The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (review)

At last—a new, up-to-date translation of the Works of Liudprand (or Liutprand) of Cremona. Paolo Squatriti’s version has much to commend it. It moves away from the “forsooth language” of the old translation by F.A. Wright and builds on the more recent work of Brian Scott; it captures Liudprand’s chameleon-like changes of style in an eminently readable version, and it provides a useful introduction to recent scholarly work on the author and his times. The translation has been based on the edition of Paolo Chiesa and thus includes a lesser-known work of Liutprand—his sole surviving Homily—to be placed alongside his much more familiar Antapodosis (translated as Retribution, a title much more suggestive of Liudprand’s often savage tone than Wright’s Tit-for-tat), Historia Ottonis (Concerning King Otto), and Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana (rendered by Squatriti simply as Embassy). As befits a translator who is both historian and literary scholar, Squatriti’s introduction has much of interest to say both about Liudprand’s place in the convoluted political world of tenth-century northern Italy, the Ottonian Empire, and Byzantium—none of them very safe places for courtiers either clerical or lay—and about the literary strategies he uses in his accounts. Unlike previous commentators, Squatriti does not feel that Liudprand reveals himself in his works, suggesting rather that “he left behind personae not personality” (p. 7), using a variety of stylistic strategies depending both on the circumstances and the purpose of his writing. These could vary from the use of sexual innuendo and robust humor as a means to point out the illegitimacy of the behavior of the petty rulers of northern Italy in contrast to that of the Ottonians, to the artistic sprinkling of Greek words and the insertion of poetry to emphasize his own learning, and thus reliability, as a writer. The dialogue form followed in the Homily (translated into English for the first time here and thus particularly welcome) shows Liudprand as an able practitioner of this familiar theological style, too. A vivid sense of his versatility and his wide horizons, both literary and geographic, comes through in both translation and introduction.

This translation has been aimed at an English-speaking student readership, and the introduction certainly has a great deal of useful guidance for one coming to Liutprand for the first time. Although there is no specific treatment of tenth-century Byzantine, Papal, northern Italian, or Ottonian history and a map would certainly have been helpful, nonetheless the footnotes (although perhaps rather too many are to works in Italian) infallibly tell the reader where to look for further information, and the bibliography is up-to-date. Thus recent debates about medieval humor, sexual politics, and the nature of the “other” all find a welcome place; for the more traditional nuts-and-bolts information, readers are sensibly referred to the relevant chapters of the New Cambridge Medieval History. Reasonably priced and extremely user-friendly, while still providing a scholarly reassessment of Liudprand and his works, this new translation is to be warmly welcomed.