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 who made ample use of older sources. It also describes the foundation and early (pre-Byzantine) history of the city, and includes the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia, a semi-legendary account of Emperor Justinian I’s patronage of this extraordinary church (built between 532 and 537). The Patria constitutes a unique record of popular traditions about the city, especially its pagan statues, held by its medieval inhabitants. At the same time it is the only Medieval Greek text to present a panorama of the city as it existed in the middle Byzantine period. Despite its problems of historical reliability, the Patria is still one of our main guides for the urban history of medieval Constantinople. This translation makes the entire text of the Patria accessible in English for the first time.
The Old English Poems of Cynewulf
The Old English poems attributed to Cynewulf, who flourished some time between the eighth and tenth centuries, are unusual because most vernacular poems in this period are anonymous. Other than the name, we have no biographical details of Cynewulf, not even the most basic facts of where or when he lived. Yet the poems themselves attest to a powerfully inventive imagination, deeply learned in Christian doctrine and traditional verse-craft.
Runic letters spelling out the name Cynewulf appear in four poems: Christ II (or The Ascension), Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, and Elene. To these a fifth can be added, Guthlac B, because of similarities in style and vocabulary, but any signature (if one ever existed) has been lost because its ending lines are missing. What characterizes Cynewulf’s poetry? He reveals an expert control of structure as shown from the changes he makes to his Latin sources. He has a flair for extended similes and dramatic dialogue. In Christ II, for example, the major events in Christ’s life are portrayed as vigorous leaps. In Juliana the force of the saint’s rhetoric utterly confounds a demon sent to torment her.
Literary Works: Alan of Lille
A product of the cathedral schools that played a foundational role in the so-called Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Alan of Lille was renowned for the vast learning which earned him the title of Doctor Universalis. His writings include many significant contributions to the development of systematic theology, but he was also the most important Latin poet of his time, the great age of Medieval Latin poetry. The works included in this volume aim to give imaginative expression to the main tenets of Alan’s theology, but the forms in which his vision is embodied are strikingly original and informed by a rich awareness of poetic tradition.
The “Sermon on the Intelligible Sphere” translates Platonist cosmology into the terms of a visionary psychology. In the Boethian dialogue of the De planctu Naturae the goddess Nature inveighs against sodomy and “unnatural” behavior generally. The Anticlaudianus, viewed as virtually a classic in its own day, is at once a summa of the scholastic achievement of the Twelfth-Century schools and an allegory of spiritual pilgrimage that anticipates the Divine Comedy.
The Vulgate Bible, Volume VI: The New Testament
Compiled and translated in large part by Saint Jerome at the turn of the fifth century CE, the Vulgate Bible permeated the Western Christian tradition through the twentieth century. It influenced literature, art, music, and education, and its contents lay at the heart of Western theological, intellectual, artistic, and political history through the Renaissance. At the end of the sixteenth century, professors at a Catholic college first at Douay, then at Rheims, translated the Vulgate Bible into English to combat the influence of Protestant vernacular Bibles.
Volume VI presents the entirety of the New Testament. The gospel narratives delineate the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Acts continues the account of the first Christians, including the descent of the Holy Spirit, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul), and the spread of Christianity through sermons and missionary journeys. Collected epistles answer theological and pragmatic concerns of early church communities. Of these epistles, Romans is notable for its expression of Paul’s salvation theory, and Hebrews for its synthesis of Jewish and Hellenistic elements. The apocalyptic vision of Revelation concludes the volume with prophecies grisly and glorious, culminating in the New Jerusalem.
Related Titles
The Vulgate Bible, Volume I: The Pentateuch
The Vulgate Bible, Volume II, Part A: The Historical Books
The Vulgate Bible, Volume II, Part B: The Historical Books
The Vulgate Bible, Volume III: The Poetical Books
The Vulgate Bible, Volume IV: The Major Prophetical Books
The Vulgate Bible, Volume V: The Minor Prophetical Books and Maccabees
The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian: Niketas Stethatos
Today the Byzantine mystic, writer, and monastic leader Symeon the New Theologian (ca. 949 to 1022 CE) is considered a saint by the Orthodox Church and revered as one of its most influential spiritual thinkers. But in his own time a cloud of controversy surrounded him and the suspicion of heresy tainted his reputation long afterward.
The Life was written more than thirty years after Symeon’s death by his disciple and apologist the theologian Niketas Stethatos, who also edited all of Symeon’s spiritual writings. An unusually valuable piece of Byzantine hagiography, it not only presents compelling descriptions of Symeon’s visions, mystical inspiration, and role as a monastic founder, but also provides vivid glimpses into the often bitter and unpleasantly conflicted politics of monasticism and the construction of sanctity and orthodoxy at the zenith of the medieval Byzantine Empire. Although the many volumes of Symeon’s spiritual writings are now readily available in English, the present translation makes the Life accessible to English readers for the first time. It is based on an authoritative edition of the Greek.
The Old English Boethius
The Old English Boethius boldly refashions in Anglo-Saxon guise a great literary monument of the late antique world, The Consolation of Philosophy. Writing from prison around 525 CE, Boethius turned to philosophy to transform his personal distress into a powerful meditation on fate, free will, and the human capacity for virtue in a flawed, fallen world. King Alfred and his hand-picked circle of scholars in ninth-century England recognized the perennial relevance of Boethius’s themes. They reshaped the Latin text into an Old English version that preserves the essence while accommodating a new audience: the Roman Fabricius, for example, becomes the Germanic weapon-smith Weland. The translation even replicated Boethius’s alternation of prose and verse—only in this case with Old English prose alternating with alliterative verse.
