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 …
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were central to the educational system of Byzantium, yet the religion and culture of the Homeric epics—even the ancient Greek language itself—had become …
Architrenius, a satirical allegory in dactylic hexameters completed in 1184 by the Norman poet Johannes de Hauvilla, follows the journey of its eponymous protagonist, the …
The eleventh-century monk Ekkehard IV’s Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall, part of the chronicles of the famous Swiss abbey, is a treasure trove of medieval monastic life. Saint …
Sophronios, born in Damascus around 560, was a highly educated monk and prolific writer who spent much of his life traveling in the Eastern Roman Empire and promoting the doctrines …
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 …
Gregory of Tours served as bishop of Tours, then a city in the Frankish kingdom, from 573 to 594. Acclaimed by the French as “the father of our history” on account of his History …
Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) was a powerful clergyman and the most influential political thinker of pre-Conquest England. An advocate for the rights and privileges of the …
Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in his distinctive alliterative prose, portrays an array of saints—including virgin …
The Latin psalms figured prominently in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons, whether sung in the Divine Office by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning by students, or …
