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Winthrop Wetherbee’s translation of Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius marks the third volume of twelfth-century poetry that he has published in Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, following Alain of Lille’s Literary Works and Bernardus Silvestris’ Poetic Works. That these three authors are joined in this way is hardly surprising as they are often discussed in comparison to one another, taken as significant examples of the learned school-poetry of the twelfth century, and even evince some similarities in terms of style and subject matter. With these translations, Wetherbee, one of the great scholars of medieval Latin literature, has made readily available to current and future scholars not only highly readable translations but has also shared his tremendous expertise and erudition about these texts in an easily accessible format. This is particularly the case for Architrenius, which, as he remarks in the conclusion to his Introduction, he has “been wrestling with for fifty years.”

Winthrop Wetherbee has done heroic labor in translating Architrenius and making it accessible to so many readers, not only those who do not know Latin but also those who are “somewhat competent in the language,” as A. G. Rigg put it nearly twenty-five years ago. There can be no doubt that this volume will be the place to begin for those interested in the popular and influential Architrenius by Johannes de Hauvilla.

Stephen M. Metzger
The Medieval Review

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Already in 1881, Ludwig Traube recognized Ovid alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three most influential classical poets among medieval readers and christened the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the “age of Ovid” (aetas Ovidiana) because it was during this time that his work was most widely imitated. A worthy addition to this field of research is the latest volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which collects “the surviving corpus of pseudo-Ovidiana,” that is, poems falsely attributed to Ovid in the Middle Ages. The title of the book, Appendix Ovidiana, evokes the Appendix Vergiliana, the title of the collection of works attributed to Virgil in medieval Europe. Unlike that ancient corpus, however, these thirty-four poems ascribed to Ovid had diverse points of origin in time and did not travel together in medieval manuscripts until the thirteenth century.

This volume is a welcome addition to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. The editors have crafted a very helpful introduction that contextualizes each of the poems and explains how medieval scribes related them to Ovid. As a result, the rationale for this collection of pseudo-Ovidiana and its importance for understanding the reception history of Ovid in the Middle Ages are clear. Scholars of medieval Latin poetry will appreciate this collection of poems attributed to Ovid, which brings together in one place many otherwise obscure pieces of late antique and medieval Latin verse that share an association with the famed Roman poet.

Scott G. Bruce
Mediaevistik

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In 2009 Wesleyan professor Michael Roberts published an illuminating monograph on the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus [The Humblest Sparrow] in which he argued cogently for the sixth-century Fortunatus as a bridge from the late classical to earlier medieval periods. The hefty volume to hand with eleven books of poetry includes well-loved hymns as well as figure poems, epigrams on miracles, and elegies in the voices of abandoned or exiled women, epitaphs, georgics, consolations, and religious poems.

Creative and ingenious metaphors and wry, self-mocking humor, with wordplay and allegory too, have doubtless meant Fortunatus’s place in the canon of Christian Latin poets was assured. Commissions from influential patrons flowed his way, assuring prominence and, of course, ultimate survival of his work. In the end, one might call him the poet laureate of the Merovingian era. Drawing on antecedent editions by Reydellet and Di Brezzano, et al., this nearly faultless edition and translation of Fortunatus by Roberts will doubtless stand the test of time, bringing on a new wave of interest in the poet.

Raymond J. Cormier
Mediaevistik

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The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library continues to produce handsome and readable facing-page translations of important texts, many previously unpublished. This volume follows the 2015 translation of the Allegories of the Iliad by the same scholars and in the same series. As Goldwyn and Kokkini note in their introduction, Tzetzes, who died in 1180, could count on an audience familiar with both the source epics and with his allegorical method. They characterize Tzetzes as “a misunderstood genius forced into poverty by an anti-intellectual and corrupt world” who nonetheless produced a significant body of work.

All of his work is characterized by allusive and ostentatious displays of learning, and one wonders who was paying attention, either at the time or over the centuries. With this translation in our hands, however, those displays open windows into the cultural and aesthetic milieu of twelfth-century Byzantium.

Many passages blend standard mythological relationships with inscrutable associations. This specular labyrinth makes the experience of reading Tzetzes a mash up of Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Allusions and associations proliferate: Hesiod, Herodotus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Aristophanes, John of Antioch, John Malalas, Ptolemy. The reader is left seeking a rationale or through-line; the code or the key. The telos is definitely not Ithaca, but something in Tzetzes’s psyche to make the Odyssey the vehicle for his ambition.

James H. Morey
The Medieval Review

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The songs known as the Carmina Burana constitute the largest and most famous surviving collection of medieval Latin lyric. These two lovely volumes in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) series present for the first time the whole contents of the manuscript in Latin with English facing-page translation. They are edited and translated by classicist David Traill, who brings to this ambitious project deep knowledge of medieval Latin poetry and the Carmina Burana manuscript.

The two volumes of Traill’s edition and translation amount to over 1,300 pages of text, with enormously helpful apparatus that aims to make the contents available to “English-speaking scholars and general readers.” The twenty-three-page introduction covers a lot of material compactly. The more discursive parts of the “Notes to the Translation” are a delight, at once deeply learned and approachable, a wonderful aid to understanding these often difficult lyrics.

On the whole, Traill’s translations are far more interesting and thoughtful than a simple trot, but will enable anyone with a modicum of Latin to appreciate the poem as it was written. These are, indeed, translations worth having. For anyone who ever contemplated teaching the medieval Latin lyric to undergraduates, the DOML Carmina Burana is a wonderful resource. As Jan Ziolkowski in his role as general editor of the DOML emphasized in a 2010 Harvard Magazine interview: “You have to appeal to a wide audience, but also satisfy the erudite.” These volumes should do both.

Thomas C. Moser, Jr.
Speculum

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