Four Seasons of Flowers: A selection of botanical illustrations from the Rare Book Collection at Dumbarton Oaks
By Linda Lott
Four Seasons of Flowers presents a selection of the manuscripts, herbals, and printed botanical texts from the Rare Book Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. Representing pivotal works in the intellectual history of Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, these drawings, books and manuscripts are among the most significant materials conserved in the Rare Book Reading Room. They offer an illuminating overview of the history of botany as a modern science, from its inception to the present day.
The Life of Patriarch Ignatius
By Nicetas David
Edited and translated by Andrew Smithies
Notes by John M. Duffy
The Life of the Patriarch Ignatius is the vivid and partisan account of two tremendous ecclesiastical struggles of the ninth century. One was between opposing patriarchs of Constantinople—the learned Photius (858–867, 877–886) and the monk Ignatius (847–858, 867–877)—and gave rise to long periods of schism, intrigue, and scandal in the Greek Orthodox world. The other was between Patriarch Photius and the papacy, which at its low point saw Photius and Nicholas I trade formal condemnations of each other and adversely affected East-West relations for generations afterwards. As much a frontal attack on Photius as a record of the author’s hero Ignatius, The Life of Patriarch Ignatius offers a fascinating, if biased, look into the complex world of competing church factions, imperial powers, and the papacy in the ninth century. This important historical document (supplemented by annotations, maps, and indexes) is here critically edited and translated into English for the first time.