Bibliography & History

4 texts · 5 editions

Catalog and biographical works — De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis and the Spanheim/Würzburg collected-works compilations and chronicles.

Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis

On Ecclesiastical Writers · 1494first English

Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis — "On Ecclesiastical Writers" — is Trithemius's pioneering bio-bibliography of Christian authors, from the apostolic age to his own century, in roughly a thousand numbered entries: each author given a short biography and a list of writings. Completed at Sponheim in 1494 and printed at Basel by Johann Amerbach in the same year, it continues the catalogue tradition of Jerome, Gennadius, and Isidore on a far larger scale, and it stands as a founding text in the history of bibliography — the first large-scale alphabetical bio-bibliography of Christian literature, and the work for which Trithemius was best known in his lifetime.

2 editions: Basel, 1494 · Coloniae, 1546

De Septem Secundeis, id est, Intelligentiis sive Spiritibus Orbes post Deum Moventibus

On the Seven Secondary Intelligences, that is, the Spirits Moving the Orbs after God · 1522

De Septem Secundeis, id est, Intelligentiis sive Spiritibus Orbes post Deum Moventibus — "On the Seven Secondary Intelligences, that is, the Spirits Moving the Orbs after God" — is Trithemius's astrological philosophy of history. Its thesis is that the successive ages of the world are governed in turn by seven planetary angels — the secundeis — each ruling for a fixed period in the order of the celestial spheres, yielding a chronological scheme that runs from the Creation down to his own century. Addressed to Emperor Maximilian I, it is the work in which Trithemius brought his reading of the celestial-intelligence tradition (transmitted through Arabic and scholastic astronomy) to bear on universal history, and it had an outsized afterlife in Renaissance historical thought.

Nurnberge, 1522 · provisional reading text · Latin / English

Opera Historica, Part I

Collected Historical Works (Freher ed.), first part · 1601first English

Opera Historica — "Historical Works," Part I — is the collected historical magnum opus of Trithemius's last years, assembling his chronicle of the Franks from their mythical Trojan origins through the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties to the late medieval period. It follows the universal-chronicle tradition — year-by-year entries assembled from over two hundred manuscript sources — and is an important, if at times credulous, source for early medieval history. (Part II, the Hirsau and Sponheim monastic chronicles, is prdl-70290 in this corpus.) Like much of Trithemius's historical writing it mingles genuine documentary labour with fabricated sources, the most notorious being the invented Hunibald; readers should weigh it against later scholarship, but the breadth of compilation is real.

Francofurti, 1601 · provisional reading text · Latin / English

Opera Historica, Part II — Chronicon Hirsaugiense & Sponheimense

Collected Historical Works, second part: the Hirsau and Sponheim chronicles · 1601first English

Opera Historica, Part II — the Chronicon Hirsaugiense and Chronicon Sponheimense — is the second half of Trithemius's collected historical works: his two great monastic chronicles. The Chronicon Hirsaugiense narrates the foundation and progress of the monastery of Hirsau, in the diocese of Speyer, down to 1520; the Chronicon Sponheimense does the same for his own former house of Sponheim, in the diocese of Mainz. Together they are the fullest record of the Benedictine reform world he inhabited — though, like his Frankish history, they must be read with caution for the fabricated sources woven into the genuine documentary labour.