic will find much food for thought in this volume.

Scott G. Bruce
Bryn Mawr Classical Review

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In the preface to his collection of poems, the eleventh-century Byzantine intellectual John Mauropous (ca. 1000-after 1075) writes that he has selected the poems in question as a sample from his oeuvre at large and “offer[s] just these gifts to friends of words as a small taste of an array of wines.” In this excellent volume published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, Floris Bernard and Christopher Livanos have now made widely accessible Mauropous’ gifts to modern “friends of words,” along with the collection of poems by another eleventh-century Byzantine author, Christopher of Mytilene (also born ca. 1000).

To bring these two collections together into one volume is a suitable choice. Both poets enjoyed successful careers during the reign of emperor Constantine IX Monomachos (1042-1055), and, even though they never explicitly refer to one another, their poetry is the product of the same historical context and intellectual world. [The volume] complements the study of the literary production of other periods, not least the Byzantine twelfth century, which produced a remarkable amount of writings in verse, often in the same poetic forms and with the same functions as eleventh-century poetry. Recurrent themes in Christopher’s and Mauropous’ collections of poems are the importance of education and the pleasure of literature—this skillful volume allows a wide audience of students and scholars to share in this literary pleasure.

Baukje van den Berg
Bryn Mawr Classical Review

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Godden has provided scholars, students, and the public with a much-needed translation into Modern English of the Old English adaptation of Orosius’s History, which itself is a rewriting of the history of the world from a Christian perspective. A contemporary of Augustine, Orosius was a Spanish cleric who wrote “one of the most widely read accounts of world history through late antiquity and the Middle Ages”; that account had “an important influence on much later writing of history” (ix) (particularly Orosius’s novel approach to geographic description) and was especially influential in Anglo-Saxon England, where it was not only read by Bede and Aldhelm, but also rendered into the vernacular in the late ninth or early tenth century.

The greatest virtue of this volume is that it takes this important account of the history of world—a vital text to those scholars who work in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, but which until now has remained relatively obscure to students and the wider public—and makes it far more accessible than it has been for more than a century. Instructors will likely find it a compelling text to include in courses on medieval perspectives on the world or medieval historiography, and as scholars avail themselves of its literal and readable translation, overall engagement with the Old English Orosius, or now The Old English History of the World, will certainly grow.

Benjamin A. Saltzman
Speculum

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