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.
701–800
1 work
c. 780–804
Latin
Alcuin of York · c. 735 – 804
Some three hundred letters to kings, bishops, and former pupils. He tells Charlemagne that a people cannot be forced to faith and that tithes have destroyed the Saxon mission; he asks Lindisfarne after the Viking raid what safety there is if Cuthbert cannot defend his own church; and he asks a monastery what Ingeld has to do with Christ.
801–900
2 works
c. 870–876
Latin
Rimbert · d. 888
The career of a missionary to Denmark and Sweden, including a shipwreck, a Viking raid that destroyed his church, and the calm return to start again.
830–882
Latin
Prudentius of Troyes and Hincmar of Reims
The year-by-year record of the West Frankish kingdom kept by two bishops in succession: the division of the empire, the Viking fleets on the Seine and the Loire, the Gottschalk affair, and the embassy of 839 whose members called themselves Rhos and turned out to be Swedes.
901–1000
2 works
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.
c. 985–987
Latin
Abbo of Fleury · c. 945 – 1004
The killing of the East Anglian king by a Danish army in 869, written a century later from a story Dunstan had heard from Edmund's own armour-bearer as an old man. The head, thrown into brambles, calls out to the searchers until they find it, guarded by a wolf.
1001–1100
1 work
1014
Old English
Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
Wulfstan of York · d. 1023
Preached as the Danes overran England: the world is hastening to its end, and the English are being punished because they betray, enslave, and sell one another.
6 of 1774 works