Historia ecclesiastica

Résumé : This is the first English translation of Hobbes's long Latin poem, the Historia Ecclesiastica of 1688, which seems to have suffered the same benign neglect as the last two books of Leviathan. For, until recently not a single book or article out of the many thousands of items on Hobbes addressed his Latin poetry, or mentioned the Historia Ecclesiastica except in passing. This, despite the fact that in the reception of Hobbes's work his ecclesiology was regarded as of utmost importance. Moreover, the Historia Ecclesiastica is more than just a Church History and reprises the main doctrines of Hobbes's epistemology and metaphysics, fitting into the scheme of his works as a missing link between the English and the Latin Leviathans.Patricia Springborg held a chair in political theory at the University of Sydney until 2005, and is now a professor in the School of Economics of the Free University of Bolzano, in Italy. She is the author of a number of articles on Hobbes and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan (2007).