The Library
1277 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.
1201–1300
98 works
c. 1204–1215
Greek
Niketas Choniates · c. 1155–1217
Byzantine history to 1206, culminating in the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade — the looting of Hagia Sophia, the destruction of ancient bronzes, and the author's own flight.
c. 1208–1215
Latin
Robert of Flamborough · d. c. 1224
A confessor's manual in dialogue form, showing how to question a penitent gently, in what order, and how to avoid suggesting sins they had not thought of.
c. 1213–1215
Latin
James of Vitry · c. 1160/70–1240
A married woman who persuaded her husband to live in continence, gave away their goods, and lived a life of extreme penance and eucharistic devotion outside any religious order.
1215
Latin
The Fourth Lateran Council
Seventy canons defining transubstantiation, requiring annual confession and communion, forbidding clergy to take part in ordeals, and imposing distinguishing dress on Jews and Muslims.
c. 1217–1219
Latin
Richard Poore · d. 1237
Diocesan statutes applying the Fourth Lateran reforms in England: what a parish priest must know, how to hear confessions, and what must be kept in a parish church.
1216–1220
Latin
Dominic de Guzmán and the early Order of Preachers · c. 1170–1221
A constitution built for a preaching order: elected superiors, a general chapter of delegates, dispensation from any observance that would hinder study, and no landed endowment.
c. 1219–1226
Latin
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
Letters to the whole order, to rulers, and to clergy, mostly concerned with reverence for the eucharist and with gathering up written words of God from the ground.
1221
Latin
Regula Non Bullata
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
The unapproved rule: a patchwork of gospel texts and instructions on begging, on working with one's hands, on going among the Saracens, and on owning nothing whatever.
c. 1222
Syriac
Solomon of Basra · 13th century
A compendium of sacred history from creation to the end of the world, gathering legends about Adam's burial, the Magi, and the fate of the apostles.
1223
Latin
Regula Bullata
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
The rule approved by the pope, shorter and more governable, binding the friars to live without property of any kind, individually or in common.
c. 1219–1223
Latin
Caesarius of Heisterbach · c. 1180–c. 1240
Hundreds of stories told by a novice master — demons in the cloister, deathbed visions, a knight who cannot say the Lord's Prayer, monks who fall asleep in choir.
c. 1220–1226
Latin
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
Twenty-eight short sayings on obedience, on knowledge that puffs up, on the friar who is disturbed by anything at all, and on true and perfect joy.
c. 1225–1240
Middle English
Ancrene Wisse
Anonymous
A rule for three enclosed sisters covering prayer, temptation, confession, and daily arrangements — including whether to keep a cat and what to say to visitors at the window.
1225
Italian
Cantico delle Creature
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
Praise offered through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, and finally Sister Bodily Death — composed while nearly blind and in constant pain.
c. 1225–1228
Latin
De Luce
Robert Grosseteste · c. 1168–1253
A cosmology in which light is the first bodily form, expanding from a point to generate the spheres — creation described as a mathematical process.
c. 1222–1225, revised 1234
Latin
Raymond of Peñafort · c. 1175–1275
A confessor's manual sorting sins by kind and circumstance, with detailed treatment of usury, marriage, restitution, and what to do about a penitent who cannot pay back what he stole.
1226
Latin
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
Dictated weeks before his death: how the Lord led him among lepers, his reverence for priests however unworthy, and a command that the rule not be glossed or explained away.
1228–1229
Latin
Thomas of Celano · c. 1185–c. 1265
The official life commissioned for the canonisation, written by a friar who had known him, covering the conversion, the crib at Greccio, and the stigmata.
c. 1220–1230
Old Church Slavonic
Anonymous
Stories of the monks of the Caves monastery — an icon painter, a doctor, a miser, a monk tormented by demons — collected from an exchange of letters between two churchmen.
c. 1222–1236
Latin
Jordan of Saxony · c. 1190–1237
Letters from the head of an order to a nun he loved, unembarrassed about affection, missing her, and apologising for how rarely he can write.
c. 1233
Latin
Jordan of Saxony · c. 1190–1237
The earliest account of Dominic and the founding of his order, by the man who succeeded him and recruited hundreds of students into it.
1234
Latin
Liber Extra
Raymond of Peñafort · c. 1175–1275
Papal decisions since Gratian, edited into five books and promulgated as the exclusive law of the church, with all earlier collections declared superseded.
c. 1230–1240
Latin
Hugh of Saint-Cher and the friars of Saint-Jacques · c. 1200–1263
Every significant word in the Latin Bible listed alphabetically with references, produced by a team of friars working from a newly standardised chapter division.
c. 1232–1235
Latin
Robert Grosseteste · c. 1168–1253
A commentary on the six days combining patristic exegesis with optics, astronomy, and the author's own observations of the natural world.
c. 1231–1236
Latin
William of Auvergne · c. 1180–1249
A bishop of Paris works through the newly available Aristotelian and Arabic philosophy, accepting what he can and rejecting the eternity of the world and the single intellect.
c. 1237–1250
Latin
Sacrum Commercium
Anonymous
Francis climbs a mountain to court Lady Poverty, who recounts her history from Eden through the desert fathers and is finally given a meal of scraps on the bare ground.
c. 1238
Arabic
Al-Majmu al-Safawi
Al-Safi ibn al-Assal · 13th century
A systematic code of church and civil law for Egyptian Christians, drawing on Byzantine, Syriac, and Islamic legal material.
1234–1253
Latin
Clare of Assisi · 1194–1253
Four letters to a king's daughter who left the court for a convent, urging her to gaze into the mirror of the cross and to refuse any endowment offered to her house.
c. 1238–1246
Old Church Slavonic
Anonymous
A short fragment recalling the beauty and strength of the land before the Mongol invasion, breaking off before it reaches the disaster itself.
c. 1230–1245
Latin
Summulae Logicales
Peter of Spain · c. 1215–1277
A textbook of logic covering the Aristotelian syllogism and then the medieval theory of how terms actually refer in a sentence.
c. 1240–1250
Latin
Liber de Duobus Principiis
Anonymous
A scholastic defence of two eternal principles, good and evil, arguing that a wholly good God cannot be the origin of a world containing so much wrong.
c. 1240
Latin
De Proprietatibus Rerum
Bartholomaeus Anglicus · c. 1203–1272
Nineteen books on God, angels, the human body, illness, air, birds, stones, colours, and smells, compiled by a friar teaching in Germany.
c. 1230–1250
Middle Dutch
Beatrice of Nazareth · c. 1200–1268
Seven ways in which love seizes the soul, from a desire to serve purely, through a love that wounds and maddens, to a longing that cannot rest short of eternity.
c. 1236–1245; completed later
Latin
Alexander of Hales and his school · c. 1185–1245
A vast collaborative theology from the first Franciscan master at Paris, notable for organising material by question rather than by commentary on a text.
1246–1247
Latin
Thomas of Celano · c. 1185–c. 1265
A second life drawing on memories gathered from Francis's closest companions, franker about his severity, his illnesses, and his disappointment with the order.
13th century; authorship disputed
Latin
Attributed to Thomas of Celano · c. 1185–c. 1265
A sequence on the day of wrath, the trumpet, the opened book, and a final quiet plea from the accused to the judge who once sat down weary seeking him.
c. 1235–1253
Latin
Robert Grosseteste · c. 1168–1253
Correspondence of a reforming bishop, including a refusal to install the pope's nephew in an English benefice on the grounds that the order was contrary to the gospel.
c. 1250
Latin
Robert Kilwardby · c. 1215–1279
A map of all the sciences and their relations to one another, written for students entering the arts faculty and needing to know what they were studying.
c. 1240–1260
Latin
David of Augsburg · c. 1200–1272
A novice master's practical guidance on the stages of prayer and the reform of the inner and outer person, written without visionary claims of any kind.
c. 1240–1260
Middle Dutch
Hadewijch of Brabant · 13th century
Fourteen visions of overwhelming intensity, in which Love appears as a demanding lady and the seer is drawn into the abyss of the Trinity and sent back unsatisfied.
1–40 of 98 matching · 1277 in the Library