List of Required Readings

New Saint Andrews College has adopted the following list of readings as a requirement for the Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts and Culture. The College is committed to assigning each of these works throughout the various colloquia which are required for graduation. These particular works have been selected because, as a set, they adequately introduce to our students the basic cultural output of the West. This is not a comprehensive list of all the readings assigned in our colloquia. Our instructors assign many readings in addition to these for practical and pedagogical reasons.

Of course, there are many other great works that are not required reading at New Saint Andrews. These we hope our students will pursue after they graduate, for there is no end to a listing of great books, and learning from books is a lifelong activity.

Note: Some of the following books are available at the College's Online Bookstore.

THEOLOGY

(Lordship) Anselm, selections
Athanasius, On the Incarnation
Augustine, City of God
Augustine, Confessions
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
Irenaeus, Against Heresies
Luther, Bondage of the Will
(Principia)
Luther, 1520 tracts
New Testament
Old Testament
(History) St. Benedict, Rule
(Traditio)
Anselm, Proslogion and Monologion
Aquinas, Selections from the Summa

NATURAL SCIENCE

(Lordship) Darwin, Origin of Species
(Nat. Phil.) Euclid, Elements
Newton, Principia (selections)

SOCIAL & POLITICAL SCIENCE

(Traditio) Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Aristotle, Ethics and Politics
Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers
Hobbes, Leviathan
John of Salisbury, Policraticus
Locke, On Civil Government
Machiavelli, Prince
Marsiglius de Padua, Defensor Pacis (selections)
Marx, Das Capital or Communist Manifesto
Plato, Republic
Rousseau, Social Contract
U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence
Weber, Protestant Ethic

HISTORY

(History) Bede, Ecclesiastical History
Herodotus, Histories
Plutarch, select lives
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum or Henry of Huntington, Historia
Anglorum

EPICS

(Traditio) Beowulf
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Dante, Divine Comedy
Homer, Iliad
Homer, Odyssey
Milton, Paradise Lost
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Spenser, Faerie Queene
Vergil, Aeneid

DRAMA

(Traditio) Aeschylus, Oresteia
Aristophanes, selections
Euripides, selections
Shakespeare, selections
Sophocles, Theban plays

NOVELS

(Traditio) Austen, representative title
Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, representative title
Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury
Goethe, Faust
Melville, Moby Dick

LETTERS

(Rhetoric) Aristotle, On Rhetoric
Plato, Gorgias or Phaedrus
Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium or Cicero, De Inventione
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
(Traditio)
Aristotle, Poetics
Montaigne, selections
Plutarch, Moralia (selections)

ART & ARCHITECTURE

(Traditio) Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture
Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, On the Abbey of the Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures
Vitruvius, On Architecture

PHILOSOPHY

(Traditio) Aquinas, selections from Summa
Aristotle, selections
Berkeley, selections
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Duns Scotus, selections
Derrida, selections
Descartes, Meditations
Hume, selections
Kant, selections
Leibnitz, selections
Locke, selections
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Plato, selections
Russell, selections
Plotinus, selections
William of Ockham, selections
Wittgenstein, selections

Visit the College's Online Bookstore