Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the eighty-third volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume holds Gregory the Great, The Pastoral Rule, the Life and the Letters, from the period about AD 590 – 604.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.
In this volume
Gregory was born at Rome about AD 540 into a rich senatorial family, served as prefect of the city, and gave his wealth to found monasteries. He was sent to Constantinople as the pope’s representative about AD 579, and there began to explain the Book of Job to the monks who went with him. He was chosen bishop of Rome in AD 590, in a time of plague, famine and Lombard invasion, and for fourteen years he governed the Church, fed the poor of Rome, and sent Augustine and his monks to the English. His books on pastoral care, his homilies, the Dialogues and the Morals on Job were among the most widely read in the Middle Ages.
This volume has three parts. The short Whitby life comes first, as the oldest account of Gregory’s own life. The Pastoral Rule follows in four parts, and the Register of Epistles, a selection of his letters, completes the volume. In the Register the letters are numbered by book and by their place within the book, and a few have no known recipient.
Dates and authorship
Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.