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Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus (mid-fifth century to 518 CE), the bishop of Vienne, left us with a large letter collection, a biblical epic of five books, De spiritalis historiae gestis, and a poem addressed to his sister on the virtues of chastity, De consolatoria castitatis laude. With his translation, Michael Roberts aims for readability and accuracy while leaving room to make choices for the sake of fluency. He achieves his goal and offers a clear and uniformly excellent prose translation. As

In the face of scant biblical information about the background and life of Mary, the virginal mother of Jesus Christ, Byzantine theologians relied on a variety of sources including apocryphal texts, homilies, hymns, and exegetical commentaries. Literary attempts to recount and celebrate Mary’s entire life story emerged somewhat late in this tradition. It was John Geometres who produced the most sophisticated, in theological and rhetorical terms, of the surviving texts. In the words of Maximos Constas and Christos Simelidis, this

Commentaries on the liturgy constitute a significant, but still unjustly neglected literary genre in the medieval period. In recent decades, excellent critical editions have been produced of some of the major monuments of the genre, including the De ecclesiasticis officiis of John Beleth, the Mitralis de officiis of Sicard of Cremona and the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand. This makes the decision of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, lavishly produced on high quality paper in two volumes of a comfortable size, to include an

Frank T. Coulson and Justin Haynes here offer an edition and English translation of the Ovidius moralizatus, or Moralized Ovid, of Pierre Bersuire. In all, this volume offers a wealth of fascinating material, adding an immensely important text to those already available for the study of the medieval and early modern reception of Ovidian myths, as well as the complex practices of moral and allegorical readings of pagan texts. The lucid English translation and informative notes will make it accessible not only

Sophia Xenophontos has successfully managed to render in fluid English a Greek text which is not equally fluid in its original form, and yet to reproduce in an almost perfect manner its stylistic peculiarities. Thanks to this great job both scholars and students are provided with a very useful tool for the study of Theodore Metochites and his work, as well as the intellectual affairs of the so-called “Early Palaeologan Renaissance.” Moreover, as it has already been observed, the book

For the teaching of Old English language and literature, for scholarship on early medieval healing practices, and for the study of premodern medicine more broadly, Medical Writings from Early Medieval England offers at once both an accessible point of entry and an invaluable resource for even the most specialized research in the field. This first of a projected two-volume set includes The Old English Herbal and Old English Remedies from Animals, Lacnunga, and Peri Didaxeon, as well as 101 miscellaneous