The (CSHB; ), also referred to as the Bonn Corpus, is a monumental fifty-volume series of primary sources for the study of

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

history (–1453), published in the German city of

Bonn Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...

between 1828 and 1897. Each volume contains a critical edition of a

Byzantine Greek Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic; Greek: ) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the F ...

historical text, accompanied by a parallel

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

translation. The project, conceived by the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, sought to revise and expand the original twenty-four volume (sometimes called the ''Byzantine du Louvre''), published in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

between 1648 and 1711 under the initial direction of the

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

scholar Philippe Labbe. The series was first based at the

University of Bonn The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (), is a public research university in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the () on 18 October 1818 by Frederick Willi ...

; after Niebuhr's death in 1831, however, oversight of the project passed to his collaborator Immanuel Bekker at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

. While the first volume of the series received praise for its "minute care and attention" to textual details, later volumes produced under Bekker became infamous for their frequent misprints, careless execution, and general unreliability.Reinsch, ''op. cit.'', reports that August Heisenberg, professor of Byzantine literature at Munich, once said of Bekker that he "must have revised the texts 'lying on the sofa with the cigar in his mouth.'" J. B. Bury was even harsher in his assessment, calling the CSHB "the most lamentably feeble production ever given to the world by German scholars of great reputation." See: ''idem'
"Introduction"
to

Edward Gibbon Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 173716 January 1794) was an English essayist, historian, and politician. His most important work, ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is known for ...

, ''

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', sometimes shortened to ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', is a six-volume work by the English historian Edward Gibbon. The six volumes cover, from 98 to 1590, the peak of the Ro ...

'', vol. 1, ed. Bury (London: Methuen, 1897), p. xlix. Given these shortcomings, the International Association of Byzantine Studies established in 1966 the to re-edit many of the texts included in the Bonn edition of the CSHB.

Volumes

References

External links

Digitized CSHB on the Documenta Omnia Catholica

List of scans of CSHB volumes
in the "Links Galore" spreadsheet
Fordham Guide to Byzantine Sources in Translation
{{Authority control Byzantine literature Byzantine studies Byzantine historians Book series Corpora 19th-century history books

Volumes

See also

References

Further reading

External links