The historical works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London. Volume 1

Author / Creator

Diceto, Ralph de, -1202?, author

Available as

Online

Summary

Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St Paul's, was both a painstaking compiler of information & an intellectual historian of wide vision. This two-volume collection of his writings, originally published in 18...

Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St Paul's, was both a painstaking compiler of information & an intellectual historian of wide vision. This two-volume collection of his writings, originally published in 1876, covers the history of the world from the Creation to 1202. The historian J.F.A. Mason wrote that the Abbreviationes chronicorum (included in Volume 1, together with the first part of the more important Ymagines historiarum) at the time represented the most ambitious attempt at a world history made by an Englishman. In his preface as editor to this volume, William Stubbs gives a characteristically thorough background to the author, writing extensively on, among other topics, the question of Ralph's mysterious name. His edition also benefits from the reintroduction of Ralph's elsewhere-omitted marginal signa: a pictorial code of crosses, swords, & crowns being torn at by jealous hands.

Show More