The Library

Translations of the Fathers, made for this project.

Most of these texts were, to the best of our knowledge, unavailable in English before they were translated here. They are published so that the arguments made on this site can be checked against their sources — and so that anyone who wants to read them, can. One is different: the Rabanus is not a first — a published translation already existed. It was made blind, from the Latin alone, and then compared against that translation as a test. What the comparison found — including where this one failed — is stated at the head of the text.

5 authors · 302 chapters · 212,035 words

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Quodvultdeus c. 390 – c. 454 5 volumes · 83,376 words

A disciple and correspondent of Augustine. Expelled from Carthage by the Arian Vandal king Geiseric in 439 and put to sea in unseaworthy ships; he wrote from exile in Campania. His great work was transmitted for over a thousand years under another man's name.

Eusebius of Caesarea c. 260 – c. 339 4 volumes · 68,284 words

Best known for the Ecclesiastical History. The Eclogae Propheticae is his sustained attempt to show how the Old Testament speaks of Christ — an apostolic hermeneutic, worked out four centuries closer to the apostles than we stand.

Shenoute of Atripe c. 347 – 465 7 volumes · 13,639 words

The most important writer in the Coptic language, and among the least translated. He ran a monastic federation of thousands in Upper Egypt for some eighty years, and wrote in a Coptic of ferocious rhetorical power. Most of his corpus has never appeared in English.

Rabanus Maurusnot a first — a test c. 780 – 856 1 volume · 33,699 words

The foremost scholar of the Carolingian renaissance, and its great compiler. He wrote this commentary in 836 and sent it to the Empress Judith — a queen twice accused of treason and twice driven into a convent — telling her, in effect, that the queen who went unbidden to the king and saved a doomed people was a pattern she was expected to fill.

The Glossa Ordinaria c. 1100 1 volume · 13,037 words

The standard annotated Bible of medieval Europe. It carries two layers of annotation: a marginal gloss (on Esther, largely Rabanus Maurus abridged) and an interlinear gloss — short, word-level decodings printed in the white space between the lines of the Vulgate itself. It is not a commentary. It is a decoder ring, laid over Scripture like a stencil, so that a schoolboy construing the Latin could not see the word province without also seeing the word church.

Parallel editions.