Our Fathers Have Told US: Part I. the Bible of Amiens
1881
Our Fathers Have Told US: Part I. the Bible of Amiens
1881
John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic and social thinker, turned his formidable mind to the education of the young in this series of historical sketches. 'Our Fathers Have Told Us' was conceived as a gift to the next generation: not a dry chronicle of dates and battles, but living narratives that would make the past breathe. Part I, 'The Bible of Amiens,' uses a single French city as a window into the broader sweep of Christian Europe. Ruskin traces Amiens's transformation from a pagan Roman settlement to a Christian capital through the arrival of St. Firmin, the martyred missionary who planted the faith in northern Gaul, and follows the emergence of the Frankish kingdom under Clovis. Throughout, Ruskin insists that history is inheritance, that the faith and civilization of the present flow from the sacrifices and choices of those who came before. Written with luminous prose and reverent attention to detail, this work offers modern readers a Victorian gentleman's vision of what the past owes the future.
