Books in the Translated Texts for Historians series

The Acts of the Council of Ephesus of 431 consist of a wide variety of documents, including proceedings and letters, that provide a unique insight into how in the context of a major dispute opinion was manipulated and pressure applied on both church and state.

The first English translation of the funerary speech for John Chrysostom delivered by one of his former clergy in a city close to Constantinople in the autumn of 407 when news arrived of John's death on a forced march in eastern Asia Minor.

The more extensive East-Syrian Cause of the Foundation of the Schools offers a history of learning from God's creation of the world to the time of the text's composition at the School of Nisibis in the late sixth century CE, recasting patriarchal, Israelite, 'pagan' and Christian history as a long series of schools.

The Commentaries translated here, dating from the sixth century, show the persisting survival of Greek learning in an increasingly Christianised world.

Optatus, Bishop of Milevis in North Africa in the late fourth century, wrote a detailed refutation of Donatist claims to be the one true and righteous church, an ark of purity in a world which was still corrupt despite Constantine's support for Christianity.

The first is what remains of a historical work Hilary wrote against two distinguished contemporary bishops, Valens and Ursacius, whose intervention on behalf of the Emperor Constantius Hilary thought disastrous. They throw a flood of light upon scenes of disarray, violence and betrayal in the Church life of the fourth century.

Venantius Fortunatus, writing in the latter half of the sixth century, was not only a major Latin poet, but also an important historical figure.

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.

A new English translation of The Apocriticus of Macarius, with notes and introductory essays. This important text purports to be the record of a debate between a pagan philosopher, and Macarius, a Christian rhetor, and is a rich, but neglected, source for the history of intellectual and cultural conflict between Christian and Hellene intellectuals.

A new English translation of The Apocriticus of Macarius, with notes and introductory essays. This important text purports to be the record of a debate between a pagan philosopher, and Macarius, a Christian rhetor, and is a rich, but neglected, source for the history of intellectual and cultural conflict between Christian and Hellene intellectuals.

The Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius (or the Zuqnin Chronicle) is an important Syriac historiographical work dating from the end of the eighth century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

John of Biclaro (c.590) and Isidore of Seville (c.625) authored histories that projected the Gothic achievements back on to their uncertain beginnings, transforming them from antagonists of the Roman Empire to protagonists of a new, independent Chistianity in Spain.