The full, ancient text, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae.De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (or On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), is an ancient text by a British cleric called St. Gildas during the 6th century. It is notable for being the only surviving, contemporary account of the Battle of Badon Hill (long associated with the legend of King Arthur). Though Arthur himself is never mentioned, Gildas does talk about Ambrosius Aurelianus, who may be an Arthur-type figure upon which many of the legends could have been based.
This book is one of Gildas' most important works. It is a sermon condemning the secular and religious behavior of his contemporaries. The author Saint Gildas is an outstanding member of the British Celtic Christian Church. His famous knowledge and literary style earned him the title of Gildas the Wise.
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
This book investigates the ways in which ideas associated with the Celtic and the Classical have been used to construct identities (national/ethnic/regional etc.) in Britain, from the period of the Roman conquest to the present day.
Gildas's 'De Excidio Britanniae' is the prime source of our knowledge of post-Roman Britain, but because it is such an isolated text, for which we have no obvious historical, geographical or cultural background, it is a work which raises more questions than answers. Much effort has been expended on extracting historical facts from 'De excidio', but Gildas did not set out to write history as we understand it. The common approach of the contributors to this volume is to look at tha author and his text on their own terms, for themselves rather than for the items of evidence which we can get out of them. Who was Gildas, and what was his position in society? What was his intellectual background - what he had learnt of Latin and Christian culture through his education, and what did he know of British language and literary traditions? What audience was he adressing? All these questions can be given some kind of answer by a close study of the text of the 'De excidio'. But there is also important evidence from Continental sources on early fifth-centyry Britain, and from Irish sources on Gildas's own repuation and career. This is a volume which no student of post-Roman Britain can afford to ignore; it does not attempt to present clear-cut conclusions or optimistic certainties, but establishes a basis on which further research can be carried out.
Jones offers a lucid and thorough analysis of the economic, social, military, and environmental problems that contributed to the failure of the Romans, drawing on literary sources and on recent archaeological evidence.
This dictionary is an indispensable guide to the study of the Latin Middle Ages. It records the continuing usage of classical and late Latin in this period (6th-16th centuries), but it presents most fully the medieval developments of the language, drawing on a rich variety of printed and manuscript sources.
