Description

Ralph de Diceto (d.1199/1200), dean of St Paul's, was both a painstaking compiler of information and an intellectual historian of remarkably wide vision. This two-volume collection of his writings, originally published in 1876, covers the history of the world from the Creation to 1202 (it was continued posthumously). Volume 1 contains the Abbreviationes chronicorum and the first part of the Ymagines historiarum. Volume 2 contains the second part of the Ymagines historiarum along with Ralph's Opuscula (a collection of far shorter texts) and various appendices. In his prefaces as editor of these volumes, William Stubbs (1825-1901) gives a characteristically thorough background to the author, writing extensively on the question of Ralph's mysterious name and his sources, among other topics. His edition also benefits from the reintroduction of Ralph's elsewhere-omitted marginal signa: a pictorial code of crosses, swords, and crowns being torn at by jealous hands.