Our latest catalogue, Studia Humanitatis, brings together 149 works of philosophy, politics, economics, and history from the late fifteenth century to the modern era. It takes its name from the main course of civic education that sprang up in the Renaissance, which aimed to cultivate in its students the virtues of the ideal gentleman and gentlewoman.

It’s perhaps fitting, therefore, that the catalogue opens with a single leaf from a work that was designed to make the story of England’s national history accessible to this newly-educated lay audience.

The Polychronicon was written by the Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden (c.1280-1364) during the middle of the thirteenth century in an England ravaged by the Black Death. The Latin manuscript was then translated into English in the 1380s, and it is from this that Caxton published the present work in 1482, marking the first appearance in print of the text in either its Latin or English form.

Our leaf charts the years after the arrival of the Vikings in England, and records the pilgrimage of the Mercian King Coenred (AD d.700) to Rome, and the restoration of Justinian II to the throne of the Byzantine Empire.

The Polychronicon is an important source for the early history of the British Isles, but like all other sources from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History to the present day, it relies on one single work for its account of the fall of Britain to the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth century AD.

Gildas’ De Excidio Britanniae lies somewhere between a providential history of the island and a fiery sermon on the moral failings of its native inhabitants.

The text was written towards the year 500, and is the only contemporary account we have of Britain following the withdrawal of the Roman legionaries in circa 410, and can be described as the earliest native history of the islands. This edition was published by the historian Polydore Vergil from a manuscript source held by the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, and marks the first appearance of the text in print.

That is not to say of course that there is no earlier account of Britain. The islands had long been known to the ancient world, but it was Julius Caesar who was amongst the first to visit them in person and record his observations.

De Bello Gallico is one of two surviving commentaries by the Roman general and statesman, and describes Caesar’s nine-years spent on military campaign in Gaul, Britain and Germania.

The work famously contains one of the first descriptions of the native inhabitants of the islands, who ‘dye themselues with woade, which setteth a blewish color vppon them’.

This edition translated by Arthur Golding marks the first time that the complete text was published in English translation, and our copy is rarer still being preserved in its contemporary calfskin binding.

Download the catalogue here.