Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus

Paul Meyvaert.
Speculum, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 827-883.

One of the natural shortcomings to which historians are prone is a failure to give ignorance its due, and to acknowledge the force of the haphazard in human affairs. We know that Bede was eager for knowledge and industrious in acquiring it. With respect to Cassiodorus, however, he labored under difficulties we have been slow to perceive. Before his eyes in his monastery at Jarrow lay an imposing volume that had taken shape under Cassiodorus’s direction at Vivarium in southern Italy, but neither he nor his brethren, including their abbot Ceolfrith, who had bought the book in Rome, knew what it was that they possessed. For years they saw it only as a splendid old volume where all the books of the Bible had been assembled together between two covers, in a text they recognized as predating Jerome’s Vulgate. Bede had been a young boy when he accompanied Ceolfrith to Jarrow from Wearmouth; he grew to maturity in the presence of this volume, Cassiodorus’s Codex Grandior, and his increasing acquaintance with it is reflected in his writings. Eventually its connection with Cassiodorus was recognized, although imperfectly. Over the years Bede’s respect for Cassiodorus grew and deepened, but his knowledge remained limited to the end. The extent of that limitation and the understanding achieved despite it are examined in the following pages.

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