Article. McCready. Bede and the Isidorian Legacy. 1995.
BEDE AND THE ISIDORIAN LEGACY
William D. McCready
IN his essay in the well-known collection commemorating the thirteenth centenary of the birth of the Venerable Bede, Paul Meyvaert makes a convincing case both for Bede’s scholarly stature and for the growing maturity and independence of judgment that can be detected over the course of his career. In the early years, as Bede himself tells us, his inclination was to follow the doctors of the Church, happily deferring to their authority. Once he learned to look into questions more carefully, however, he was ready to advance his own opinions, even if he happened to be in conflict with esteemed predecessors. In general, says Meyvaert, Bede was able to state his disagreement respectfully, without jeopardizing the becoming modesty that has endeared him to so many. In his handling of Isidore, however, Meyvaert claims that it is a different Bede that we see, one much less gracious than is usually the case. The point has been made by other scholars as well, both before and since, and now represents the generally established view. Indeed, it is suggested that Bede’s attitude towards Isidore amounted to nothing less than a hearty dislike, one strong enough for him to have made the correction of the errors in Isidore’s De natura rerum one of the two major projects of his final days.
In his Epistola de obitu Bedae the deacon Cuthbert tells us that Bede was engaged on two works, neither of which has survived, at the time of his death. Alongside a translation of the Gospel of St. John, which Bede completed up to John 6:9, Cuthbert mentions certain “exceptiones” from Isidore’s De natura rerum; Bede is reported to have said, “I cannot have my children learning what is not true and losing their labour on this after I am gone.” Although the authenticity of Cuthbert’s text has been called into question, most scholars would agree that there is little doubt that it is indeed what it purports to be: an eyewitness account of Bede’s last days by a former pupil who was destined to become abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow. Whether Cuthbert’s description of Bede’s scholarly activities can sustain the interpretation that Meyvaert and others have placed upon it is, however, another matter. Was Bede compiling a set of corrections to the errors in Isidore’s text, or was he not rather, as has traditionally been thought, assembling a set of extracts from Isidore to counter the misinformation that his students would encounter elsewhere? The question is a complex one, deserving an essay of its own. The purpose of the present essay, which focuses on passages in which Bede either criticizes Isidore or has been thought to do so, is to provide some additional context for that debate by examining the attitude towards Isidore -particularly Isidore’s De natura rerum -that emerges from Bede’s own published works.Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995): 41-73.
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