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Many Old English students will count Alfred’s prefatory letter to the Old English Pastoral Care among the texts that introduced them to the language; outside of Beowulf, Alfred’s stated aim to translate “suma bec—ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne” [certain books—those most essential for all people to know] is perhaps one of the most quoted lines in the corpus of early English writing. Despite the apparent centrality of the Pastoral Care to early English translational practice, education, ethics,

There has been a growing interest over the years in Latin works dedicated to the study of Islam. The Latin lives of Muhammad, derogatory throughout, were written with the clear intention of undermining Islam by deriding its founder. In all likelihood, these works were based on the erroneous theological assumption – or rather Christian prejudice – that the life of Muhammad in Islam had a similar meaning to that of Jesus in Christianity, an obvious misapprehension. That is why the

Andrew Rabin brings Wulfstan’s political tracts and law codes together in a very efficient and handy edition, which places the Old English text and the Modern English translation on facing pages. It thus offers the scholarly and general public a more accessible introduction to Wulfstan than Felix Liebermann’s stately yet somewhat outdated Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903). The translation itself is concise and easy to read. Rabin follows the texts closely but manages to avoid the constraints of Old English

The Soliloquies of St. Augustine are a philosophical dialogue between Augustine’s mind and his faculty of reason concerning the nature of God and the immortality of the soul. The Soliloquies was translated into Old English in the late ninth century as part of King Alfred of Wessex’s (r. 871-899) program to revive learning and literacy in his kingdom. This volume contains complete texts of the Latin and Old English Soliloquies, as well as original, facing-page translations of both.  Leslie Lockett’s elegant, readable, and accurate translation of the

Few medieval authors make it as easy for historians to crawl inside their minds as Ekkehard IV of St. Gall (c. 980–c. 1057). He gets as close as possible to becoming an actual person—which is, all things considered, quite a rarity in medieval historiography. However, tempting as it may be to get swept up in the life and thoughts of this author, it is precisely this “personality” that makes it so important to not simply take his texts for granted,

This book comprises the first English translation of John Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Odyssey, a long allegorical commentary on Homer’s Odyssey in 15-syllable verse. It is the authors’ second work on Tzetzes to be published in recent years, following their translation of the Allegories of the Iliad (Cambridge 2015). Tzetzes divides his commentary into 24 sections corresponding to the Homeric books. After a short summary of each book, he interprets allegorically the Homeric verses that refer to the pagan gods.