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.
1201–1300
98 works
c. 1275–1285
Syriac
Bar Hebraeus · 1226–1286
A guide for solitaries without a spiritual director, ending with the author's own account of how he came to peace by ceasing to argue about doctrine.
c. 1275–1282
Greek
John Bekkos · c. 1225–1297
A patriarch who had once opposed union argues from the Greek fathers themselves that through the Son and from the Son mean the same thing.
c. 1280–1290
Old Church Slavonic
Anonymous
The prince who defeated Swedes and Teutonic knights while submitting to the Mongols, presented as both a warrior and a saint.
c. 1283
Catalan
Ramon Llull · c. 1232–c. 1316
A young man rises from hermit to abbot to bishop to pope, reforms the whole church, and then resigns to become a contemplative — with the Book of the Lover and the Beloved embedded in it.
c. 1279–1283
Latin
Peter John Olivi · 1248–1298
An argument that renouncing ownership means nothing unless it is joined to restricted use — that a friar who owns nothing but lives comfortably has kept the letter and lost the vow.
c. 1280–1286
Syriac
Bar Hebraeus · 1226–1286
A world history in secular and ecclesiastical parts, and a shorter Arabic version written at the request of Muslim friends who wanted to read it.
c. 1286–1291
Latin
William Durandus · c. 1230–1296
An exhaustive allegorical explanation of the church building, its furnishings, the vestments, the mass, and the year — every column, colour, and gesture given a meaning.
c. 1282–1290
Latin
Salimbene de Adam · 1221–c. 1290
A gossipy friar's chronicle of everything he saw and heard across Italy and France, including his father's fury at his joining the order and his opinions of everyone.
c. 1289–1302
Latin
Legatus Divinae Pietatis
Gertrude the Great · 1256–c. 1302
Visions received at Helfta, centred on the heart of Christ opened to the soul, and told with an unusual note of confidence rather than penitential dread.
1276–1292
Latin
Henry of Ghent · c. 1217–1293
Answers to any question the audience chose to raise, twice yearly for fifteen years, on everything from divine illumination to whether a bishop may keep a plurality of benefices.
13th century; authorship disputed
Latin
Attributed to Jacopone da Todi · c. 1230–1306
Twenty stanzas at the foot of the cross, asking to be allowed to stand with the mother and share her grief.
c. 1270–1306
Italian
Laude
Jacopone da Todi · c. 1230–1306
Vernacular songs of love, self-mockery, and savage satire against a pope who imprisoned him, alongside a dramatic lament of Mary at the cross.
c. 1291–1298
Latin
Mechthild of Hackeborn · 1241–1298
Visions recorded, at first without her knowledge, by two sisters at Helfta, structured around the liturgical year and full of images of Christ's heart and voice.
c. 1290–1300
Old French
Le Mirouer des simples ames
Marguerite Porete · d. 1310
A dialogue among Love, Reason, and the Soul describing a soul so annihilated in God that it no longer needs the virtues, having become what it loves.
1297
Latin
Lectura super Apocalipsim
Peter John Olivi · 1248–1298
Revelation read through Joachim's scheme, identifying the coming crisis with the persecution of those who keep Francis's rule strictly, and the carnal church with Babylon.
c. 1292–1298
Latin
Angela of Foligno · c. 1248–1309
A widow's account of thirty steps of conversion, dictated to a scribe who repeatedly admits he cannot render what she says and is frightened by it.
c. 1300–1304
Latin
John Duns Scotus · c. 1266–1308
A commentary on the Sentences of extraordinary subtlety, arguing the univocity of being, the primacy of the will, and that Christ would have become incarnate even without the fall.
c. 1300–1320
Greek
Anonymous
A verse chronicle of the Frankish principality in the Peloponnese, told from the crusaders' side in vernacular Greek and openly contemptuous of the Byzantines.
81–98 of 98 matching · 1774 in the Library