Bøger i Translated Texts for Historians serien

The only Latin art of war to survive, Vegetius' Epitome was for long a part of the medieval prince's military education. The core of his proposals, the maintenance of a professional standing army, was revolutionary for medieval Europe, while his theory of deterrence through strength remains the foundation of modern Western defence policy.

The Venerable Bede's In Ezram et Neemiam* is the first and only complete commentary written on these biblical books in either the patristic or later medieval era.

This volume makes available three works attributed to Constantine - two of which were certainly not written by him - which are important sources for historians of the papacy, Christianity and Constantine himself. The third text, the Edict of Constantine, presents Constantine's supposed edict to Pope Silvester transferring lands to the papacy.

This volume brings together many important historical texts, the majority of them (speeches of Themistius, the Passion of St Saba, and evidence relating to the life and work of Ulfila) not previously available in English translation.

This is the first full-scale translation and commentary in English of Aurelius Victor's De Caesaribus, which provides a brief survey of the emperors of Rome from Octavian Augustus in 30 BC to Constantius II in AD 360.

Khalifa ibn Khayyat is the author of the earliest extant Arabic chronicle. The work principally deals with fighting between Arab groups, external conquests, and administrative matters. After the death of each caliph it lists those who held office during his reign; also notes leaders of the pilgrimage in each year and deaths of prominent persons.

This is a Syriac text written, in all probability, by an inhabitant of Edessa almost immediately after the conclusion of the war between Rome and Persia in 502-506 AD. The Chronicle also vividly describes the famine and plague that swept through Edessa in the years immediately before the war.

Bede's aim in De Templo is stated in Chapter I: 'That the building of the tabernacle and the temple signifies one and the same Church of Christ'. This classic in Latin by an English saint is here made available in English for the first time since it was written nearly 1300 years ago.

The Council of Constantinople of 553 (often called Constantinople-II or the Fifth Ecumenical Council) has been described as by far the most problematic of all the councils, because it condemned two of the greatest biblical scholars and commentators of the patristic era Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia and because the pope of the day, Vigilius, ...

Nemesius' treatise On the Nature of Man is an important text for historians of ancient thought, not only as a much-quarried source of evidence for earlier works now lost, but also as an indication of intellectual life in the late fourth century AD.

Orosius's work is therefore crucial for an understanding of early Christian approaches to history, the development of universal history, and the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, for which it was both an important reference work and also a defining model for the writing of history.

In The Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes Raymond Davis continues from the year AD 715, where his Book of the Pontiffs (revised edition, Liverpool, 2000) stopped, and deals with the next nine biographies from the Liber Pontificalis of the Roman Church down to AD 817.

Featuring commentary and introduction, this title brings together three important works. It provides an important insight into the early Byzantine period.

The first full-scale translation and commentary on Eutropius, whose Breviarium (Abbreviated History of Rome) was a major vehicle for transmitting knowledge of Roman history to people of the Middle Ages and beyond.

From the patristic age until the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, computus - the science of time reckoning and art of calendar construction - was a subject of intense concern to medieval people.

A reconstruction of the lost chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa (d.785). Covering 590-760, it describes such world-changing events as the last great war of antiquity between Byzantium and Iran, the Arab conquests, the establishment of a Muslim empire, and the revolution that saw the capital of this empire shift from Damascus to Baghdad.

The episcopate of Ambrose of Milan (374-97) is pivotal to understanding the developing relationship between the Christian Church and the Roman Empire. This volume includes the tenth book of his collection of letters; the letters that are preserved outside his published collection; and his funeral speeches for Valentinian II and Theodosius I.

For a long while mistakenly revered as a saviour of classical civilization, in recent times more often dismissed as an anachronism, Cassiodorus emerges from this edition of the Institutions as an exceptional but nonetheless representative exponent of the learned Christian culture of later Latin Antiquity.

Two volume set The Second Council of Nicaea (787) decreed that religious images were to set up in churches and venerated. This edition offers the first translation that is based on the new critical edition of this text in the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum series, and the first full commentary of this work that has ever been written.

Isidore of Seville's On the Nature of Things, the first attempt by a Christian author to present an account of the physical universe - the heavens, planets and stars, earth and its physical features, weather and time - played an exceptionally influential role in the assimilation of classical science into the emerging Christian culture of medieval Europe.

A translation of the two books of The Life of Columbanus, a central text for the history of seventh-century monasticism. The Life of John of Reome and The Life of Vedast are also included.

By translating the sections on pre-Islamic Persia in three Muslim Arabic chronicles how knowledge about ancient Iran was transmitted to Muslim historians, in what forms it circulated and how it was shaped and refashioned for the new Perso-Muslim elite that served the early Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad.

Translated here for the first time into English, Bede's On the Nature of Things and On Times bring together cosmology and time-reckoning to form a unified science of computus -- the basis for the scientific education of the Middle Ages.

Offers sources vital for the reconstruction of events in the first Islamic century, covering the period which ends with the unsuccessful Arab siege of Constantinople, an event which both modern historians and Syriac chronographers see as making a decisive caesura in history.

The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius narrates the history of the church from the start of the Nestorian controversy in 428 until the death of Evagrius' employer, Patriarch Gregory of Antioch Gregory in 592.

The Chronicon Paschale is one of the major constituents of the Byzantine chronographic tradition covering the late antique period.

No complete translation of the Latin text of the Book of Pontiffs-the Liber Pontificalis of the Roman Church-exists in any language, though the work is indispensable to students of late antiquity and the early middle ages;

The first translation into English of Life of the Fathers, a collection of twenty lives of saints which lives present a cross-section of the Gallic Church and are a counterpart to the secular society described in Gregory's History of the Franks.