Books in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series

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.

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.

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.

This volume collects one hundred of the most important and beloved Late Antique and Medieval Latin hymns from Western Europe. Ranging from Ambrose in the late fourth century to Bonaventure in the thirteenth, the authors meditate on the ineffable, from Passion to Paradise, and cover a broad gamut of poetic forms and meters.

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.

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.

In 1039 Byzantium was the most powerful empire in Europe and the Near East. By 1079 it was a politically unstable state half the size, menaced by enemies on all sides. The History of Michael Attaleiates is our main source for this astonishing reversal. This translation, based on the most recent critical edition, includes notes, maps, and glossary.

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.

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.

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.

The Old English poems in this volume are among the first retellings of scriptural texts in a European vernacular. More than simple translations, they recast the familiar plots in daringly imaginative ways, from Satan's seductive pride (anticipating Milton), to a sympathetic yet tragic Eve, to the lyrical nature poetry in Azarias.

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.

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.

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.

Alan of Lille was renowned for his learning, his contributions to systematic theology, and his Latin poetry. The works included in this volume give imaginative expression to the main tenets of Alan's theology, but the original forms in which his vision is embodied are informed by a rich awareness of poetic tradition.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The Vulgate Bible was used from the early Middle Ages through the 12th century in the Western European Christian (and, later, Catholic) tradition. This volume elegantly and affordably presents the text of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. It is the first volume of the projected six-volume set of the complete Vulgate Bible.