The History of the Church by Eusebius and Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Venerable Bede

Eusebius’ The History of the Church, and nearly four centuries later, St. Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People opened new chapters in the long history of the historiographical tradition. Both works dealt with the formation of the church in different geographies and different periods: Eusebius concerned himself with the broader Eastern Mediterranean world and started his account with the birth of Jesus, whereas Bede began his account with Caesar’s invasion of Britain and covered the formation of the church in Anglo-Saxon England. Even though they followed the historiographical tradition established formerly, their histories were the prominent examples of the genre of church history in historiography, and they represented a divergence from the established historiographical traditions. This paper in detail presents Eusebius’s The History of the Church and Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People and gives illustrative quotes from both works to indicate the mindset of the mentioned historians. It also aims to discuss the primary motivations behind these historians to construct these particular historical narratives and show how they differed from the previous works of historiography. Moreover, this paper will discuss these historians respectively, starting from Eusebius.

A City Where the Last Hopes Gathered: Late Byzantine Mistra and Peloponnese and Their Functions and Reception by the Contemporaries

Cyriac of Ancona, considered by some as the founding father of modern classical archaeology, while traveling in the winter of 1447-48 in and around ancient Sparta and Mistra, wrote in his diaries the following verses that he says he heard from Calliope, singing in their “most delightful Italian tongue:” “Great Laconian city of Sparta,/ the glory of Greece, once example to the world/ of warfare and of chastity; gymnasium and temple/ and mirror and font of every noble virtue;/ if I contemplate your constitution, customs/ and human law together with you other moral virtues,/ then gaze upon you on the Eurotas, suddenly/ I exclaim to you patron Diana’s chorus:/ ‘Where are your excellent Lycurgus, where the Dioscuri,/ the dire twins, Castor and Pollux,/ Anaxandridas, Orthryadas and Gylippus,/ Eurystus and Leonidas? Where do you dwell/ son of Atreus and Pausanias, o famous leader, / Lysander, Aristo, Agesilaus, and Xanthippus? / Neither in Rome, nor with Philip,’/ it said: ‘But it is your tawdry age. I assign/ the turn to Mistra, under the leadership of Constantine.”^[1]