Books Archive - Page 11 of 16 - Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

February 28, 2016 by jes5970

On the Liturgy, Volume II: Books 3–4, Amalar of Metz

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.

This volume adapts the text of Jean-Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

February 28, 2016 by jes5970

On the Liturgy, Volume I: Books 1–2, Amalar of Metz

This volume adapts the text of Jean-Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

February 28, 2016 by jes5970

The Histories, Volume II: Books 6–10, Laonikos Chalkokondyles

Among Greek histories of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the work of Laonikos (ca. 1430–ca. 1465) has by far the broadest scope. Born to a leading family of Athens under Florentine rule, he was educated in the classics at Mistra by the Neoplatonist philosopher Plethon.

In the 1450s, Laonikos set out to imitate Herodotos in writing the history of his times, a version in which the armies of Asia would prevail over the Greeks in Europe. The backbone of the Histories, a text written in difficult Thucydidean Greek, is the expansion of the Ottoman Empire from the early 1300s to 1464, but Laonikos’s digressions give sweeping accounts of world geography and ethnography from Britain to Mongolia, with an emphasis on Spain, Italy, and Arabia. Following the methodology of Herodotos and rejecting theological polemic, Laonikos is the first Greek writer to treat Islam as a legitimate cultural and religious system. He followed Plethon in viewing the Byzantines as Greeks rather than Romans, and so stands at the origins of Neo-Hellenic identity.

This translation makes the entire text of The Histories available in English for the first time.

February 28, 2016 by jes5970

The Histories, Volume I: Books 1–5, Laonikos Chalkokondyles

This translation makes the entire text of The Histories available in English for the first time.

February 28, 2016 by jes5970

Old English Shorter Poems, Volume II: Wisdom and Lyric

The twenty-five poems and eleven metrical charms in this Old English volume offer tantalizing insights into the mental landscape of the Anglo-Saxons. The Wanderer and The Seafarer famously combine philosophical consolation with introspection to achieve a spiritual understanding of life as a journey. The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer direct a subjective lyrical intensity on the perennial themes of love, separation, and the passion for vengeance. From suffering comes wisdom, and these poems find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. “Woe is wondrously clinging; clouds glide,” reads a stoic, matter-of-fact observation in Maxims II on nature’s indifference to human suffering. Another form of wisdom emerges in the form of folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf. The enigmatic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn combine scholarly erudition and proverbial wisdom. Learning of all kinds is celebrated, including the meaning of individual runes in The Rune Poem and the catalog of legendary heroes in Widsith.

This book is a welcome complement to the previously published DOML volume Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic.

February 28, 2016 by jes5970

Saints’ Lives, Volume II: Henry of Avranches

The artistry, wit, and erudition of medieval Latin narrative poetry continued to thrive well into the middle of the thirteenth century. No better evidence of this survives than in the long and brilliantly successful career of Henry of Avranches (d. 1262). Professional versifier to abbots, bishops, kings, and at least one pope, Henry displays a pyrotechnical verbal skill and playfulness that rivals that of the Carmina Burana and similar collections of rhymed secular verse. Yet he also stands as self-conscious heir to the great classicizing tradition of the twelfth-century epic poets, above all of Walter of Châtillon. Henry entwines these two strands of his literary inheritance in what might surprise modern readers as an improbable genre. The bulk of Henry’s known output is a series of versified saints’ lives, including those of Francis of Assisi, King Edmund, and Thomas Becket, nearly all of which are based on identified prose models. These two volumes present most of his work in the genre, as witnessed in the English manuscript that remains the linchpin of our knowledge of this remarkable poet’s career.