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A Universal History Shares Its Author with a Book of Jokes

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A Universal History Shares Its Author with a Book of Jokes

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Bar Hebraeus's Chronicon, a universal history running from creation to his own day, and its companion ecclesiastical history remain major documented sources for the political and church history of the medieval Middle East, a scholarly output distinct in scale from the shorter regional chronicles more typical of his own period.

Alongside that historical work he also compiled Laughable Stories, a celebrated collection of humorous anecdotes still read today as a documented window onto the everyday life and wit of the period, a markedly different register from the universal history and the philosophical and scientific compilations that occupy the rest of his recorded output. That the same maphrian who wrote encyclopedic Aristotelian philosophy also gathered comic anecdotes is preserved as part of his recorded body of work rather than treated as an inauthentic or later addition to it.

That one scholar's surviving output spans a universal history, an ecclesiastical chronicle, philosophical and scientific encyclopedias, and a book of jokes marks Bar Hebraeus's combined legacy as a documented case where an unusually wide range of registers, from the most solemn historical record to deliberate comedy, was preserved together as the work of a single author.

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Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
Sources
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source
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