The Library
1774 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.
901–1000
73 works
c. 900
Latin
Musica Enchiriadis
Anonymous
A manual for teaching chant that turns, halfway through, into something new: instructions for singing a second voice against the melody at a fixed interval, with worked examples of organum on liturgical texts.
c. 894–906
Old Church Slavonic
Constantine of Preslav
An acrostic prayer whose lines begin with the letters of the Slavonic alphabet in order, and a cycle of fifty-one sermons on the Sunday gospels — the first original preaching composed in a Slavic language rather than translated.
c. 906
Latin
Libri Duo de Synodalibus Causis
Regino of Prüm · c. 840–915
A handbook for bishops on visitation, with the questions to be put to each parish, and a famous canon dismissing as delusion the belief that women ride out at night with Diana.
c. 908
Latin
Regino of Prüm · c. 840–915
A world chronicle whose later books cover the collapse of the Carolingian order, the Viking and Magyar raids, and the rise of regional dukes.
910
Latin
William the Pious of Aquitaine · d. 918
A duke gives land for a monastery and then renounces all authority over it, placing it directly under Rome and forbidding any lord, bishop, or king to interfere.
c. 893–916
Old Church Slavonic
Clement of Ohrid · c. 840–916
Simple festal sermons written for newly converted Bulgarian congregations by a disciple of Cyril and Methodius who trained thousands of Slavonic clergy.
c. 910–913
Greek
Arethas of Caesarea · c. 860 – c. 939
A reworking of Andrew of Caesarea with more history in it — the seven churches given their actual circumstances, the plagues read against the Arab and Bulgar wars the writer had lived through.
c. 900–920
Old Church Slavonic
John the Exarch · 9th–10th century
A commentary on the six days of creation compiled from Basil and Severian for the Bulgarian court, incorporating Greek natural science into Slavonic prose.
c. 900–920
Old Church Slavonic
Chernorizets Hrabar
A short defence of the Slavic alphabet against Greeks who said only three languages were fit for scripture. The Greeks did not have letters either until Palamedes, he answers, and theirs were made by pagans over centuries, while ours were made at once by a holy man.
c. 900–925
Armenian
Tovma Artsruni
An Armenian noble house chronicled from Adam to the writer's own day under Arab rule, with an eyewitness account of the invasions, the sieges, and the building of the church of the Holy Cross at Aghtamar, described stone by stone.
c. 920–930
Judeo-Arabic
Saadia Gaon · 882 – 942
The Torah and much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible translated into Arabic, deliberately smoothing anthropomorphism — where the Hebrew has God's hand, the Arabic has his power — and adding a running commentary against Karaite and Muslim readings.
c. 930–940
Arabic
Nazm al-Jawhar
Eutychius of Alexandria · 877–940
A world history from creation to the author's own day by a physician who became patriarch of Alexandria, covering both Christian and Islamic history.
c. 930
Hebrew
Dikdukei ha-Te'amim
Aaron ben Moses ben Asher
The rules of the Tiberian system for pointing and accenting the Hebrew Bible, set out by the last and greatest of the family that developed it — vowels, cantillation marks, and the fine distinctions that fix how a verse is read aloud and therefore what it means.
c. 930
Latin
Odo of Cluny · c. 878–942
The life of a layman and landholder presented as a saint — a lord who fought with the flat of his sword, refused to despoil the poor, and never married.
9th–10th century; authorship disputed
Latin
Attributed to Ekkehard of Saint Gall
A Germanic heroic legend told in Virgilian hexameters by a monk: two hostages escape Attila's court, and old comrades fight each other for treasure until all are maimed.
933
Judeo-Arabic
Kitab al-Amanat wa-l-I'tiqadat
Saadia Gaon · 882 – 942
The first systematic Jewish theology, arguing that reason and revelation cannot conflict because both come from God, that the world was created from nothing, and that scripture must be read figuratively wherever the plain sense contradicts reason or another verse.
c. 930–940
Latin
Collationes
Odo of Cluny · c. 878–942
Three books of moral criticism aimed at clergy and nobility alike, unsparing about simony, violence, and the appetites of the powerful.
c. 934–936
Latin
Praeloquia
Ratherius of Verona · c. 887–974
Written in prison after being deposed, a survey of the duties of every rank of society — kings, soldiers, merchants, the poor, the rich — with a good deal of self-examination mixed in.
937
Judeo-Arabic
Kitab al-Anwar wa-l-Maraqib
Jacob al-Qirqisani
A Karaite legal code prefaced by a survey of every Jewish sect the author knew of, from the Sadducees to his own day — and including a notably level-headed account of Jesus, whom he describes as a righteous man whose followers later made claims he had not made.
c. 942
Arabic
Kitab al-Unwan
Agapius of Hierapolis · 10th century
A history from creation to the tenth century preserving material from lost Syriac and Greek chronicles, including notices about the first century.
c. 948–952
Latin
Flodoard of Reims · 893–966
A history of one great see built directly out of its archive, with hundreds of letters and charters summarised or quoted from documents now lost.
951
Georgian
Giorgi Merchule
The life of a monastic founder who cleared forest in the mountains of Tao-Klarjeti and built a dozen houses there, told with unusual attention to landscape, building, and argument with local nobles. It contains the sentence that Georgia is wherever the liturgy is celebrated in Georgian.
c. 950–961
Greek
Anonymous, commissioned by Constantine VII
History from 813 to the writer's own day, commissioned by an emperor about his own dynasty — so the iconoclast emperors are monsters, Michael III a drunk, and Basil I, who murdered his way to the throne, a providential deliverer.
c. 948–952
Greek
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus · 905–959
A private handbook from an emperor to his son on the peoples surrounding the empire — Rus, Pechenegs, Serbs, Croats — and how to manage each of them.
c. 953
Hebrew
Anonymous, in southern Italy
Jewish history from Adam to the fall of Masada, built out of a Latin Josephus and other sources and written as though by Josephus himself. It reorders, adds, and quietly removes the passage about Jesus.
c. 950–954
Latin
De Ortu et Tempore Antichristi
Adso of Montier-en-Der · c. 910 – 992
Written for a queen who had asked. Adso assembles a complete biography of a man not yet born — tribe of Dan, born in Babylon, raised by sorcerers, reigning three and a half years from Jerusalem — and then says the end cannot come while the Frankish kings still stand.
c. 950–960
Greek
Gregory the Disciple
A holy man in Constantinople, and two long visions granted to his servant Theodora: her soul's passage after death through twenty aerial toll-houses where demons produce a ledger of every sin by category, and a vision of the last judgement.
c. 956–959
Greek
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus · 905–959
The full protocol of the imperial court and its liturgical year: processions to churches, coronations, receptions of ambassadors, and the acclamations to be sung at each.
c. 958–962
Latin
Antapodosis
Liudprand of Cremona · c. 920–972
A history of Italy, Germany, and Byzantium written explicitly to repay enemies, full of scandal, verse interludes, and Greek words showing off the author's learning.
c. 10th century
Latin
Attributed to Theodulus
A singing contest in thirty-seven verse exchanges: Pseustis the shepherd offers a pagan myth, Alithia the shepherdess answers with the scriptural story that matches and outdoes it, and Phronesis judges. Deucalion is answered by Noah, Prometheus by Adam.
c. 950–963
Latin
Anonymous, at Saint Alban's, Mainz
Everything a bishop performs, gathered in one book: ordinations, the consecration of churches and of kings, the blessing of an abbot, exorcisms, the ordeals by hot iron and by water, and the rite for expelling penitents on Ash Wednesday.
c. 955–965
Latin
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim · c. 935–c. 1002
Eight narrative poems in leonine hexameters on saints and on the Virgin, including a version of the Theophilus legend in which a man sells his soul and is rescued by Mary.
c. 960–970
Latin
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim · c. 935–c. 1002
Six comedies written in imitation of Terence but with chaste heroines instead of seduced ones, including a courtesan converted by a hermit and virgins martyred under Diocletian.
c. 967–968
Latin
Adalbert of Magdeburg · d. 981
A continuation of Regino's chronicle to 967 by a monk who had led a failed mission to the Rus and returned with nothing to show for it.
c. 967–973
Latin
Widukind of Corvey · c. 925–after 973
A history of the Saxon people and the Ottonian kings, dedicated to an abbess, and notably reticent about the church for a book written by a monk.
969
Latin
Liudprand of Cremona · c. 920–972
A furious report of a failed diplomatic mission — bad wine, worse lodgings, humiliating protocol, and a Byzantine emperor who called the Western ruler no emperor at all.
c. 10th century
Greek
Attributed to Nicephorus
A slave who feigns madness, sleeps with the dogs, is beaten in the street, and sees what nobody else does. The central episode is a vision in the Blachernae church of the Mother of God spreading her veil over the congregation.
c. 970–990
Old Church Slavonic
Cosmas the Priest · 10th century
An attack on a Bulgarian movement that rejected the material world, the cross, the sacraments, and the wealthy clergy — while conceding that the clergy deserved much of the criticism.
c. 970–973
Greek
Athanasius the Athonite · c. 920–c. 1003
The founding rule of the first great monastery on Mount Athos, setting out the daily office, the common table, and the balance between community and solitary cells.
c. 960–974
Arabic
Tahdhib al-Akhlaq
Yahya ibn Adi · 893–974
A philosophical ethics of the soul's three faculties and the training of character, written without appeal to scripture so that Muslims, Jews, and Christians could all use it.
1–40 of 73 matching · 1774 in the Library