The Chronicles — the Chronicon, or Summa historialis, of St. Antoninus of Florence, O.P. (1389–1459) — is now on the site in its first part, in English for the first time. The whole work will follow, a part at a time, as each is finished.
Antoninus was a Dominican of the reform, the first prior of San Marco, and from 1446 until his death the archbishop of his city, remembered for his care of the poor in the years of plague and famine. He wrote a Summa of moral theology that was among the first to weigh the questions of trade, credit, and the just price by which the merchants of Florence lived; and he wrote this history of the world, in three parts, from the creation to his own age.
This first part runs from Adam to the persecution of Diocletian, in eight titles: the ages of the world from the first parents to Noah, from Abraham to David, and from David to the coming of Christ; the life of Christ himself; the Church of the Apostles, with the acts of each of the twelve; the reign of Vespasian and the martyrs under the emperors; and the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. Antoninus gathers sacred and profane history into one narrative — Scripture beside Josephus, Eusebius beside Justin and Livy — weighing his authorities as he goes, and telling where they disagree.
He closes the volume with his own alphabetical register of everything treated in it, and that register is here made to work as he meant it to: each of its seven hundred entries is a link to the passage it names, as are the six hundred and eighty pointers of his summary at the front.
The work may be read online, or downloaded as a PDF of 895 pages or as an EPUB. Its persons, its Scripture passages, its councils, its heresies and its subjects are gathered into the five indexes that span the whole library, where it adds some two thousand four hundred references for more than twelve hundred persons.