Ralph de Diceto (d.1199/1200), dean of St Paul's, was both a painstaking compiler of information and an intellectual historian of remarkably wide vision. This two-volume collection of his writings, originally published in 1876, covers the history of the world from the Creation to 1202 (it was continued posthumously). The historian J. F. A. Mason wrote that the Abbreviationes chronicorum (included in Volume 1, together with the first part of the more important Ymagines historiarum) at the time represented the most ambitious attempt at a world history made by an Englishman. In his preface as...

Ralph de Diceto (d.1199/1200), dean of St Paul's, was both a painstaking compiler of information and an intellectual historian of remarkably wide vision. This two-volume collection of his writings, originally published in 1876, covers the history of the world from the Creation to 1202 (it was continued posthumously). Volume 2 contains the second half of Diceto's most important work, the Ymagines historiarum, his Opuscula (a collection of far shorter texts) as well as various appendices. In his preface to this volume, William Stubbs (1825 1901) assesses the historical value of the work via an...