Ebook The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis)

The preparation of an English text of the Lz'ber Pontificalz's, of which the following pages furnish the first installment, is some thing more than the translation of a crabbed text, crowded with obscure references. Even of the great libraries in this country only about ten possess the original in the best working edition, if one may judge by library returns, and it is doubtful if many more copies of the complete text exist this side of the Atlantic. A docu ment which long was viewed as of fundamental importance for the history of the Papacy has thus sunk so completely out of sight as to have become a rather rare curiosity to all but research students of medieval history. This is in part due to the character of the work, with its forbidding lists of items of local and temporary inter est, in which only the trained archaeologist can find his way, but it is also surely due to the fact that both texts and commentary have hitherto been in foreign languages and are to be found only in costly and rare volumes. The English version aims to over come these difficulties. While the narrative portions of the text have been kept in full, lists of mere names and figures, especially in the case of ordinations, have been in part eliminated unless they were of distinct historical interest. The narrative, when no longer clogged with an undue amount of this material, Will be found to run along with something of the swiftness of a medieval chronicle. The archaeologist, who alone will miss the discarded portions, will turn to the original in any case. In the second place, sufficient apparatus has been given in the form of explanatory notes to make the narrative clear, while bibliographical references furnish a guide to the treatment of the more intricate problems. It is hoped, therefore, that in its new form — for the Lz'ber Pontz'fiealz's has never before been translated into any other tongue — this quaint monument of curial historiography will be found to have retained enough of that charm of naive Simplicity, which the scholar appreciates in the original, to lure the general reader of history into a study of the important facts with which it deals.