The Library
1780 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
1501–1600
148 works
1577
Spanish
El Castillo Interior
Teresa of Ávila · 1515–1582
The soul imagined as a castle of many rooms with God at the centre. Teresa maps the seven dwelling places a person passes through, describing prayer with the practicality of a woman who also had convents to run.
c. 1545–1579
Nahuatl
Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España
Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators · c. 1499–1590
Twelve books on Nahua religion, government, medicine, trade, and natural history, compiled from interviews with elders and written in Nahuatl by native scribes.
1578
Latin
Fausto Sozzini · 1539–1604
A denial that Christ's death was a satisfaction for sin, arguing instead that he saves by revealing the way to immortality and by his example and resurrection.
1579
Latin
Vindiciae contra Tyrannos
Anonymous
Four questions on whether subjects must obey a ruler who commands against God, and who may resist — answered by a double covenant between God, king, and people.
25 June 1580
German
The Lutheran churches of Germany
The three ancient creeds bound together with the Augsburg Confession, its Apology, the Smalcald Articles, both catechisms, and the Formula of Concord.
begun c. 1565, continued for centuries
German
The Hutterian Brethren
The community's own record of its origins in Moravia, its communal ownership of goods, and the executions of its members, kept year by year.
1581
Old Church Slavonic
Ivan Fyodorov and the Ostrog circle
The first complete printed Church Slavonic Bible, prepared in Volhynia from Greek and Slavonic manuscripts under the patronage of a Ruthenian prince.
c. 1574–1581
Spanish
Diego Durán · c. 1537–1588
Aztec history and religion recorded from native accounts and painted books by a friar raised in Mexico who spoke Nahuatl from childhood.
1573–1581
Greek
Jeremias II of Constantinople · 1536–1595
Lutheran theologians send the patriarch a Greek Augsburg Confession; he replies with three long letters accepting some points and rejecting justification by faith alone.
1573–1582
Spanish
Teresa of Ávila · 1515–1582
An account of founding seventeen convents — the lawsuits, the bad roads, the hostile townspeople, the money, and the sisters who turned out to be impossible.
1582
Latin
Charles Borromeo · 1538–1584
The synodal decrees, visitation records, and instructions of an archbishop applying Trent in detail — seminaries, catechism schools, confessionals, and church architecture.
1582; Old Testament at Douai 1609–1610
English
Gregory Martin and the English College
An English Catholic translation from the Vulgate, made by exiles and deliberately literal, with notes answering Protestant readings verse by verse.
1583
Spanish
De los Nombres de Cristo
Luis de León · 1527–1591
Three friars by a river discuss the names scripture gives Christ — shepherd, mountain, father of the age to come — in prose of great deliberate beauty.
poem c. 1578; commentary 1584
Spanish
John of the Cross · 1542–1591
A poem in the voice of a bride searching the woods for her beloved, begun in a prison cell, with a long commentary written for the nuns who asked what it meant.
c. 1578–1585
Spanish
John of the Cross · 1542–1591
A systematic account of the active night, in which memory, understanding, and will are emptied of every attachment — including attachment to spiritual consolations.
c. 1578–1585
Spanish
La Noche Oscura del Alma
John of the Cross · 1542–1591
A poem and its commentary on the two nights the soul passes through — of the senses and then of the spirit — in which God withdraws every consolation precisely in order to purify love of its self-interest.
c. 1585–1587
Spanish
John of the Cross · 1542–1591
A commentary on his own short poem about the soul transformed in God, written in a fortnight for a laywoman who directed a household.
1588
Latin
Concordia
Luis de Molina · 1535–1600
A proposal that God knows what every free creature would do in any circumstance, and providentially arranges circumstances accordingly.
1588
Latin
José de Acosta · 1540–1600
A manual of missionary method arguing that peoples differ in their capacities and customs and must be approached differently, and that force produces only pretence.
1589
Italian
Il Combattimento Spirituale
Lorenzo Scupoli · c. 1530–1610
Four weapons for the interior struggle — distrust of self, confidence in God, use of the faculties, and prayer — with no visions and no extraordinary states.
1590
Spanish
José de Acosta · 1540–1600
Geography, altitude sickness, silver mining, and Andean religion, with an early argument that the Americas were peopled by migration from Asia across a northern land bridge.
1586–1593
Latin
Robert Bellarmine · 1542–1621
A systematic survey of every disputed doctrine, stating Protestant positions accurately and at length before answering them.
1593
Ge'ez
Bahrey · 16th century
An Ethiopian monk's account of the Oromo migrations, asking why a people with no king or fortress could defeat a Christian empire, and answering that its own society was too unequal to fight.
1593–1597; later books posthumous
English
Richard Hooker · 1554–1600
A defence of the English church against Puritan critics, grounded in a doctrine of law running from eternal law through natural reason to human custom.
c. 1584–1606
French
Charlotte Arbaleste de Mornay · 1550–1606
A Huguenot noblewoman's account, written for her son, of escaping the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre with a small child and of thirty years of flight and exile.
1595–1596
Latin
The Ruthenian bishops
Thirty-three conditions on which Orthodox bishops of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth entered communion with Rome while keeping the Byzantine rite and married clergy.
1597
Latin
Disputationes Metaphysicae
Francisco Suárez · 1548–1617
The first metaphysics in the West organised by topic rather than as a commentary on Aristotle, covering being, essence, causation, and individuation.
13 April 1598
French
Henry IV of France · 1553–1610
A settlement granting Huguenots freedom of conscience, limited public worship, civil equality, and fortified towns, after thirty-six years of religious war.
121–148 of 148 matching · 1780 in the Library