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There’s a certain state of mind I call crossword brain: It’s both intuitive and counterintuitive, knowing when to turn away from the seemingly obvious solution, but also knowing when to trust your instincts and go with the answer that feels good. Yet as The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, a comprehensive new collection beautifully edited by the Oxford professor Andy Orchard, demonstrates, everything you need to know about crosswords you can learn from Anglo-Saxon riddles: Riddles are the ür-crossword puzzles.

Riddles are at the heart of language. The Old English verb raedan lies at the root of “to read” and “to riddle”: To read is to riddle, to riddle is to read. What makes the riddle so special and weird as a form — and so like the crossword — is its ability to be at once highbrow and lowbrow. Riddles represent the whole of Anglo-Saxon life. These short pieces range about as widely as possible in tone and form, from ribald cracks to grammar lessons to ornate religious puzzles by the archbishop of Canterbury. For perhaps the first time, Orchard’s collection gathers these early medieval riddles from across centuries and languages. An equally hefty companion book of commentary traces the riddles’ provenance, how scholars over the centuries have solved them and where they’ve gone astray.

Riddles, games and crosswords might seem like throwaways, entertaining diversions from real life. Crosswords entered The New York Times in 1942 to give readers a distraction from the bleak headlines of World War II. But crossword-brain and riddle logic tap into the heart of what it means to read, and to be human. To think inside the box, you have to let your mind wander free.

Adrienne Raphel
The New York Times Sunday Book Review

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These volumes have been long needed. They contain one of the major works of the single most prolific Old English author, Ælfric of Eynsham, yet have not been edited in more than a century. They fit with Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library’s mission of making new, carefully edited and beautifully presented editions and translations of medieval texts available to specialists and general readers alike. Since 2010, this series has established itself as the place to publish accessible translations with critical editions of Old English literature.

These volumes are designed to be of use and interest to a wide range of readers, and they succeed. First and foremost, they provide a new critical edition of these important texts. They have also contextualized the texts in a way that makes them intelligible to all readers, but also fits them into current Old English scholarship. The clear translations make these texts accessible to non-Old English scholars, and will, one hopes, lead to Ælfric’s collection being considered in the wider world of medieval hagiography. I find the translations to be clear and idiomatic, as well as wonderfully literal, so that it is easy to move from the translation to the Old English and quickly find any particular phrase that is being translated. Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins have struck an excellent balance of making the translation both readable and useful. These volumes achieve much in three compact, beautifully constructed books. They were worth the wait.

Damian Fleming
Speculum

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This volume compiles seven hagiographies of less-well known male saints in Greece from the ninth and the tenth centuries CE, and prints the Greek texts with facing English translations. This work falls under the overall publishing purpose of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library which aims to offer “the classics of the medieval canon as well as lesser-known gems of literary and cultural value to a global audience through accessible modern translations based on the latest research by leading scholars in the field.” The present volume achieves more than satisfactorily the standards set by the series in terms of the selection of the translated texts, the quality of the translations, and the editorial work of Professors Anthony Kaldellis and Ioannis Polemis.

Overall, this volume offers an essential selection of texts. Kaldellis and Polemis need to be commended not only for their enterprise to put them together and provide information on their importance and topics that emerge through these compositions and the intertextual sources that seem to be present in these works, but also for their translation from Medieval Greek given their various styles. This volume will be valuable to those interested in hagiographical texts from the Middle Byzantine period in Greece, students of Medieval Greek, and individuals interested in the lives of saints in Greece, particularly the broader area of the medieval Peloponnese.

Michail Kitsos
The Medieval Review

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Ælfric of Eynsham was one of the most prolific and politically engaged prose writers in early medieval England. His alliterative prose Lives of Saints (ca. 994-998 CE), composed during a turbulent era of Viking attack and church reform, has generated extensive scholarship on a range of topics, including lay piety, medieval gender relations, and the boundaries between Old English poetry and prose. Although Ælfric’s writings have long been recognized for their centrality within early English literature and culture, the main scholarly edition of his Lives of Saints–W. W. Skeat’s edition and translation, published by the Early English Text Society in 1881-1900 and reprinted in 1966 with no significant revisions–is over a century old. Clayton and Mullins’ three-volume edition of the Lives of Saints with facing-page translation is thus a much-awaited and most welcome addition to the field.   

Clayton and Mullins have produced an accessible, and yet remarkably thorough, edition that is filled with deep learning, energy, and good sense. Although the editors wear their learning lightly, these three volumes are the product of extensive knowledge and erudition. Scholars of all levels, as well as generalists interested in the early medieval past, will find much to admire in this accomplished and elegant edition. 

Stacy S. Klein
The Medieval Review

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Johannes de Hauvilla was a master of the important Rouen Cathedral school at the end of the twelfth century. His only known work is the satirical poem Architrenius [The Arch-Weeper], composed in 1184 and preserved in its entirety in twenty-six manuscripts, fourteen of which date to the thirteenth century. Divided into nine books, the Architrenius spans 4361 hexameters describing, in elaborate and often opaque Latin, the travels of the young protagonist as he searches for answers that will help him combat sin and foster moral self-discipline. His quest, “a collection of vivid tableaux,” as Winthrop Wetherbee describes it, culminates in the Arch-Weeper’s encounter with Nature, who lectures him on the order of the universe before granting him marriage with Moderation as a reward for his tribulations. Its stylistic ambitions, complex figurative language, and impressive knowledge of ancient literature and mythology made the Architrenius a classic in the Middle Ages and a canonical school text equal to the works of Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille, and Walter of Châtillon.

This elegant volume is clearly a labor of love: it provides students and scholars with an eminently useful translation of an often misunderstood and misjudged twelfth-century Latin epic; it is also valuable for the improved version of [Paul Gerhard] Schmidt’s Latin text, itself not easy to find outside major research libraries. It is to be hoped that both edition and translation will change the fate of the Architrenius, bringing this distinctive, if unusual work to the attention of both Latin aficionados and the wider public. There is much to be learned from the Arch-Weeper’s complaint about the avarice and selfishness of the world!

Greti Dinkova-Bruun
Speculum

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