Scott McGill has made available in English translation the first of the Latin biblical epics and the first known hexameter poem dedicated to Christian subject matter. With the publication of this volume, the entire poem is accessible in a modern European language for the first time. This is a great feat for the integration of a significant text to the teaching and study of early Christianity, quite apart from the linguistic heroism required to translate more than 3000 lines of dactylic hexameter into very respectable English verse.
The book itself is straightforward, consisting of a roughly 20-page introduction and very copious and valuable notes that give details of intertextual allusions, clarifications of references to the gospel stories, and literary commentary. The text of the poem is correlated in the right hand margin with the passages from the canonical gospels to which it refers. The poem itself takes up 78 print...
University of California Press