Latin theology between the Carolingian renewal and the eve of the Reformation, roughly 750 to 1500. The section holds 14 authors and 911 notes, all in public-domain English translations.
Ratramnus of Corbie
Ratramnus of Corbie (d. c. 870), who wrote against his own abbot on the eucharist at the request of Charles the Bald, and was read by Ridley and Cranmer seven centuries later.
Author index: Ratramnus of Corbie
- On the Body and Blood of the Lord — Written at the request of Charles the Bald, and against his own abbot Paschasius Radbertus: the body in the sacrament is Christ’s body in figura, not the same flesh born of Mary in visible form. (1 notes)
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), abbot of Bec and archbishop of Canterbury, the father of scholastic theology — faith seeking understanding.
Author index: Anselm of Canterbury
- Cur Deus Homo — Why God Became Man (1094–98), a dialogue with the monk Boso and the classic statement of the satisfaction theory of the atonement: sin is an infinite dishonour to God which man owes and cannot pay, and God alone can pay but does not owe — so the one who makes satisfaction must be both God and man. (49 notes)
- In Behalf of the Fool — The first and most famous objection to the ontological argument, with its answer. (12 notes)
- Monologium — The earlier and longer of the two meditations (1076), written at his monks’ request as an example of meditation on the grounds of faith. (80 notes)
- Proslogium — Written 1077–78 as Fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” (27 notes)
Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard (1079–1142), the sharpest logician of the twelfth century and its most notorious teacher, condemned at Soissons and again at Sens.
Author index: Peter Abelard
- Historia Calamitatum — The Story of My Misfortunes, written as a letter of consolation to a friend: Abelard’s account of his own rise as a logician, his rivalry with William of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon, his love for Heloise and its punishment, the burning of his book at Soissons, and his flight from one enmity to the next. (17 notes)
Bernard of Clairvaux
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Cistercian abbot and the conscience of Latin Christendom, who prosecuted Abelard and preached the Second Crusade.
Author index: Bernard of Clairvaux
- Life of St Malachy of Armagh — Bernard’s life of his friend Malachy, archbishop of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux in 1148 — the chief narrative source for the twelfth-century reform of the Irish church. (15 notes)
- On Loving God — Bernard’s answer to the question why and how much God is to be loved: “The reason for loving God is God Himself; the measure, to love without measure.” (16 notes)
- Some Letters of Saint Bernard — Sixty-six letters to popes, kings, bishops, abbots, monks and noblewomen — the abbot of Clairvaux acting on the whole of twelfth-century Europe from a monastery. (66 notes)
Hugh of St Victor
Hugh of St Victor (c. 1096–1141), master of the abbey school of St Victor in Paris and the most influential teacher of his century.
Author index: Hugh of St Victor
- Explanation of the Rule of St Augustine — A commentary on the Rule that governed the canons regular of St Victor, and through them much of twelfth-century religious life: what it means to have one heart and one soul, to hold nothing as one’s own, and to be corrected without bitterness. (12 notes)
Bonaventure
Bonaventure (1221–1274), Franciscan minister general and regent master at Paris, the Seraphic Doctor.
Author index: Bonaventure
- The Life of Christ — Meditations on the life of Christ from the Incarnation to the Ascension, long attributed to Bonaventure and among the most widely copied devotional books of the later Middle Ages. Hutchings translates the shorter recension: the author’s Preface and a hundred chapters. (101 notes)
Thomas Aquinas
St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), Dominican friar, priest, and Doctor of the Church. His two theological summaries are here in public-domain or freely available English translations.
Author index: Thomas Aquinas
- Summa Contra Gentiles — English translation from the Hanover House edition (1955–57), edited with updated Scriptural references by Joseph Kenny, O.P. (0 notes)
- Summa Theologiae — The work is arranged in Parts, each divided into Questions, each Question into Articles. (0 notes)
Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), Dominican preacher of the birth of the Word in the ground of the soul; twenty-eight of his propositions were condemned in 1329.
Author index: Meister Eckhart
- Sermons — The first English rendering of a selection of Eckhart’s German sermons: the birth of the Word in the soul, detachment, and the ground of the soul where, he says, God and the soul are one. (8 notes)
Jan van Ruusbroec
Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381), the Flemish contemplative of Groenendaal, whose work fed the Devotio Moderna.
Author index: Jan van Ruusbroec
- The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage — Ruusbroec’s masterpiece, called in Flemish Die Chierheit der gheestelijker Brulocht — the Spiritual Espousals — on the three lives of the Christian: active, inward, and contemplative, all of them the answer to Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet Him. (99 notes)
- The Book of Supreme Truth — Ruusbroec’s last work, written to clear up misunderstandings of what he had said about union with God — that the creature never becomes God, but is united to Him without intermediary. (15 notes)
- The Sparkling Stone — A shorter treatise on the white stone of Revelation 2:17, and on the difference between the faithful servant, the secret friend, and the hidden son of God. (15 notes)
Catherine of Siena
Catherine Benincasa (1347–1380), Dominican tertiary and Doctor of the Church, who brought the papacy back from Avignon.
Author index: Catherine of Siena
- Letters — Letters to popes, kings, mercenaries, prisoners, prostitutes and her own family, written by a dyer’s daughter who could not write and dictated them — including the letters urging Gregory XI to leave Avignon for Rome. (71 notes)
- The Dialogue — Dictated in 1378, much of it in ecstasy: a dialogue between the Eternal Father and a soul, on discretion, prayer, obedience, and the bridge that is Christ, by which the soul crosses the flood. (95 notes)
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416), anchoress, whose Revelations is the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman.
Author index: Julian of Norwich
- Revelations of Divine Love — The sixteen shewings granted to an anchoress of Norwich on 8 May 1373, as she lay expecting to die, and the twenty years of meditation she gave them: the hazelnut that is all that is made, the motherhood of God, and the answer she was given about sin — *that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner… (86 notes)
Jean Gerson
Jean Gerson (1363–1429), chancellor of Paris and the leading conciliarist of the Great Schism.
Author index: Jean Gerson
- The Snares of the Devil — A short treatise of practical discernment by the chancellor of Paris — the temptations that beset the soul at each stage of the spiritual life, and the remedies against them. (5 notes)
Thomas à Kempis
Thomas Hemerken of Kempen (c. 1380–1471), canon regular at Mount St Agnes, to whom the Imitation of Christ is given.
Author index: Thomas à Kempis
- The Founders of the New Devotion — Lives of Gerard Groote, Florentius Radewin and their followers — the Devotio Moderna of the Low Countries, the movement in whose houses Thomas à Kempis was raised and out of which the Imitation came. (62 notes)
- The Imitation of Christ — The most widely read Christian book after the Bible, written in the houses of the Devotio Moderna and circulating anonymously from about 1420. (114 notes)
Nicholas of Cusa
Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), cardinal and speculative theologian of learned ignorance and the coincidence of opposites.
Author index: Nicholas of Cusa
- The Vision of God — Written in 1453 for the monks of Tegernsee, who had asked him to explain mystical theology. (25 notes)
Missing Works
Fourteen of the thirty-eight authors asked for are here. The rest are absent for one reason: no English translation of the named work exists outside copyright. Everything in this library is public domain, so a work reaches it only where a pre-1929 translation was made — which for the Victorians meant the devotional and controversial writers far more often than the schoolmen, and almost never the Byzantines.
Four authors were added only after a second, harder look: the standard modern translations of Hugh of St Victor, Bonaventure, Nicholas of Cusa and Ratramnus are all in copyright, but each has a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century English translation of some other work, scanned and public domain. Where a work is listed below as missing, it means that search was made and came back empty.
Two texts were rejected during sourcing after their title pages were read, and are worth naming so the check is not repeated: the Imitation of Christ offered by CCEL is the Bruce Publishing Company’s translation of 1940, and CCEL’s Mind’s Road to God is George Boas’s of 1953. Both are marked public domain there and neither is.
No public-domain English translation found
| Author | Work asked for | What exists |
|---|---|---|
| Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856) | commentaries, On the Nature of Things | Latin only; no English edition at all |
| Paschasius Radbertus (c. 785–865) | On the Body and Blood of the Lord | modern translations only — though his opponent Ratramnus is here |
| Gottschalk of Orbais (c. 808–867) | on double predestination | modern translations only |
| John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–877) | Periphyseon | Latin editions of 1681 and 1838 are public domain; the English is Uhlfelder 1976 and Sheldon-Williams, both in copyright |
| Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) | Scivias | Hart & Bishop 1990 — in copyright |
| Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160) | Sentences | Silano 2007–10 — in copyright. The Victorians wrote about him but did not translate him |
| Richard of St Victor (d. 1173) | On the Trinity | Zinn 1979 — in copyright |
| Alexander of Hales (c. 1185–1245) | the Franciscan Summa | Latin only |
| Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) | theology and natural philosophy | the 1864 Castel off Loue is not a translation but the Middle English poem itself; the theology is Riedl 1942 and later |
| Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) | commentaries on the Sentences and Aristotle | Latin only; the English Paradise of the Soul (1682) is doubtfully his |
| Henry of Ghent (c. 1217–1293) | Quodlibets | modern translations only |
| Giles of Rome (c. 1243–1316) | On Ecclesiastical Power | Dyson — in copyright |
| John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) | Ordinatio | Wolter and the Vatican edition — in copyright |
| William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) | Sentences commentary, Quodlibets | Latin edition of 1908 is public domain; the English is Boehner and later |
| Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1300–1349) | On the Cause of God | never translated into English |
| Gabriel Biel (c. 1420–1495) | Exposition of the Canon of the Mass | modern translations only |
| Theodore the Studite (759–826) | defence of icons | Roth 1981 — in copyright |
| Photios (c. 810–893) | Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit | Farrell 1987 — in copyright |
| Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) | Hymns of Divine Love, Discourses | Maloney, deCatanzaro — in copyright |
| Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) | Triads | Gendle 1983 — in copyright |
| Nicholas Cabasilas (c. 1322–1392) | The Life in Christ | deCatanzaro 1974 — in copyright |
| Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444) | against the union at Florence | no English edition |
Here, but not the work that was asked for
- Hugh of St Victor — On the Sacraments is Deferrari 1951, in copyright; his Explanation of the Rule of St Augustine (1911) is here instead.
- Bonaventure — the Itinerarium and Breviloquium are Boas 1953 and Nemmers 1946, both in copyright; his Life of Christ (Hutchings, 1881; read from the 1888 printing) is here instead.
- Nicholas of Cusa — On Learned Ignorance is Heron 1954, in copyright; The Vision of God (Salter, 1928) is here instead.
Already in the vault, under a different section
- John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) and Jan Hus (c. 1370–1415) are in 05 Reformers → 00 Forerunners, where the vault had already placed them.
Still to do
- Bernard, Cantica Canticorum — Samuel Eales’s translation of the eighty-six sermons on the Song
of Songs (1895) is public domain and scanned, and is the largest single gap left in this section.
The scan’s own OCR cannot be split on: it misreads the sermon numerals into valid but wrong figures
(Sermon XX read as XxX, which parses as 30) and loses two headings outright, so a split on them
misnumbers the series silently. The pages are being re-read with tesseract, which gets the numerals
right; see
build/tools/quality/medieval/.