A delightful pair of translations by an Irish scholar of Trinity College Dublin, with a dedication, in Italian, to Mary of Modena, Queen of the three kingdoms, presenting these stories of three Empresses. The first work, anonymous, out of a long-lost Estrangela manuscript (not exactly the collection of saint's lives Loftus thought it, in calling its author a biologist), was only published in Syriac by Eberhard Nestle, in 1889. It is the story of the double discovery of the Cross, by "Patronica, Empress of Rome", a convert of Nero's time, and when it was hidden away again by the Jews, by Helena. The second part is a short extract from Bar-Hebraeus, telling how Theodora sent her emissary, Saint Julianus, to convert the Nubians ahead of Justinian's Chalcedonian envoys; the Nubians accepted him and refused the persecutors; Julianus spent two years baptizing them with the pure water of caves, since their rivers are not clean.