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.

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. The author was a Christian bishop; the subject is the nature of human beings and their place in the scheme of created things. The medical works of Galen and the philosophical writings of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonist Porphyry are all major influences on Nemesius; so too the controversial Christian Origen. On the Nature of Man provides the...

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. This was the period which saw much of Italy shake off what was left of Byzantine control, the development of the tempo

The Venerable Bede composed On the Nature of Things (De natura rerum) and On Times (De temporibus) at the outset of his career, about AD 703. Bede fashioned himself as a teacher to his people and his age, and these two short works show him selecting, editing, and clarifying a mass of difficult and sometimes dangerous material. He insisted that his reader understand the mathematical and physical basis of time, and though he was dependent on his textual sources, he also included observations of his own. But Bede was also a Christian exegete who thought deeply and earnestly about how...

With this volume, Donatism regains its voice and its hagiography is available in English for the first time. The stories included provide a unique opportunity to glimpse the daily life of the church which for over a century was the faith of the majority of North African Christians. The narratives represent the lives and deaths of Christians who carried on pre-Constantine traditions from the fourth century to the advent of Islam.

The letter collection of Ruricius, bishop of Limoges c.485-510, describes the last quarter of the fifth century, when it had seemed that the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse, not the kingdom of the Franks, would become the primary barbarian power of Gaul. The letters illustrate how literary life continued under barbarian rule, and demonstrate how well-to-do Gauls responded to the changing times. They provide priceless insights not only into the private and public lives of individual letter writers, but also into life and activities in Visigothic Gaul at the local level in general. More than any...

Caesarius was born in 469/70 and served as Bishop of Arles from 502 until his death in 542. Originally trained as a monk at Lerins, he devoted himself as Bishop to an ambitious programme of church reform and Christianization inspired by strict monastic standards of piety. Best known as a preacher, with a corpus of over 250 sermons, Caesarius also founded a monastery whose rule he composed and presided over several important church councils whose canons still survive. The documents included in this volume - most never before translated into English - vividly illustrate Caesarius's career and...

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.

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.

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.