Book excerpt: Alcuin of York, an English scholar and ecclesiastic born around 735, wrote "Virtues and Vices," a handbook of advice for a soldier whose "soul is wearied by the work-a-day world." Richard E. Murphy turned the moral treatise into plain, everyday English, making it accessible to ordinary modern readers for the first time. In "De Virtutibus et Vitiis," Alcuin drew on the ideas of St. Augustine and other early church fathers but kept it short. A leading teacher at the Carolingian court, Alcuin offers timeless guidance in a translation rendered beautifully and still accurately. "Alcuin reminds us that the practice of virtue and the avoidance of vice were virtually the same in the Middle Ages as in our own day," Murphy writes.