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.

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;

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.