Press

Anonymous Old English saints’ lives form a major part of the corpus of surviving literature from early England. Compared to poetry or works by named authors like Ælfric, they have been mainly served by editors and translators piecemeal. Johanna Kramer, Hugh Magennis, and Robin Norris offer a welcome addition to the field with a new collection of Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints in fresh editions and translations. As the editors say, “The lives included in this collection are highly

The Anglo-Saxon riddles are a fascinating verbal realm where ambiguity and polysemy, suggestion and a big dose of distraction and deflection make the rule rather than the exception. Andy Orchard paves a way through this slippery territory by bringing together in one place the entire riddle corpus, Latin and Old English, with a detailed and informative commentary. The size of the work alone bespeaks years of industrious effort. The author revisits all the riddles and the literature on them, and

There seems to be growing interest in what John Tolan aptly calls the “European Muhammad”: not the historical figure who lived in and transformed early-seventh-century Arabia but rather “a mirror for European writers, expressing their fears, hopes, and ambitions.” Julian Yolles and Jessica Weiss enrich this field by providing ready access to narrative accounts of Muhammad’s life and, crucially, making these texts available not only in Latin but also in accurate and highly readable English translations. Medieval Latin Lives of

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

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