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.
501–600
98 works
c. 500–510
Syriac
Philoxenus of Mabbug · c. 440–523
Thirteen instructions for monks on faith, simplicity, the fear of God, gluttony and lust, written in a Syriac of unusual clarity and almost no polemic.
c. 500–510
Latin
De Institutione Musica
Boethius · c. 477–524
Music treated as a branch of mathematics rather than an art, dividing it into the music of the cosmos, of the human person, and of instruments.
c. 500–510
Latin
De Spiritalis Historiae Gestis
Avitus of Vienne · c. 470–c. 519
Five books of hexameters on creation, the fall, the sentence, the flood, and the crossing of the Red Sea, with a serpent given real rhetorical craft.
508; survives in fragments
Syriac
Polycarp, for Philoxenus of Mabbug
A new Syriac New Testament commissioned because the Peshitta was judged too loose to settle Christological arguments, and because it lacked five books. It included 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation for the first time in Syriac.
c. 500–520; first cited 533
Greek
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Four treatises and ten letters written under the name of Paul's Athenian convert: on the divine names, on mystical theology, and on the ranked hierarchies of angels and of the church.
c. 500–520
Greek
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Five very short chapters stripping away every name given to God, affirmative and negative alike, until the soul is united to the one beyond assertion and denial.
511
Latin
Eugippius · c. 465–c. 535
The life of a monk who organised the defence, provisioning, and eventual evacuation of the Roman towns along the Danube as the frontier collapsed.
c. 512–534
Latin
Regula Virginum
Caesarius of Arles · c. 470–542
A rule for a community of women written for his sister's monastery, requiring strict enclosure, insisting every nun learn to read, and forbidding the acceptance of dowries.
c. 501–513
Latin
Ennodius of Pavia · c. 474 – 521
A bishop of Pavia writing in prose so ornamented that readers have complained about it for fifteen hundred years. The life of his predecessor shows a bishop ransoming captives from Burgundians and Goths and negotiating with kings, because there was nobody else left to do it.
c. 512–513
Latin
Contra Eutychen et Nestorium
Boethius · c. 477–524
A short treatise applying strict logical definitions to the christological question, and defining a person as an individual substance of a rational nature.
512–538
Syriac
Severus of Antioch · c. 465–538
The correspondence and preaching of the greatest Miaphysite theologian, surviving almost entirely in Syriac translation after the Greek was destroyed.
c. 515
Greek
Zacharias Scholasticus · c. 465 – after 536
A dialogue set in the Alexandrian lecture rooms, in which a Christian student argues against his own professor that the world had a beginning, and that a craftsman who needs eternal matter is not a maker but an arranger.
c. 512–518; surviving in Syriac
Greek, surviving in Syriac
Severus of Antioch · c. 465 – 538
Around three hundred short hymns for the cathedral office at Antioch, arranged by the eight tones — for the feasts, for the martyrs of the city, for earthquakes, for the dead, and for rain.
c. 515–520
Latin
Excerpta ex Operibus Sancti Augustini
Eugippius · c. 460 – c. 533
Three hundred and forty-eight passages cut from Augustine and arranged for monks who would never see the originals, made at a monastery near Naples by the abbot who also wrote the Life of Severinus.
c. 500–518
Greek
Aeneas of Gaza · d. c. 518
A Platonic dialogue arguing against the pre-existence of souls and the eternity of the world, and for the resurrection of the body.
519–520
Latin
John Maxentius
A delegation of monks from the Danube frontier arrives in Rome insisting that the church must say one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh, and refuses to leave until it does. Rome resists; Constantinople eventually agrees.
c. 503–542
Latin
Caesarius of Arles · c. 470–542
Around two hundred and fifty short sermons in deliberately plain Latin, attacking drunkenness, sorcery, and the survival of pagan festivals among nominally Christian peasants.
c. 518–522
Latin
De Trinitate
Boethius · c. 477–524
A very short treatise applying the Aristotelian categories to God, and asking which of them can be predicated of a being who is wholly simple.
c. 520
Latin
Anonymous
The life of the consecrated woman who is said to have kept Paris from panic when Attila approached, and organised grain convoys during a siege.
c. 505–523
Latin
Boethius · c. 477 – c. 524
Boethius set out to translate all of Aristotle and all of Plato and prove them compatible, and was executed long before finishing. What he completed was the logic: the Categories, On Interpretation, and Porphyry's Isagoge, each with commentary.
c. 523
Latin
De Fide ad Petrum
Fulgentius of Ruspe · c. 462–527
A compact rule of faith written for a man setting off for Jerusalem, summarising Augustine's teaching on the Trinity, the incarnation, and predestination in numbered propositions.
524
Syriac
Simeon of Beth Arsham · d. c. 540
An eyewitness report of the massacre of the Christians of Najran in southern Arabia, naming the dead and describing the burning of the church.
c. 524
Latin
De Consolatione Philosophiae
Boethius · c. 477–524
Written in prison awaiting execution on a false charge. Lady Philosophy visits the condemned man and works him through fortune, happiness, providence, and how human freedom survives divine foreknowledge.
525
Latin
Dionysius Exiguus · c. 470–c. 544
A continuation of the Alexandrian Easter cycle in which the compiler declined to number years from the persecuting emperor Diocletian and counted instead from the incarnation.
c. 500–526
Latin
Dionysius Exiguus · c. 470–c. 544
Greek conciliar canons translated into Latin and gathered with the decretals of the popes into a single ordered collection.
c. 526
Latin
Institutiones Grammaticae
Priscian
Eighteen books on Latin, written at Constantinople for Greek-speaking officials, quoting several hundred Latin authors — many of whom survive only in these citations.
529
Latin
The Council of Orange
Twenty-five canons settling the long quarrel over grace: the beginning of faith is itself God's gift, but the council pointedly declines to teach predestination to damnation.
529
Greek
John Philoponus · c. 490–c. 570
A Christian grammarian dismantles the Aristotelian arguments for an eternal universe, and in doing so attacks Aristotle's physics of motion and the fifth element.
c. 500–530
Latin
Regula Magistri
Anonymous
An enormously detailed and controlling rule for an Italian monastery, prescribing everything from the abbot's absolute authority to who inspects the loaves.
begun c. 530, continued to the 9th century
Latin
Liber Pontificalis
Anonymous
Serial biographies of the bishops of Rome from Peter onward, recording each one's origin, building projects, ordinations, and burial place.
c. 530
Latin
Regula Benedicti
Benedict of Nursia · c. 480–c. 547
Seventy-three short chapters ordering a monastery's day around prayer, reading, and manual work, with a striking moderation about food, sleep, and the failings of ordinary people.
c. 534
Latin
Regula ad Monachos
Caesarius of Arles · c. 470 – 542
A short rule for a men's community, notably milder than the one he wrote for his sister's nuns: no absolute enclosure, no punishment specified beyond correction, and a working day arranged around the office rather than the other way round.
529–534, with the Novels to 565
Latin and Greek
Corpus Juris Civilis
Justinian I and the commission of Tribonian · Justinian, c. 482 – 565
A thousand years of Roman law compressed into a code, a digest of the jurists, a students' textbook, and the new laws that followed. It opens by declaring the Trinity, closes the Academy at Athens, legislates on heretics, Jews, and pagans, and regulates the clergy in detail.
c. 535–536
Greek
Ho Monogenes
Attributed to Justinian I · c. 482 – 565
A short hymn, sung at every Byzantine liturgy since, compressing the whole Chalcedonian settlement into one sentence: the immortal Word became flesh of the Theotokos, was crucified, and trampled down death by death, being one of the Holy Trinity.
537
Latin
Cassiodorus · c. 485–c. 585
Official letters drafted for the Ostrogothic kings of Italy, collected as models of style, and covering everything from theology to sewer repair and the price of pepper.
c. 520–555
Greek
Romanos the Melodist · c. 490–c. 556
Long sung sermons in stanzas with a repeated refrain, giving speeches to Mary, to Judas, to the woman at the well, and to Adam pleading at the gate of paradise.
c. 525–545
Greek
Barsanuphius and John of Gaza · 6th century
Around eight hundred and fifty replies from two enclosed elders to monks and laypeople who wrote to them with questions, from prayer and doubt to lawsuits and illness.
c. 530–545
Latin
De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae
Gildas · c. 500–c. 570
A furious sermon on the Saxon conquest as divine judgement, naming five British kings and denouncing them and the clergy in scriptural language.
c. 540
Latin
Primasius of Hadrumetum · d. c. 560
A North African exposition drawing heavily on Tyconius and Augustine, reading the visions as the church's present struggle rather than a timetable.
c. 542
Latin
Instituta Regularia Divinae Legis
Junillus Africanus
A catechism-style introduction to reading scripture — its kinds of book, its authority, its style — adapted from a Syriac original of the school of Nisibis.
1–40 of 98 matching · 1780 in the Library