Hilary of Poitiers: Conflicts of Conscience and Law in the Fourth-Century Church

164 Pages·1997·6.84 MB·English

by  Hilary of Poitiers, Lionel R. Wickham

Translated Texts for Historians
This series is designed to meet the needs of students of ancient and
medieval history and others who wish to broaden their study by reading
source material, but whose knowledge of Latin or Greek is not
sufficient to allow them to do so in the original language. Many
important Late Imperial and Dark Age texts are currently unavailable
in translation and it is hoped that TTH will help to fill this gap and to
complement the secondary literature in English which already exists.
The series relates principally to the period 300-800 AD and includes
Late Imperial, Greek, Byzantine and Syriac texts as well as source
books illustrating a particular period or theme. Each volume is a self-
contained scholarly translation with an introductory essay on the text
and its author and notes on the text indicating major problems of
interpretation, including textual difficulties.
Editorial Committee
Sebastian Brock, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford
Averil Cameron, Keble College, Oxford
Henry Chadwick, Oxford
John Davies, University of Liverpool
Carlotta Dionisotti, King’s College, London
Peter Heather, University College London
Michael Lapidge, Clare College, Cambridge
Robert Markus, University of Nottingham
John Matthews, Yale University
Raymond Van Dam, University of Michigan
Michael Whitby, University of Warwick
Ian Wood, University of Leeds
General Editors
Gillian Clark, University of Liverpool
Mary Whitby, Oxford
Front cover drawing: Bishops debating, from a medieval ivory (drawn by Gail Heather)
A full list of published titles in the Translated Texts for
Historians series is printed at the end of this book.
Translated Texts for Historians
Volume 25
Hilary of Poitiers
Conflicts of Conscience and Law
in the Fourth-century Church
Against Valens and Ursacius:
the extant fragments, together with his
Letter to the Emperor Constantius
Translated into English with Introduction and notes,
from the edition by Alfred Feder in Corpus Scriptorum
Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum vol. LXV (1916) pp. 41-205,
by LIONEL R. WICKHAM
Liverpool
University
Press
f f l
First published 1997
Liverpool University Press
Senate House, Abercromby Square
Liverpool, L69 3BX
Copyright ® 1997 Lionel R. Wickham
All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the
publishers, except by a reviewer in
connection with a review for inclusion
in a magazine or newspaper.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP Record is available
ISBN 0-85323-572-4
Printed in the European Union by
Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements................................................................................vii
Introduction
(i) The general scope and significance of the texts ...................... ix
(ii) (a) The author ............................................... xii
(b) The background to the present texts...................................xv
(iii) The literary history of the texts ................................................xxii
A synopsis of the fragments of
Against Valens and Ursacius
Book One...............................................................................................1
Book Two...............................................................................................7
Book Three....................................................................................... 12
A summary of Hilary’s Letter to the Emperor Constantins..........14
The texts in translation with notes.
Against Valens and Ursacius:
Book One.......................................................................................... 15
Book Two.............................................................................................70
Book Three..........................................................................................93
Letter to the Emperor Constantius ................................................. 104
IV. Select Bibliography...................................................................... 110
V. Indices ......................................................................................... 112

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the managers of the Bethune-Baker Fund for a grant towards the
preparation of the manuscript, and Dr Mark Elliott for putting it on
disk.
Lionel R. Wickham