The Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (CSHB; English: Corpus of Byzantine history writers), also referred to as the Bonn Corpus, is a monumental fifty-volume series of primary sources for the study of Byzantine history (c. 330–1453), published in the German city of Bonn between 1828 and 1897. Each volume contains a critical edition of a Byzantine Greek historical text, accompanied by a parallel Latin translation. The project, conceived by the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, sought to revise and expand the original twenty-four volume Corpus Byzantinae Historiae (sometimes called the Byzantine du Louvre),[1] published in Paris between 1648 and 1711 under the initial direction of the Jesuit scholar Philippe Labbe.[2] The series was first based at the University of Bonn; after Niebuhr's death in 1831, however, oversight of the project passed to his collaborator Immanuel Bekker at the Prussian Academy of SciencesinBerlin.[3]
While the first volume of the series received praise for its "minute care and attention" to textual details,[4] later volumes produced under Bekker became infamous for their frequent misprints, careless execution, and general unreliability.[5] Given these shortcomings, the International Association of Byzantine Studies established in 1966 the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae to re-edit many of the texts included in the Bonn edition of the CSHB.
