Cyprian’s Corpus
The Works of Cyprian of Carthage
Cyprian, bishop of Carthage
Eighty-one letters from a man who had nine years to be a bishop and used all of them.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 180
- Stat total
- 308
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Thirteen treatises and eighty-one letters — the fullest picture anyone has of how a third-century church actually ran, week to week, under pressure.
A bishop for nine years, in hiding for one of them, beheaded at the end of it. He argued the two hardest questions his century had — what to do with those who cracked, and whether the church can be more than one thing — and the church has been quoting his answers at itself ever since.
Cyprian was copied more than any Latin Christian writer before Augustine, and the letters survive in numbers a third-century text has no business surviving in. Very hard to knock off a text this well attested.
Named in every argument about church order there has been, and by both sides of most of them. It takes the floor early.
Cited for this book
The letters are the reason this corpus matters more than its page count suggests. They are not essays: they are a working bishop writing to other bishops, to his own clergy while he is in hiding, and to congregations he cannot visit — about money, about who may be readmitted, about a man claiming an office he does not hold. Nothing else from the third century shows the church at work this closely.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 32 | The Universal Church | Ecclesiology | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 32 | The Lapsed | Ethics | Argument | 80 | 100% | 10 |
| 38 | In Time of Plague | Ethics | Argument | 70 | 100% | 10 |