Bøker i Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library-serien

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 legends collected in Saints at the Limits, despite sometimes being viewed with suspicion by the Church, fascinated Christians during the Middle Ages¿as cults and retellings attest. These Byzantine Greek stories, translated into English here for the first time, continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand universal fears and desires.

Medical Writings from Early Medieval England presents vernacular texts on health and healing--unique local remedies and translations of late antique Latin treatises--and offers insights into the history of science and medicine, scribal practices, and culture. This is first comprehensive edition and translation from Old English in more than 150 years.

John Geometres's Life of the Virgin Mary, a work of outstanding theological sophistication animated by deeply felt devotion to the Mother of God, remains largely unknown today. This new edition of the Byzantine Greek text and the first complete translation in a modern language presents a masterpiece of early Marian writing to new audiences.

Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean is a treasure trove of widely translated stories on how to conduct oneself and succeed in life. The new Byzantine Greek text and English translation presented here is based on a twelfth-century work that contains unique prefaces and reinstates stories omitted from the earliest Greek version.

Biblical and Pastoral Poetry was written by Alcimus Avitus, bishop of Vienne, in the late fifth or early sixth century. This volume presents new English translations alongside the Latin texts of the Spiritual History, his most famous work which narrates biblical stories, and verses addressed to his sister, In Consolatory Praise of Chastity.

The Historia surveys a tumultuous century in which two competing dynasties struggled for supremacy, while great magnates seized the opportunity to carve out their own principalities. Richer tells of synods and coronations, deception and espionage, battles and sieges, disease and death, and even the difficulties of travel.

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric, portrays an array of saints-including virgin martyrs, kings, soldiers, and bishops-whose examples modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance at a turbulent time when England was under severe Viking attack.

Carmina Burana, the largest surviving collection of secular Medieval Latin verse, features poems on subjects ranging from sex and gambling to crusades and corruption. This new, two-volume presentation of the medieval classic makes the anthology accessible in its entirety to Latin lovers and English readers alike.

Maximos the Confessor is one of the most challenging and original Christian thinkers of all time. The Ambigua is his greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind's journey to God.

Henry of Avranches, professional versifier to abbots, bishops, kings, and a pope, displays pyrotechnical verbal skill and playfulness that rivals the Carmina Burana and collections of rhymed secular verse. Yet The Saints' Lives also stands as self-conscious heir to the great classicizing tradition of twelfth-century epic poets.

The Life and Death of Theodore of Stoudios collects three important works promoting the influential Constantinople monastery of Stoudios and the memory of its founder, who is celebrated as a saint in the Orthodox Church for defending icon veneration. New editions of the Byzantine Greek texts appear alongside the first English translations.

Writings on Body and Soul includes a selection of the theological, historical, and devotional works of Aelred, the controversial abbot of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire who was widely admired but also criticized for frankness about his own sins. Freshly revised editions of the Latin texts appear here alongside new English translations.

The Old English Pastoral Care, a ninth-century translation from Latin of Pope Gregory the Great's guide for aspiring bishops that advises on what sort of spiritual guidance bishops should provide, was aimed at revitalizing the English Church. This new edition and translation into modern English is the first to appear in a century and a half.

The eleventh-century monk Ekkehard IV's Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall chronicles the 880s to 972, near the end of the famous Swiss monastery's two-century-long golden age, bearing witness to the struggles of the tenth-century church reform movement. This volume publishes the Latin text alongside its first complete English translation.

The Byzantine Sinbad collects The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher, originally a Persian story, and the sixty-two tales of The Fables of Syntipas-both translated from Syriac in the late eleventh century by Michael Andreopoulos. This volume is the first English translation to include these texts alongside the Byzantine Greek originals.

Wordplay has been at the heart of Western literature for many centuries, and medieval riddles provide insights into the extraordinary and the everyday. The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition assembles, for the first time ever, an astonishing array of riddles composed before 1200 CE that continue to entertain and puzzle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain-the earliest book to detail the legendary foundation of Britain and life of King Arthur-was widely read during the Middle Ages. This volume presents the first English translation of what may have been his source, the anonymous First Variant Version, attested in just a handful of manuscripts.

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.

The Latin psalms-translated into Old English-figured prominently in the lives of Anglo-Saxons, whether sung by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning, or recited in private devotion by lay people. The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time.

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.