The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library attends MAA 2022 in Charlottesville
The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library is excited to exhibit at the Medieval Academy of America conference in Charlottesville, VA, March 10-12, 2022. Please stop by our in-person conference booth or, if you are attending virtually, our electronic booth in the conference app. To celebrate the conference, we are offering a discount, good through April 20, 2022, available when you order with the special form linked below. Shipping is free to the US and Canada. To order outside North and South
Review: Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad
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
Review: Architrenius, by Johannes de Hauvilla
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
Review: Appendix Ovidiana
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
Review: Poems, by Venantius Fortunatus
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
Review: Allegories of the Odyssey
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
