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The poetry that survives from the Anglo-Saxon period of medieval history is relatively meager in quantity compared to the numerous homilies, recipes, writes, law codes, and liturgical materials that remain, and yet this poetic corpus is overwhelmed by the lasting image of the most famous monument to Old English heroic cultures, Beowulf. While its 3,182 lines of alliterative verse do constitute the most substantial and arguably the deepest single contribution of Old English poets to the history of poetry, its position has dwarfed the many other poems of value and spirit from the period, verse which takes as its subject not monsters and dragons, heroes and worldly glory, but themes more familiar to our own modern poets’ offerings, although the form taken is different. Spiritual unrest, the desire for peace in a troubled world, the terrors of an uncertain future, and the need for steadfastness despite the times: all these are the concern of the thirty poems collected from approximately thirty manuscripts and presented in the first volume of Old English Shorter Poems, most ably edited and translated by Christopher A. Jones for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library Series.

Anthony Adams
The Medieval Review

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In the field of medieval studies, the question of continuity and harmony between the east and the west has largely gone unaddressed. Benjamin Garstad’s new volume may well serve to change all that, although he himself does not venture into such an analysis. He offers to the reader fresh Greek and Latin editions of The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, the Revelationes (which is the Latin version of The Apocalypse), and the Excerpta latina barbari, along with facing page translations which have the distinction of being the very first in English.

Nirma Dass
The Medieval Review

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This ninth volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, taken as a whole, offers a fascinating glimpse at the intellectual and literary accomplishment of German monastic culture in the eleventh century. Both of the texts in the volume contain a multiplicity of styles, topics, and interpretive practices; they look back to the “platinum Latin” of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages as much as they look forward to the combination of humanistic learning and contemporary concerns. We are lucky to have these texts available with introductions, notes, and translations in a handsome and affordable volume.

Jonathan Newman
The Medieval Review

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Anybody who knows anything about the study of all things Byzantine today knows that Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University, is North America’s leading place for Byzantine scholars today. They publish their own journal as well as a series of books, and among the most recent offerings is Alice-Mary Talbot and Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, trans., Miracle Tales from Byzantium (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library/Harvard UP, 2012), 480pp.

I asked both translators for an interview about this book, and here are their thoughts.

Adam DeVille: There seems to be an endless interest today in all things Byzantine, with book upon book being published on all aspects of the East-Roman Empire. What do you think explains this abiding, if not burgeoning, interest today? 

Alice-Mary Talbot: Interest in Byzantium has been spurred by a number of factors, including the major exhibits of Byzantine art at the Metropolitan Museum in recent years. I also think more people are visiting Turkey, where they encounter Byzantine churches and monuments, and are inspired to read further about this long-lived medieval civilization.

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson: There is an awareness of Byzantium being between East and West, and being between ancient and modern, and that makes it attractive since it seems to speak to every possible imaginary world in some way.

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During the course of the mid-990s, Richer, a monk at the monastery of St. Rémi in the archiepiscopal city of Rheims, composed one of the most important narrative histories for the modern understanding of the political and military affairs of the West Frankish/French kingdom of the tenth century.

Despite his quite good sources of information, Richer largely has received a negative reception from historians, following the condemnation of his work by Robert Latouche, whose facing page French- Latin translation of Richer in 1930 provided a thorough account the author’s errors, and apparent fabrications, many of which drew upon images taken from Roman historical works, particularly Sallust, but also Caesar and Livy. However, Richer’s work has been rehabilitated recently by Justin Lake, the translator of the volume under review here. Lake’s study [in the Journal of Medieval History] on the rhetoric of plausibility makes clear that authors, such as Richer, who drew heavily on rhetorical works associated with Cicero, worked diligently to present events in a manner that were consistent with the expectations of an audience that was familiar with the subject manner being presented.

David Bachrach
The Medieval Review

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Monastic historians rejoice! Bruce Venarde’s new facing-page Latin- English text of The Rule of Benedict is an attractive and affordable volume that will surely interest anyone whose research touches on the history of medieval cenobitism. Published as part of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, an exciting new series that presents Latin, Greek and Old English texts from the Middle Ages accompanied by modern English translations, this book is a very useful reference work for scholars and general readers alike. A new Latin-English version of the Rule is long overdue.

Scott G. Bruce
The Medieval Review

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