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 subject matter. With these translations, Wetherbee, one of the great scholars of medieval Latin literature, has made readily available to current and future scholars not only highly readable translations but has also shared his tremendous expertise and erudition about these texts in an easily accessible format. This is particularly the case for Architrenius, which, as he remarks in the conclusion to his Introduction, he has “been wrestling with for fifty years.”
Winthrop Wetherbee has done heroic labor in translating Architrenius and making it accessible to so many readers, not only those who do not know Latin but also those who are “somewhat competent in the language,” as A. G. Rigg put it nearly twenty-five years ago. There can be no doubt that this volume will be the place to begin for those interested in the popular and influential Architrenius by Johannes de Hauvilla.
Stephen M. Metzger
The Medieval Review
