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Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. Holy Men of Mount Athos presents the Lives of five holy men who lived there at different times, from the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century.

Laonikos was one of the Greek historians of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the first Greek writer to treat Islam as a legitimate cultural and religious system. He viewed Byzantines as Greeks rather than Romans, and his Histories of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire stands at the origins of Neo-Hellenic identity.

The Well-Laden Ship is an eleventh-century Latin poem composed of ancient and medieval proverbs, fables, and folktales. It was one of the few surviving works from the Middle Ages written explicitly for schoolroom use. Most of the content derives from the Bible, especially the wisdom books, from the Church Fathers, and from the ancient poets.

The twelfth-century Byzantine scholar, poet, and teacher John Tzetzes composed the verse commentary Allegories of the Odyssey to explain Odysseus's journey and the pagan gods and marvels he encountered. This edition presents the first translation of the Allegories of the Odyssey into any language alongside the Greek text.

Johannes de Hauvilla's satirical allegory Architrenius, completed in 1184, follows the quest for moral education of its eponymous protaganist, the "arch-weeper," who confronts the vices of school, church, and court. This edition brings together the most authoritative Latin text with a new English translation of an important medieval poem.

Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece collects a variety of funeral orations, encomia, and narrative hagiography that illuminate the roles of holy men during one of the most obscure periods of Greek history. This volume presents Byzantine Greek texts written by locals in the provinces and translated here into English for the first time.

Venantius Fortunatus, a master of the short praise poem and a canonical Christian Latin poet, wrote eleven volumes of hymns, epigrams, elegies, and other religious and epistolary verses addressed to kings, bishops, and abbesses. This volume presents for the first time in English translation all of his poetry, apart from a single long saint's life.

The Apocalypse informed medieval expectations of the end of the world, responses to strange and exotic invaders, and the legend of Alexander the Great. An Alexandrian World Chronicle represented the early Christian chronicle tradition that would dominate medieval historiography. Both crossed the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity.

Homilies collects seven sermons delivered by Sophronios during his short tenure as patriarch of Jerusalem, which coincided with the Holy City's capitulation to the Arab army in 638 CE. Based on a completely new edition of the Byzantine Greek text, this is the first English translation of the homilies of Sophronios.

Old English Legal Writings is the first publication to bring together Archbishop Wulfstan's works on law, church governance, and political reform that shaped the political world of eleventh-century England. This volume presents new editions of the Old English texts alongside new English translations.

For the first time in the history of Beowulf scholarship, the poem appears alongside the other four texts from its sole surviving manuscript: the prose Passion of Saint Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and the poem Judith.

Religious piety has rarely been animated as vigorously as in Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Ranging from lyrical to dramatic to narrative and showing great inventiveness, these ten anonymous poems vividly demonstrate the extraordinary hybrid that emerges when traditional Germanic verse adapts itself to Christian themes.

John of Garland's Parisiana poetria, first published about 1220, expounds medieval poetic theory and summarizes contemporary thought about writing. The long account of rhymed poetry included here is the most complete that has survived. This volume presents the most authoritative edition of the Latin text alongside a fresh English translation.

This second volume of a projected six-volume set of the complete Vulgate Bible presents the Historical Books of the Bible, which tell of Joshua's leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, the leadership of judges and kings, Israel's steady departure from many of God's precepts, the Babylonian Captivity, and the return of Israel from exile.

One of the most influential texts in the Middle Ages, The Rule of Saint Benedict offers guidance about both the spiritual and organizational dimensions, from the loftiest to the lowliest, of monastic life. This new Latin-English edition has features for both first-time readers and scholars of medieval history and language.

This volume presents two complementary medieval anthologies containing lyrics by two outstanding Latin poets of the second half of the twelfth century. The collection is further augmented by verse as varied as Christmas poems and satires on the venality of the Roman Curia and immoral bishops.

Volume III in this six-volume translation of the Vulgate Bible begins with Job's argument with God and continues with the Psalms and the Canticle of Canticles. Its seven Poetical Books mark the third step in a thematic progression from God's creation of the universe, through his oversight of historical events, and into the lives of his people.

Old English Shorter Poems offers tantalizing insights into the Anglo-Saxon mental landscape. These poems and charms find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. Wisdom also emerges as folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf.

The Byzantine mystic, writer, and monastic leader Symeon the New Theologian is considered a saint by the Orthodox Church. The Life was written more than 30 years after Symeon's death by his disciple and apologist Niketas Stethatos. This translation, based on an authoritative Greek edition, makes it accessible to English readers for the first time.

Volume IV presents writings attributed to the "major" prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Dire prophecies of God's impending judgment are punctuated by portentous visions. Profound grief is accompanied by the promise of mercy and redemption, a promise illustrated best by Isaiah's visions of a new heaven and a new earth.

Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints includes narratives from the eleventh and twelfth centuries about locally venerated saints like the abbess Seaxburh, as well as familiar ones like Nicholas and Michael the Archangel. This volume presents new Old English editions and modern English translations of twenty-two unattributed saints' Lives.

On Morals or Concerning Education is a manual of proper living and ethical guidance and the importance of education by the prolific late-Byzantine author and statesman Theodore Metochites. This volume provides the full Byzantine Greek text alongside the first English translation of one of Metochites's longest works.

The pseudonymous Appendix Ovidiana-which includes nature, erotic, and religious poetry-reflects different understandings of an admired Classical poet and expands his legacy through the Middle Ages. This is the first comprehensive collection and English translation of these medieval Latin verses ascribed to Ovid.

The Old English History of the World, produced around the year 900, is an anonymous translation and adaptation of Paulus Orosius's immensely popular Latin history known as the Seven Books of History against the Pagans. This volume offers a new edition and modern translation of an Anglo-Saxon perspective on the ancient world.

The anonymous Tria sunt, with its wealth of illustrative materials, was a widely used and highly ambitious textbook compiled in the late fourteenth century for rhetorical composition at Oxford. Of all the major Latin arts of poetry and prose, it is the only one not previously edited or translated into English.

This volume presents translations from the Greek of two crucial primary sources published together for the first time-Michael Panaretos's On the Emperors of Trebizond and Bessarion's Encomium on Trebizond-providing enlightening perspectives on Byzantine identity and illuminating views of this major trading hub along the Silk Road.

Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad helps trace the persistence of old cliches as well as the evolution of new attitudes toward Islam and its prophet over five centuries in Western culture. This volume brings together a highly varied and fascinating set of Latin narratives and polemics never before translated into English.

Poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous collects the varied Byzantine Greek verses of these witty and vibrant poets their epigrams, satires, encomia, polemics, and more in English for the first time.

Progymnasmata, exercises in the study of declamation, were the cornerstone of elite education from Hellenistic through Byzantine times. The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes, translated here into English for the first time, illuminate teaching and literary culture in one of the most important epochs of the Byzantine Empire.

Volume V of a projected six-volume Vulgate Bible presents the twelve minor prophetical books of the Old Testament, as well as two deuterocanonical books, 1 and 2 Maccabees. The major prophets' themes of judgment and redemption are further developed here by the minor prophets. Influential martyrdom narratives anticipate Christian hagiography.