Some Remnants of Bede’s Lost Liber Epigrammatum
Author(s): Michael Lapidge
Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 357 (Oct., 1975), pp. 798-820

View the p. 798 as image.
View the p. 799 as image.
View the p. 800 as image.
View the p. 801 as image.
View the p. 802 as image.
View the p. 803 as image.
View the p. 804 as image.
View the p. 805 as image.
View the p. 806 as image.
View the p. 807 as image.
View the p. 808 as image.
View the p. 809 as image.
View the p. 810 as image.
View the p. 811 as image.
View the p. 812 as image.
View the p. 813 as image.
View the p. 814 as image.
View the p. 815 as image.
View the p. 816 as image.
View the p. 817 as image.
View the p. 818 as image.
View the p. 819 as image.
View the p. 820 as image.

The ‘Lost’ Sirmond Manuscript of Bede’s ‘Computus’
Author: Charles W. Jones
Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 52, No. 206 (Apr., 1937), pp. 204-219

View the p. 204 as image.
View the p. 205 as image.
View the p. 206 as image.
View the p. 207 as image.
View the p. 208 as image.
View the p. 209 as image.
View the p. 210 as image.
View the p. 211 as image.
View the p. 212 as image.
View the p. 213 as image.
View the p. 214 as image.
View the p. 215 as image.
View the p. 216 as image.
View the p. 217 as image.
View the p. 218 as image.
View the p. 219 as image.

The Ecclesiastical History, of course, was the culmination of Bede’s long career as an historical writer. His earlier works were by nature of an apprenticeship, one that he served by dint of productive labor in two separate fields ?chronology or chronography, and hagiography. “At the root of Bede’s historical studies are the science of computing dates and the cult of saints,” and to us, “The Historia Ecclesiastica seems the natural outcome of Bede’s work on saints’ lives and chronology.” By hindsight, at least, this looks obvious enough. However, it would be a grave mistake to view Bede’s ultimate synthetic work as a simple or inevitable step. Before Bede, these two literary veins ran at right angles more frequently than they converged to produce a richer literary product. Chronographie writings -by Bede as well as by his predecessors and mentors- were designed to establish an accurate calendar so that sacred history and human history could fit into the same coherent, universal framework. They had little to do with secular events, at least as they were explained by means of secular causation. Hagiography too had its own purposes. Hagiographie writings, written and read in every Christian community between Syria and the Hebrides, rarely displayed much interest in the specifics of place and/or time. The lives were but individualized bits of a universal genus, the tale of the holy hero, and the biographies were in no way hampered by their wonted neglect of chronological narrative structure or by their independence of the laws of temporal causation. Their central figure is usually depicted as standing pretty much alone, saving his friends and those who believe in him, resisting a host of satanic enemies. He stands successfully, to be sure; he dies gloriously and reposes without bodily corruption. Nevertheless, he is not portrayed as being part of or coming from an instrumental framework of human history or of secular institutions.

View the p. 599 as image.
View the p. 600 as image.
View the p. 601 as image.
View the p. 602 as image.
View the p. 603 as image.
View the p. 604 as image.
View the p. 605 as image.
View the p. 606 as image.
View the p. 607 as image.
View the p. 608 as image.
View the p. 609 as image.
View the p. 610 as image.
View the p. 611 as image.

The thesis of this article is that Bede’s great work on time reckoning, the De temporum ratione (A.D. 725), contains the seeds of later calendar reform. The year 664 was distinguished not only by the Synod of Whitby, after which the Northumbrian Church conformed to the Roman method of calculating Easter, but by an event of computistical significance the solar eclipse on 1 May. Since this date showed the Roman reckoning to be inaccurate, it was altered to 3 May. Bede knew of this alteration and was uneasy about it. He at first attempted to justify the ecclesiastical dating, although eyewitness accounts showed it to be wrong, and later, by referring to the Acta synodi, a document used by the Irish to justify their Easter reckoning, implied how a solution to the problem might be found. In the eleventh century, Gerland spelled out the heterodox ideas at which Bede had only hinted.

View p. 50 as image.
View p. 51 as image.
View p. 52 as image.
View p. 53 as image.
View p. 54 as image.
View p. 55 as image.
View p. 56 as image.
View p. 57 as image.
View p. 58 as image.
View p. 59 as image.
View p. 60 as image.
View p. 61 as image.
View p. 62 as image.
View p. 63 as image.
View p. 64 as image.
View p. 65 as image.

When Bede was born neither of the two monastic houses with which his name is so closely linked was yet founded; only four or five years had passed since Theodore of Tarsus landed in England. On the other hand, much civilising work had been carried on for the past half-century in the northern parts of England by Paulinus, Wilfrith, and their associates, and by the Irish from Iona. These last laid the foundations of Northumbrian scholarship and gave to the English a script which they transmuted into a national hand. The monastery of Wearmouth was founded in 674 by Benedict Biscop. To the care of its abbot and teachers the boy Bede was entrusted at the age of seven. When he was nine or ten, another religious house was established near-by at Jarrow. Wearmouth and Jarrow were indeed intended to form a single monastery. But political and ecclesiastical affairs often demanded Benedict Biscop’s presence elsewhere, so that in practice each house had its own permanent head. Bede appears to have been transferred to Jarrow at, or soon after, its foundation; at all events, if the identification of him with the small choirboy, who aided Abbot Ceolfrith to carry on the services of the Church during the awful visitation of the plague in 686, is correct, he was established by that year in the surroundings where he was to pass the remainder of his life. There is but little information about the schools at Wearmouth and Jarrow. The picture which modern writers have been apt to draw, by using in the main the evidence of the Carolingian schools, is likely to be more misleading than helpful. Two facts, however, stand out: Benedict Biscop had brought many books to the north and Abbot Ceolfrith added greatly to them.l In the second place, even the earliest works of Bede, though they may show little originality, make it abundantly clear that he had already then read widely, doubtless far more widely than any of his school-fellows. It is well to remind oneself, moreover, in order properly to appraise the magnitude of Bede’s achievement, that Latin was a foreign language to the people of England. Bede’s mastery over Latin idiom, like the German Einhard’s a century later, is the more astounding.

View p. 69 as image.
View p. 70 as image.
View p. 71 as image.
View p. 72 as image.
View p. 73 as image.
View p. 74 as image.
View p. 75 as image.
View p. 76 as image.
View p. 77 as image.
View p. 78 as image.
View p. 79 as image.
View p. 80 as image.
View p. 81 as image.
View p. 82 as image.
View p. 83 as image.
View p. 84 as image.
View p. 85 as image.
View p. 86 as image.
View p. 87 as image.
View p. 88 as image.
View p. 89 as image.
View p. 90 as image.
View p. 91 as image.
View p. 92 as image.
View p. 93 as image.
View p. 94 as image.

ALTHOUGH students in the West during the early Middle Ages knew very little about the language and customs of eastern races, the names of the months according to the Hebrews, Egyptians (Alexandrians), Athenians, Macedonians, and other eastern peoples appear at intervals in western literature. Professor Mountford called attention to one source for these lists. This note will discuss another, and more popular, source for the names of the months according to the Hebrews, Egyptians, and Greeks (Macedonians).

View p. 50 as image.
View p. 51 as image.
View p. 52 as image.
View p. 53 as image.
View p. 54 as image.
View p. 55 as image.
View p. 56 as image.

To be remembered by posterity after twelve hundred years is in itself exceptional ; it is more than exceptional when one reflects that during the twelve hundred years which have elapsed since the death of the Venerable Bede dynasties have risen and vanished, Christendom has been divided and subdivided, new continents have been discovered and settled. And the wonder is not lessened by recalling the fact that the figure we are concerned with was not a great pontiff, nor a crusader, nor an empoeror; he was of all things a historian. To understand why after twelve hundred years the slight figure of Bede should be remembered at all it may be practical to borrow the suggestion in the inscription carved for an Englishman of a later time : “Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice” and transpose it into the injunction, “tolle, lege,” for Bede has a monument and that monument, the written word, is indeed an impressive one. Bede’s monument is composed of a series of works which includes theological and scriptural studies, literary pieces, that is to say the technical side of letters as well as some verses, treatises on natural science, and of particular importance, history.1 The variety of fields of human knowledge covered by Bede is little less than astonishing. The physical labor alone incident to the production of his intellectual output judged by any standards is considerable, but when it is reckoned, as it should be, both with reference to the troubled times in which he lived and to his own position in life, the results of Bede’s industry cannot fail to amaze us. So it appeared to Symeon of Durham, who wrote of Bede as one living “in a remote corner of the world, who never crossed the seas in order to learn knowledge, who did not visit the schools of the philosophers, [yet] should be famous for such great learning and should be known everywhere in the world for the composition of so many books.”

View p. 297 as image.
View p. 298 as image.
View p. 299 as image.
View p. 300 as image.
View p. 301 as image.
View p. 302 as image.
View p. 303 as image.