Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Written during the last sixteen years of Liszt’s life, these letters are addressed to the Baroness Olga von Meyendorff, who shared his interests in a broad field of disciplines. Composed with warmth and humor, they reveal Liszt to have been an ardent, generous, and modest man, loyal and devoted to family and friends, pupils and colleagues alike.

Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century is devoted to frontier studies and to the structures of the Arab federates of Byzantium. It deals mainly with the Ghassanids of Oriens in the sixth century, a time of transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The focus is on the military, religious, and civil structures of the Ghassanids.

The vast collection of 17,000 Byzantine lead seals in the Harvard collections has long been recognized as an important source for the study of the Byzantine provinces. This volume is the fourth in the series of catalogues of geographical seals, and presents photographs, descriptions, and commentaries on the seals from the East.

Volume 5 in the Byzantine Seals catalogue includes seals with place names from the East, Constantinople and its environs, and seals with uncertain readings. These seals contribute significantly to historical geography, the evolution of the Byzantine imperial administration, development in the Greek language, and decorative vogues.

The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 6 in the catalogue presents the seals of emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople. More than 250 seals are illustrated and accompanied—where appropriate—by a full commentary regarding each specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and iconographic features.

This is the first fully illustrated catalogue of a major collection of late Roman and early Byzantine imperial coins. It follows the general layout of the Byzantine volumes in the Dumbarton Oaks series, with a substantial introduction dealing with the history of the coinage, including iconography, mints, and the monetary system.

Marvin Ross’s groundbreaking catalogue of jewelry in the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks, first published in 1965, has long been out of print, but its enduring status led to a reprint—this time with color photographs and an addendum by Susan Boyd and Stephen Zwirn with 22 new objects acquired by Dumbarton Oaks since 1962.

In volume 2 of this series, Part I examines Phocas and Heraclius (602–641) and Part II covers the period between Heraclius Constantine to Theodosius III (602–717).

In volume three of this series, Part I covers the period between Leo III to Michale III (867–1081), while Part II covers Bail I to Nicephorus III (867–1081).

This volume is in two parts. Part I covers the reigns of Alexius I to Alexius V (1081–1204), and Part II covers the emperors of Nicea and their contemporaries (1204–1261).

Part I includes the introduction, appendices, and bibliography, while Part II continues with the catalogue, concordances, and indexes.

This catalogue focuses on the Greek and Roman antiquities of the collections at Dumbarton Oaks. The catalogue also includes other objects, such as a bronze horse, and four floor mosaics from Antioch.

These sculptures reflect the Blisses’ wide-ranging tastes and extraordinary connoisseurship. About a quarter are Greco-Roman; nearly two-thirds of the rest are Late Antique, mostly limestone carvings from Early Byzantine Egypt. Sculpture from the Middle Byzantine period is very rare, making the four pieces in this collection especially significant.

This book is the first general survey of lighting in Byzantium. The first part of the book discusses the technology and types of lighting devices and explains their decorative symbolism and social function. The second half illustrates this narrative by drawing on a Dumbarton Oaks exhibition.

This illustrated handbook presents a concise history of the development of the coinage of the early Arab caliphate in the seventh century. The historical introduction, which includes descriptions of all the basic types, is followed by a summary catalogue of the recently acquired collection of Arab-Byzantine coins at Dumbarton Oaks.

From nuns disguised as monks to desert harlots, the ten women whose vitae are presented here exemplify the divergent paths to sanctification in Byzantium. These vitae are also notable for their details of Byzantine life, providing information on family life and household management, monastic routines, and even a smallpox epidemic.

The Old Testament in Byzantium contains papers from a Dumbarton Oaks symposium based on an exhibition of early Bible manuscripts titled “In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000.” Topics include manifestations of the holy books in Byzantine manuscript illustration, architecture, and government, as well as in Jewish Bible translations.

Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium presents detailed information about children’s lives, and provides a basis for further study. This collection of eight articles covers matters relevant to daily life such as the definition of children in Byzantine law, procreation, death, breastfeeding patterns, and material culture.

A group of scholars, mostly Dutch, surveys what has been called the “golden age“ of Dutch garden design. Essays discuss the political context of William’s building and gardening activities at his palace; the development of a distinctively Dutch garden art during the 17th century; country house poetry; and specific estates and their gardens.

Much has been written on the traditions of elite gardens but little attention has been directed to the gardens of more humble and popular cultures that reflect regional, localized, ethnic, personal, or folk creations. These articles reflect growing interest in a range of cultural artifacts that demonstrate how culture influences surroundings.

John Evelyn (1620–1706) was a pivotal figure in 17th-century intellectual life in England. The contributors approach him and his work from diverse disciplines: architectural and intellectual history and histories of science, agriculture, gardens, and literature. They present the “Elysium Britannicum” as a central document of late European humanism.

Garden history is a discipline of contested purposes. Perspectives on Garden Histories contributes to a self-critical examination of this emergent field of study, at the same time offering an overview of its main achievements in several domains—such as Italian and Mughal gardens—and of the new kinds of investigation to which they have led.

Places of Commemoration examines commemorative sites of different character, including gardens, landscapes, memorials, cemeteries, and sites of former Nazi concentration camps, detailing the ideas behind the creation of memorials and monuments and the struggles over the narratives they present.

The present renewal of garden art demands a new approach to garden aesthetics. This book considers exceptional creations around the world and proposes new forms of garden experience using a variety of critical perspectives.

Breaking with the idea that gardens are places of indulgence and escapism, these studies of ritualized practices reveal that gardens in Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean have in fact made significant contributions to cultural change.

This book highlights religious, artistic, political, and economic consequences of horticultural pursuits, exploring the roles of peasants, botanists, horticulturists, nurserymen, and gentlemen collectors in these developments, and offering a reflection on horticulture’s future in the context of environmental devastation and ecological uncertainty.

The essays in this volume explore the broad range of ideas about nature reflected in twentieth-century concepts of natural gardens and their ideological implications. They also investigate garden designers’ use of earlier ideas of natural gardens and their relationship to the rich model that nature offers.

Baroque Garden Cultures proposes a new approach to the study of baroque gardens, examining the social reception of gardens as a means to understand garden culture in general and exploring baroque gardens as a feature of baroque cultures in particular.

Dumbarton Oaks houses the extraordinary art collection begun by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. In this book the museum publishes the specialist collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, along with examples from the Blisses’ superb European collection, for the first time.

These seven chapters, originally given as lectures honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, cover a wide range of topics, from the relationship of Byzantium with its Islamic, Slavic, and Western European neighbors to the modern reception of Byzantine art.

The essays in this volume investigate themes related to the place of law in Byzantine ideology and society. Was this a society which was meant to be governed by law? For answers, these essays look to the intent of the legislators; the attitudes toward the law; the relationship between law, religion, literature, and art.

From the walls and curtains of first-century Judaism to the tramezzo of Renaissance Italy, screens of various shapes and sizes have been used to separate the sacred from the secular. Drawn from papers presented at a recent Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies symposium, this volume provides insightful new research on the history of the iconostasis.

This fascinating two-volume set includes a photographic reproduction of an anonymous 17th-century Italian gardener’s notebook from Dumbarton Oaks’s Rare Books Collection. The notebook is a record of the planting of three flower gardens at San Lorenzo. Ada Segre’s accompanying study of the notebook is a groundbreaking example of garden archaeology.

This publication brings to a wider audience important new findings in the fields of medieval pottery and archaeometry. The new data that materials analysis provides about Byzantine ceramics and their production at times supports, modifies, and even contradicts conclusions derived from traditional archaeological methods.

Using the evidence of written documents, seed and plant lists, catalogues, and illustrations, the author attempts to show which annuals were popular and how they were used in the fifty-year period following the Civil War. Several commercial seed lists are reproduced to document the changing styles of gardening.

The essays in this volume focus on the different aspects of Italian gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is divided into two parts, with the first part concentrating on the decorations in Roman gardens of the sixteenth century, and the second considering two particular sites and their histories.

Until recently, little archaeological investigation has been dedicated to the Inka, the last great culture in Andean South America before the 16th-century arrival of the Spaniards. Using both theoretical and methodological approaches, scholars of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities provide a new understanding of Inka culture and history.

Gardens have exerted a deep influence on the culture of cities. Considering each city as a whole, this book presents the profoundly different roles of gardens in cultural development and social life. Gardens, City Life and Culture unveils an exciting domain of interplay between public and private action that is little known by citizen groups, city planners, and managers.

Twenty-one papers on the Olmec were written for this volume in tribute to Matthew W. Stirling, “pioneer archaeologist, ethnologist, and the discoverer of the Olmec civilization.”

This book elucidates the birth of the new relationship between the Roman Empire and the Arabs and the rise of its institutional forms. Shahîd discusses the participation of the Arab foederati in Byzantium’s wars with her neighbors—the Persians and the Goths—during which those Arab allies contributed to the welfare of the imperium and the ecclesia.

This book explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ball game rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.

In 1969, House and Garden magazine commissioned one of the first minimalist artists, Patricia Johanson, to propose new directions for American garden art. Having never been exhibited or published before as a whole, the resulting garden proposals reveal an unknown dimension of the New York art world of the late 1960s.

This book summarizes research on the nature of El Niño events in the Americas and details specific historic and prehistoric patterns in Peru and elsewhere.

This book examines evidence for cultural interchange among the intellectual powerbrokers in Postclassic Mesoamerica, specifically those centered in the northern Maya lowlands and the central Mexican highlands. It includes a wealth of new data and interpretive frameworks in a comprehensive discussion of a critical time period in Mesoamerica.

John Scott looks at the characteristics, stylistic evolution, ceramic relationships, and dating of the Danzantes of Monte Albán. The volume includes an illustrated catalogue of the reliefs and an appendix on their petrography and pigmentation.

Townsend offers an interpretation of major examples of Mexica monumental art by identifying three interrelated iconographic themes: the conception of the universe as a sacred structure, the correspondence of the social order and the territory of the nation with the cosmic structure, and the representation of Tenochtitlan as the historically legitimate successor to the civilization of the past.

The authors present evidence that specific place names do exist in Maya inscriptions, and show that identifying these names sheds considerable light on both past and present questions about the Maya.

The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca was created at a pivotal transitional moment, bridging an era when pictorial manuscripts dominated and one that witnessed the rising hegemony of alphabetic texts. Script and Glyph is a particularly appropriate volume for Dumbarton Oaks, as it crosses the boundaries of Pre-Columbian and Landscape areas of study. The volume is beautifully illustrated with color images from the manuscript itself.

Papers from the 1986 Summer Seminar, “Empire, Province, and Village in Aztec History.”

This volume consists of papers from the 1992 Dumbarton Oaks conference marking the quincentennial of Columbus’s landing in the Americas.

These articles mark a significant stage in the study of Maya architecture and the society that built it. They represent advances in our understandings of the past, point toward avenues for further studies, and note the distance yet to travel in fully appreciating and understanding this ancient American culture and its material remains.

This volume is both a summation of work that has been carried out over a long period of time and a signpost pointing the way for future studies. Issues regarding gender, social identity, and landscape archaeology are present, as are the analysis of mortuary practices, questions of social hierarchy, and conjunctive studies of art and society.

This volume is devoted to the archaeology of Formative Ecuador in order to bring new information on this important period of the region’s past to the attention of New World scholars.

Until the 1980s, the Roman frontier in modern Jordan was among the least studied of the empire’s far-flung border regions. From 1980 until 1989, excavation focused on the late Roman legionary fortress of el-Lejjun as well as four smaller but contemporaneous forts. This report presents detailed results from the excavated forts, a broad range of material evidence from animal bones to bedouin burials, and provides a synthesis of the history of this frontier, which witnessed the first confrontation between the Byzantine Empire and the forces of Islam.

This is the first monographic study of the Glajor Gospel, a 14th-century illuminated Armenian manuscript. In addition to critical studies of the iconography of the illuminations, the authors provide the history of the manuscript and the political and cultural setting in which it was produced, and the history of the monastery and school of Glajor.

The “Parangelmata Poliorcetica“ and the “Geodesia,“ two Greek treatises on the construction of devices for siege warfare, are products of 10th-century Byzantium. The texts are presented here in critical editions based, for the first time, on the archetype manuscript “Vaticanus graecus 1605“ and accompanied by an English translation and commentary.

Leo’s firsthand experience of the campaigns and courts of two Byzantine emperors provides vivid descriptions of sieges, pitched battles, and ambushes. His account of the conspiracy against Nikephoros II Phokas, murdered as he slept on the floor in front of his icons, is one of the most dramatic in Byzantine narrative histories.

The Kariye Camii remains one of the most important and best-known monuments of the Byzantine world. Rebuilt and decorated in the early 14th century by statesman-scholar Theodore Metochites, the monument played a key role in the development of Late Byzantine art. Ousterhout presents a structural history and architectural analysis of this building.

Sirarpie Der Nersessian’s scholarship has influenced the understanding of Armenian art and its Byzantine context. These two volumes are the culmination of six decades devoted to the exploration of Armenian art, and reflect a deep knowledge of the manuscripts and their creators.

This volume examines the use of florilegia—anthologies of earlier writings—by ecumenical councils. The manuscript provides new information concerning the beginning of the Filioque controversy and the use of Iconophile florilegia by the seventh ecumenical council in 787.

In this work, David and June Winfield discuss the language of Byzantine church decoration, methods of plastering, proportional rules, system of coloring, and the working methods of the Byzantine painter.

Replete with mosaics and revetment, the basilica was the center of the ecclesiastical administration until its destruction in the late seventh century. In this long-awaited report, Megaw and colleagues present in full the results of excavations from the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s.

The military achievements of the emperors Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, and Basil II brought the Byzantine Empire to the height of power by the early 11th century. This book presents new editions and translations of the Praecepta militaria of Nikephoros Phokas and the revised version included in the Taktika of Nikephoros Ouranos.

This is a reprint of the second revised edition of the text and translation written and compiled by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. The edition includes general and critical introductions, an index of proper names, and an extensive glossary, as well as grammatical notes and an index of sources and parallel passages.

Threatened on all sides by relentless enemies for a thousand years, the Byzantines needed ready armies and secure borders. To this end, experienced commanders compiled practical handbooks of military strategy. Three such manuals are presented here. These treatises provide information not only on tactics and weaponry but also on the motivations of the men who risked their lives to defend the empire.

Preserved in a single manuscript, Ignatios’s correspondence has remained practically unknown to scholars. Some of the letters deal with literary trifles, while others contain valuable information on the social and economic history of the period. Taken together, they afford a unique glimpse into the activity of a Byzantine intellectual.

This study highlights a selection of garden ornaments from Dumbarton Oaks, the Washington, D.C., estate of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. Drawings from Beatrix Farrand’s office and excerpts from her Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks, combined with period photographs, endeavor to show the stylistic sources, evolution of design, and iconography.

Based on a set of papers presented by sixteen international scholars at the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Studies symposium held in Lima, Peru, in 2004, this volume brings together essays on the nature of political organization of the Moche, a complex pre-Inca society that existed on the north coast of Peru from c. 100 to 800 CE.

This volume presents the collection of Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, and Classic Veracruz sculpture, jewelry, and painting. Four leading scholars present essays on the ancient art and archaeology of Mexico’s Central Highlands, Southwestern Highlands, and Gulf Lowlands as well as extensive catalogue entries of over one hundred objects.

The imperial court in Constantinople is central to the outsider’s vision of Byzantium. However, in spite of its fame in literature and scholarship, there have been few attempts to analyze the court in its entirety as a phenomenon. These studies provide a unified composition by presenting Byzantine courtly life in all its interconnected facets.

This volume considers the significance of stone monuments in Preclassic Mesoamerica. By placing sculptures in their cultural, historical, social, political, religious, and cognitive contexts, the seventeen contributors utilize archaeological and art historical methods to understand the origins, growth, and spread of civilization in Middle America.

This book assesses the significance of the embellishment of the church of San Marco of Venice and its immediate surroundings. The authors address the diverse styles, sources, meanings, and significance of this art, offering new insights into the inspiration, purposes, and mutability of San Marco and the myths that inspired and motivated Venetians.

Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art explores the portable artifacts of eastern Mediterranean pilgrimage from the fifth to the seventh century, presenting them in the context of contemporary pilgrims’ texts and the archaeology of sacred sites. Gary Vikan significantly expands this narrative in the revised, enlarged edition of the book.

Michael McCormick rehabilitates a neglected source from Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. It preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments, and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.

This volume catalogues the American art collection at Dumbarton Oaks and is published in conjunction with an exhibition, “American Art at Dumbarton Oaks.” Richly illustrated with color plates and comparative illustrations, this catalogue will be an important and enduring reference for scholars, students, and admirers of American art.

Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss were consummate collectors and patrons. The illustrated essays in this volume reveal how the Blisses’ wide-ranging interests in art, music, gardens, architecture, and interior design resulted in the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection—what they came to call their “home of the humanities.”

The history of Pre-Columbian collecting is a social and aesthetic history—of ideas, people and organizations, and objects. This richly illustrated volume examines these histories by considering the collection and display of Pre-Columbian objects in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

Italian gardens have received more attention from historians than perhaps any other garden tradition. This volume presents eight richly illustrated essays by established and emerging scholars that suggest striking new directions, both quantitative and methodological, for future research.

This volume is a “must read” for all Mesoamericanists. Originally published in 2007, it revisits long-standing questions regarding the relationship between Chichén Itzá and Tula and considers their roles in the social, political, and economic relationships that emerged during the transition from the Epiclassic to the Early Postclassic period.

Their Way of Writing considers substantive and theoretical issues concerning writing and signing systems in the ancient Americas. The contributions here not only present the latest thinking about graphic and tactile systems of communication but constitute a major contribution to our comparative and global understanding of writing and literacy.

Following its initial publication in 2005, A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia has become a seminal work in interpreting the rich material remains of Byzantine Cappadocia. This revised edition builds upon its predecessor with an updated preface, a new bibliography, and a new master map of the Çanlı Kilise site.

Tombs for the Living examines how mortuary practices functioned in different cultures across the Andes. By examining rich sets of archaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric data, this collection enriches our understanding of the context and meaning of mortuary traditions in the region.

This volume explores how ancient Mesoamerican cities defined themselves through their built environments. Themes include the ways in which a kingdom’s monuments reflected geographic space, patron gods, and mythology, and how the Olmec, Maya, Mexica, Zapotecs, and others sought to center their world through architectural monuments and public art.

How are markets in antiquity to be characterized? As comparable to modern free markets? As controlled by the State? Or in completely different terms, as free but regulated? Here, scholars address these and related questions by reexamining and reinterpreting records from Byzantium and its hinterland for local, regional, and interregional trade.

This introduction to Maya art is based on study of one of the most important collections in the United States, assembled by Robert Woods Bliss between 1935 and 1962. The catalogue, written by leading Maya scholars, contains detailed analyses of specific works of art along with thematic essays situating them within the context of Maya culture.

The fall of Acre in 1291 inspired many schemes for crusades to recover Jerusalem. One of these proposals is How to Defeat the Saracens, written around 1317 by William of Adam, a Dominican who traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and parts of India. Extensive notes guide the reader through the historical context of this fascinating work.

The De Administrando Imperio, compiled by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century, is one of the most important historical documents surviving from the middle Byzantine period, containing information on foreign relations and internal administration. Long out of print, this most authoritative study of the text is once again available.

Built around 1100, the church of Asinou in Cyprus is decorated with accretions of images, from the fresco cycle executed shortly after construction to those made in the seventeenth century. This volume sets Asinou’s art and architecture in the context of the surrounding area’s changing fortunes under Byzantine, Lusignan, Venetian, and Ottoman rule.

Archaeological illustrations are often treated as neutral representations. This volume considers them instead as products of time and place that actively shape the construction of knowledge. Taking the visual presentation of the Pre-Columbian past from the fifteenth century to today, these essays explore the culture of archaeological illustration.

Whether threatened by habitat destruction or climate change, many wild animals have failed to thrive in the company of humans. The essays in Designing Wildlife Habitats explore how landscape architects and garden designers are drawing on the insights and practices of conservation ecology to create productive ecosystems and promote biodiversity.

Viewing the Morea focuses on the late medieval Morea (Peloponnese), beginning with the bold attempt of Western knights to establish a kingdom on its soil. The authors explore how the groups of this contested region—Crusaders, Orthodox villagers, and Venetians—interacted, asserted identity, and recollected the ancient history of the Peloponnese.

Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World investigates the complex structure of economic systems in the pre-Hispanic Americas, with a focus on the central highlands of Mexico, the Maya Lowlands, and the central Andes. Essays examine the use of marketplaces, the role of merchants and artisans, and the operation of trade networks.

A window into the complex world of competing church factions, imperial powers, and the papacy, The Life of Patriarch Ignatius is the vivid account of two major ecclesiastical struggles of the ninth century. Critically edited with annotations, maps, and indexes, this important historical document is here translated into English for the first time.

By examining the connections between place and identity in the Classic Maya culture that thrived in the Yucatan peninsula and parts of Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras from 350 to 900 CE, Alexandre Tokovinine addresses one of the crucial research questions in anthropology: How do human communities define themselves in relation to landscapes?

First published in 2010, and now available in this updated, revised paper edition, this is the first modern critical edition of the complete text of Byzantine emperor Leo VI’s military treatise, The Taktika. The volume includes a facing English translation and explanatory notes by George T. Dennis, as well as extensive indexes.

John Haldon’s critical commentary on Byzantine emperor Leo VI’s Taktika, the first to appear in any language, addresses in detail the varied subjects touched on in the treatise. Three introductory chapters examine the context, sources, language, structure and content of the text and the military administration of the empire in Leo’s time.

Innovative landscape architect Leberecht Migge espoused an idea of “garden culture” that reflected the progressive political currents of early twentieth-century Germany. Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century details his vision, including an emphasis on the socioeconomic benefits of urban agriculture that prefigured this now popular trend.

This illustrated volume presents the never-before-published travel report by the Prussian court gardener Hans Jancke. Describing his 1874–1875 apprenticeship in England, the report contains extensive plant lists, measured drawings, and detailed descriptions of the horticultural regimens observed in the Knowsley Estate’s gardens and greenhouses.

Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places examines the nature of war in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Drawing on anthropological archaeology, bioarchaeology, and ethnohistory, the essays consider the similarities and differences of warfare in cross-cultural perspective, from the importance of captive-taking to rituals of sacrifice and performance.

One of the most important middle Byzantine saints’ lives, The Life of Saint Basil the Younger presents the life of a holy man who lived in Constantinople in the first part of the tenth century. The first critical edition in any language, this volume provides the Greek text facing the annotated English translation, as well as an introduction.

Technology and the Garden examines the role of technology in the shaping and visualization of landscapes. Essays discuss topics including the development of horticultural technologies; the construction of landscape through hydraulics, labor, and infrastructure; and the effect of emerging technologies on the experience of landscape.

Bringing together cartography, history, philosophy, philology, and other disciplines, Dante and the Greeks taps into the knowledge of scholars of the medieval West, Byzantium, and Dante. Essays discuss the presence of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and science in Dante’s writings, as well as the Greek characters who populate his works.

Four Seasons of Flowers presents a selection of manuscripts, herbals, and printed botanical texts from the Rare Book Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. With each text accompanied by remarkable botanical illustrations, it offers an illuminating overview of the scientific history of botany, from its origins in the sixteenth century to the present day.

Anthony F. Aveni gathers specialists from diverse fields to discuss temporal concepts gleaned from the people of Mesoamerica and the Andes. Essays address how they reckon and register time and how they sense time and its moral dimensions. To them, time is a feature of the process of perception, not just the sharp present ingrained in Western minds.

Food and the City explores the physical, social, and political relations between the production of food and urban settlements. Essays offer a variety of perspectives—from landscape and architectural history to geography—on the multiple scales and ideologies of productive landscapes across the globe from the sixteenth century to the present.

Saints and Sacred Matter explores the embodied aspects of the divine—physical remains of holy men and women and objects associated with them. Contributors explore how relics linked the past and present with an imagined future in essays that discuss Christian and other religious traditions from the ancient world such as Judaism and Islam.

The New Testament in Byzantium draws on the current state of textual scholarship and explores aspects of the New Testament, particularly as it was imagined in lectionaries, hymns, homilies, saints’ lives, miniatures, and monuments—framing Byzantine Christian theological inquiry, ecclesiastical controversy, and political thought.

Making Value, Making Meaning explores the concept of techné—the application of a thorough and masterful knowledge of a specific field—as an analytic tool useful for understanding how the production process created value and meaning for objects and public monuments in complex societies of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes.

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century brings together international scholars to examine: the figure of the botanical explorer; links between imperial ambition and the impulse to survey, map, and collect specimens in “new” territories; and relationships among botanical knowledge, self-representation, and material culture.

Sign and Design addresses the pictorial dimension of writing systems from cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspectives. Historians, paleographers, and anthropologists engage with pictographic, ideographic, and logographic writing systems and alphabetic scripts, examining diverse examples of cross-pollination between language and art.

Trepanation is the oldest surgical procedure known from antiquity, but its origins, evolution, and the reasons for doing it remain unclear. Holes in the Head examines trepanation in ancient Peru and explores its origins and spread throughout the Central Andes, focusing on techniques, success rates, and possible motivations for trepanning.

Essays in North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam include the legacy of Vandal rule in Africa, art and architectural history, archaeology, economics, theology, Berbers, and the Islamic conquest. They examine the ways in which the imperial legacy was re-interpreted, re-imagined, and put to new uses in Byzantine and early Islamic Africa.

Sound and Scent in the Garden explores the experiences of sound and smell as dimensions of garden design. The contributors explore the sensory experience of gardens as places and demonstrate a wide variety of approaches to apply to the study of sensory history.

Painted Words presents a facsimile and analysis of a 17th-century pictographic Catholic catechism from colonial Mexico at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This book shows they are better understood as indigenous expressions of devotional knowledge—with pictures to aid oral performance—rather than the products of evangelization.

Cappadocia is unrivaled in its preservation of the physical remains of the Byzantine Empire: churches, towns and villages, agricultural installations, storage facilities, and other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia.

Hagia Sophia is the architectural jewel of Constantinople. The edifice is intact, yet only some of its original mosaics survive. Natalia Teteriatnikov analyzes the materials, the architectural and theological aesthetics, and the social conditions that led to the distinctive mosaics, alongside watercolors of lost mosaics by Gaspare Fossati.

Scholars have attended to aspects of sight and sound in Byzantine culture, but have generally left smell, taste, and touch undervalued and understudied. Through collected essays that redress the imbalance, the volume offers a fresh charting of the Byzantine sensorium as a whole.

The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru is a richly illustrated volume offering a nuanced account of the modern history of exploration, archaeology, and image making at Pañamarca. It also offers detailed documentation of the new fieldwork carried out by the authors at the site.

Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history—shaping the development of urban landscapes and altering ecologies. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. River Cities, City Rivers explores how such histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.

Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice address the traditions, circumstances, and practices that involved the burning of bodies and bone, to better understand the ideologies behind these acts. It brings together scholars working across Mesoamerica with different methodologies and interdisciplinary lenses.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers was in founded in 1941 to publish articles on Byzantine civilization. In this issue: Zellmann-Rohrer, “Psalms Useful for Everything”; Caner, “Not a Hospital but a Leprosarium”; Botley, “The Books of Andronicus Callistus”; Busine, “The Dux and the Nun: Hagiography and the Cult of Artemios and Febronia”; and many more.

Drawing on “an Old French legend”—a poem with roots stretching back seven hundred years—Barbara Cooney, a two-time recipient of the Caldecott Medal, made a story of beauty and simplicity to entertain and edify young audiences. Her protagonist Barnaby the juggler helps readers appreciate how they can offer their services, no matter how humble.

Writers, illustrators, and musicians from the Middle Ages to the present have loved this simple, medieval tale. In 1890, Anatole France adapted the original poem as the short story “Le jongleur de Notre Dame,” paired here with a translation by Jan M. Ziolkowski and Art Deco illustrations by Maurice Lalau.

Writers, illustrators, and musicians from the Middle Ages to the present have loved this simple, medieval tale. In 1890, Anatole France adapted the original poem as the short story “Le jongleur de Notre Dame,” paired here with a facing translation by Jan M. Ziolkowski and medievalesque illustrations and calligraphy in gouache by Malatesta.

This simple story behind this coloring book has medieval beginnings—a lovely poem often known as “Our Lady’s Tumbler” that dates to the 1230s. Many writers and artists have been inspired by it, and the line art was thoughtfully chosen and carefully prepared from books published a century or so ago.

Universities are custodians of some of the most significant designed landscapes in the world. Landscape and the Academy complements the growing body of literature in architectural history, cultural geography, and education by examining the role of landscape in creating academic communities.

In 1826, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau began a tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. His letters home were part memoir, part travelogue and political commentary, part epistolary novel. His rhetorical flare and acute observations provoked German poet Heinrich Heine to describe him as the “most fashionable of eccentric men—Diogenes on horseback.”

Thirty-Six Views comprises poems and descriptions published by the Kangxi emperor in 1712 commemorating his newly finished summer palace and reflecting on his life there. The text is accompanied by wood-block prints of its most scenic views created by several outstanding court artists and copperplate engravings by Italian artist Matteo Ripa.

Jean-Marie Morel’s Théorie des jardins is a fundamental 18th-century text in landscape architecture. A renowned landscape designer and theorist with an engineering background, Morel took account of natural processes that underlie landscape formation and coined the term architecte-paysagiste, the precursor to “landscape architect.”

The essays in this volume reconsider from a variety of vantage points an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks, which brought together a philologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian to reconstruct their own version of the Church of the Holy Apostles.

Sacred Matter: Animacy and Authority in the Americas examines animism in Pre-Columbian America, focusing on how objects and places played central social roles in practices that expressed and sanctified political authority in the Andes, Amazon, and Mesoamerica.

Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City brings together specialists in art and archaeology to develop a synthetic overview of the urban, political, economic, and religious organization of Teotihuacan, one of the major cities of Classic-period Mesoamerica.

The Dumbarton Oaks Anthology of Chinese Garden Literature is the first comprehensive collection in English of over two millennia of Chinese writing about gardens and landscape. Featuring new and previously published translations, this anthology includes a glossary of translated names, Chinese names, and binomials.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 73 includes: Walter E. Kaegi, “Irfan Shahîd (1926–2016)”; Kathrin Colburn, “Loops, Tabs, and Reinforced Edges”; Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, “A Taste for Textiles”; Kostis Kourelis, “Wool and Rubble Walls”; and many more.

Dumbarton Oaks houses the largest collection of Byzantine lead seals in the world, with roughly 17,000 specimens. Volume 7 in the catalogue presents 572 anonymous seals—almost all previously unpublished—bearing sacred images on both sides. The catalogue represents the first attempt to analyze this group of seals chronologically and typologically.

The Industrial Revolution is seen as a turning point in the emergence of the metropolis. But, as Landscapes of Preindustrial Urbanism shows, features associated with contemporary urban landscapes can also be found in preindustrial contexts. A group of essays examine how clusters of agrarian communities evolved into the earliest cities.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 74 includes: Victoria Gerhold, “The Legend of Euphratas”; Georgios Makris, “Living in Turbulent Times”; Stefania Gerevini, “Art as Politics in the Baptistery and Chapel of Sant’Isidoro at San Marco, Venice”; Baukje van den Berg, “John Tzetzes as Didactic Poet and Learned Grammarian”; and many more.

Military Landscapes seeks to develop a nuanced definition of military landscapes under the framework of landscape theory. It moves beyond discussions of infrastructure and battlefields, shifting the focus instead to often overlooked factors, highlighting the historical character of militarized environments as inherently gendered and racialized.

This authoritative commentary is the most comprehensive examination to date of the bilingual riddle tradition of Anglo-Saxon England and its links to the wider world. A companion to The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, this volume includes rich notes and commentary on hundreds of Latin, Old English, and Old Norse–Icelandic riddles.

The Conquered probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlan. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

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.

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.

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.

This second volume of a 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.

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 second volume of a 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.

Volume III in this six-volume edition 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.

The Satires of Amarcius unrelentingly attack both secular vices and ecclesiastical abuses of the late eleventh century. The Eupolemius is a late-eleventh-century Latin epic that recasts salvation history, from Lucifer’s fall through Christ’s resurrection, fusing Greek and Hebrew components within a uniquely medieval framework.

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.

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.

Volume IV of the Vulgate Bible 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.

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.

Old English poetry offers a large number of shorter compositions, many of them on explicitly Christian themes. This volume presents twenty-nine of these shorter religious poems composed in Old and early Middle English between the seventh and twelfth centuries. These texts demonstrate the remarkable versatility of early English verse.

Miracles occupied a unique place in medieval and Byzantine life and thought. This volume makes available three collections of miracle tales never before translated into English. They deepen our understanding of attitudes toward miracles and display the remarkable range of registers in which Greek could be written during the Byzantine period.

King Alfred’s circle of scholars boldly refashioned Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy from Latin into Old English, bringing it to a vernacular audience for the first time. Verse prologues and epilogues associated with the court of Alfred fill out this new edition, translated from Old English by Susan Irvine and Malcolm R. Godden.

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.

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.

Volume V in this 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.

Compiled and translated in large part by Saint Jerome, the Vulgate Bible influenced Western literature, art, music, education, theology, and political history through the Renaissance. Professors at Douay, then at Rheims, translated it into English to combat Protestant vernacular Bibles. Volume VI presents the entire New Testament.

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.

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.

Other than his name, we have no biographical details of Cynewulf, not even where or when he lived. Yet his Old English poems attest to a powerfully inventive imagination, deeply learned in Christian doctrine and traditional verse-craft. He reveals an expert control of structure and a flair for extended similes and dramatic dialogue.

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.

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.

The Patria is a fascinating four-book collection of short historical notes, stories, and legends about the buildings and monuments of Constantinople, compiled in the late tenth century by an anonymous author. It is the only Medieval Greek text to present a panorama of the city as it existed in the middle Byzantine period.

The twelfth-century Latin beast epic Ysengrimus is one of the great comic masterpieces of the Middle Ages. It recounts the persecution of the wolf Ysengrimus—who represents a hybrid abbot-bishop—by his archenemy Reynard the fox. The narrative’s details are carefully crafted to make the wolf’s punishment fit the abbot-bishop’s crime.

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 Saints’ Lives also stands as self-conscious heir to the great classicizing tradition of twelfth-century epic poets.

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.

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 Saints’ Lives also stands as self-conscious heir to the great classicizing tradition of twelfth-century epic poets.

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.

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy—one of the most widely circulated texts of the Carolingian era—addresses Christian worship from prayers to vestments to bodily gestures of celebrants. This volume adapts the text of Jean-Michel Hanssens’s 1948 edition and provides the first complete translation into a modern 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.

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy—one of the most widely circulated texts of the Carolingian era—addresses Christian worship from prayers to vestments to bodily gestures of celebrants. This volume adapts the text of Jean-Michel Hanssens’s 1948 edition and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

In this companion to the two-volume Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library translation of The Histories by Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Anthony Kaldellis explores the ethnic dynamics that undergird the Histories, which recount the rise of the Ottoman empire and the decline of the Byzantine empire, all in the context of expanding western power.

As a didactic explanation of pagan ancient Greek culture to Orthodox Christians, John Tzetzes’s Allegories of the Iliad is deeply rooted in the mid-twelfth-century circumstances of the cosmopolitan Comnenian court. As a critical reworking of the Iliad, it is part of the millennia-long global tradition of Homeric adaptation.

Having studied with pioneers in philosophy and science, Bernardus Silvestris became a renowned teacher of literary and poetic composition. His versatility as scholar, philosopher, and scientist is apparent in this collection, particularly his masterpiece the Cosmographia, which has been compared to the poetry of Lucretius and Giordano Bruno.

Gregory of Tours, acclaimed as “the father” of French history, also wrote extensively about holy men and women, and about wondrous events—miracles. The conversational stories in Lives and Miracles relate what Gregory viewed as the visible results of holy power, direct or mediated, at work in the world.

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.

In the fourth century CE, Calcidius translated into Latin an important section of Plato’s Timaeus, complemented by commentary and organized into coordinated parts. Its organization subsequently informed the sense of macrocosm and microcosm—of the world and our place in it—which is prevalent in western European thought in the Middle Ages.

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.

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.

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.

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Ælfric (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.

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 Menologion by Symeon Metaphrastes, among the most important Byzantine religious and literary works, is a culmination of a well-established tradition of Greek storytelling. This edition excerpts six Christian novels, each featuring women who defy social expectations, translated for the first time into English.

The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano is a snapshot of a distinctive moment before the schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople. Neilos lived in both hermitages and monasteries, torn between solitude and community. This edition provides the first English translation with a newly revised Greek text.

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.

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.

The 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.

Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad helps trace the persistence of old clichés 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.

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.

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 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.

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Ælfric, 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.

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.

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Ælfric, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pre-Columbian Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador: Toward an Integrated Approach presents current research on the prehispanic indigenous peoples in the lands between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Specialists have contributed to this illustrated book on topics ranging from historical and theoretical perspectives to reports on recent excavations.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 75 includes: Sihong Lin, “Justin under Justinian”; David Gyllenhaal, “Byzantine Melitene and the Social Milieu of the Syriac Renaissance”; Anna Chrysostomides, “John of Damascus’s Theology of Icons in the Context of Eighth-Century Palestinian Iconoclasm”; and many more.

Francesco Ignazio Lazzari’s reconstruction of the lost villa “in Tuscis” adds a unique document to the history of Italian gardens. Published with an English translation, this manuscript is framed by the scholarly contributions of Anatole Tchikine and Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, and offers essential context for understanding Lazzari’s work.

The final installment in the series of catalogues of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection, Pre-Columbian Art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks examines a comprehensive collection of jade and gold objects from Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. Full color photographs illustrate the breathtaking works of Indigenous artists and artisans.

The Philosopher, or On Faith is a literary recreation of the conversations between Mehmed II and George Amiroutzes. Complex and subtle arguments emerge, firmly situated in their fifteenth-century context but steeped in the long Greek philosophical tradition. This volume presents both the editio princeps and the first translation from the Greek.

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 Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe offers a new approach to the history of Byzantine scholarship. By tracing Byzantium’s impact on everything from politics to painting, this book shows that the empire and its legacy remained relevant to generations of Western writers, artists, statesmen, and intellectuals.

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.

This new edition of the Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks joins Farrand’s text explaining the reasoning behind her plan for each garden with Kavalier’s commentary that provides context for changes that have affected new plant choices for the gardens. New and historical photography show the gardens in their current beauty and as they were conceived.

Garden as Art illuminates the stewardship of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, one of the most beautiful gardens on earth. Essays consider its archival significance and its influence on landscape architecture. New photographs by Sahar Coston-Hardy and archival images invite contemplation of the art of garden design and how gardens evolve as works of art.

The Diagram as Paradigm explores medieval diagrams in Byzantium, the Islamicate world, and the Latin West. Case studies consider the theoretical dimensions of diagramming in historical disciplines ranging from philosophy to cosmology. Four introductory essays provide overviews of diagrammatic traditions of the regions explored in this volume.

Landscapes for Sport explores the intersection of place, body cultures, and politics. With a focus on outdoor spaces designed and used for exercise and sports since the early modern period, this volume uncovers the relevance and meanings of the overlooked landscapes that often constitute significant areas of open space in and outside our cities.

Making the East Latin analyzes the literary and rhetorical techniques of varied sources, revealing the ways Crusader settlers responded to their new environment while maintaining ties with their homelands and produced a hybrid Latin literature that soon emerged as an indispensable part of the literary history of both the Near East and of Europe.

Waves of Influence brings fresh attention to connections among regions often seen as isolated from one another. Drawing upon recent models of globalization alongside methods such as computer simulation and iconographic analysis, authors present individual case studies to demonstrate how each region participated in its own distinct network.

Nigel of Canterbury’s Miracles of the Virgin, the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary, features lively tales illustrating her boundless mercy. Tract on Abuses rails against ecclesiastical corruption. Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.

In the tenth century, an anonymous scholar crafted an Old English version of Saint Augustine’s Soliloquia, which explores the nature of truth and immortality of the soul. This volume presents the first English translation of the complete Old English Soliloquies to appear in more than a century accompanied by a unique edition of Augustine’s work.

A companion to the first-ever English translation of Nigel of Canterbury’s Miracles of the Virgin, published alongside the Latin in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. This supplement offers an extensive commentary to facilitate appreciation of the Miracles as poetry by a medieval writer deeply imbued in the long tradition of Latin literature.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 76 includes articles relating to Byzantine civilization on the law under Alexios I, politics under Manuel I, the economies of the major Mediterranean islands, the literature of Niketas Choniates, the trial of John bar ʿAbdun, and more.

Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch assembles back together from clues and pieces a book that had disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works. It shows how people in the distant past thought about their own history and how they discussed political and social issues across a seemingly insurmountable divide in a period of existential crisis.

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.

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.

Jewel of the Soul unveils the meaning behind the sacred texts, objects, music, and ritual of the Roman Mass and Divine Office for young initiates. It remains key to understanding medieval allegorical approaches to worship. These volumes offer the first complete translation into a modern language of this foundational Latin text on Christian liturgy.

Jewel of the Soul unveils the meaning behind the sacred texts, objects, music, and ritual of the Roman Mass and Divine Office for young initiates. It remains key to understanding medieval allegorical approaches to worship. These volumes offer the first complete translation into a modern language of this foundational Latin text on Christian liturgy.

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.

Histories of racial segregation and its impacts have been the focus of urban research for over a century, and yet the role of space, place, and land in these narratives has been largely overlooked. With a focus on the Americas, the essays in this volume move across time and space to ask questions about place-making and community building.

Written in about 1340 by the Benedictine preacher Pierre Bersuire, The Moralized Ovid was a highly influential interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages. It contains descriptions of the gods followed by allegorical interpretations of major myths. This edition presents a new English translation and an authoritative Latin text.

Published annually, the journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers was founded in 1941 for the publication of articles relating to Byzantine civilization. Volume 77 includes articles on Byzantine insects, wine production and consumption in Anatolia, the Huqoq elephant mosaic, and more.

Reconsidering the Chavín Phenomenon in the Twenty-First Century builds upon a surge of archaeological research over the last twenty years at Chavín de Huántar, bringing together the work of scholars researching the UNESCO World Heritage Site and offering a cohesive vision of the Chavín Phenomenon at both the local and interregional level.

Ernst Kris’s The Rustic Style is a pioneering inquiry into the relationship between art and nature in early modern decorative arts and garden design that attempts to define the character of late sixteenth-century naturalism. In this lavishly illustrated edition, the work is made available in English for the first time.