Press

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

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Library continues to produce handsome and readable facing-page translations of important texts, many previously unpublished.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

The songs known as the Carmina Burana constitute the largest and most famous surviving collection of medieval Latin lyric. These two lovely volumes in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) series present for the first time the whole contents of the manuscript in Latin with English facing-page translation. They are edited and translated by classicist David Traill, who brings to this ambitious project deep knowledge of medieval Latin poetry and the Carmina Burana manuscript. The two volumes of Traill’s edition

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

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