The library of the Venerable Bede

Rosalind Love.
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 1: c.400–1100, [Edited by Richard Gameson, University of Durham], pp. 606-632. 2011.

In a letter written as the preface to his commentary on Genesis, addressed to Acca, bishop of Hexham (709–31), Bede listed the authors who had preceded him in commenting on the first book of the Old Testament – Basil, Ambrose, Augustine – and he observed of their writings:

But because these are so copious and lengthy that such a number of volumes may scarcely be acquired except by the very wealthy, and so profound that they may scarcely be understood fully except by the very learned, it has pleased your holiness to assign to me the task of gathering from all these, as if from the loveliest meadows of a widely blossoming paradise, such things as should seem to meet the needs of the weak.

In these words we can glimpse not only Bede’s idea of his own calling – as one of the very learned, with the skill to assimilate difficult and diffuse material and pass on its import to those less fortunate – but also his sense of privilege as a beneficiary of the wealth that brought so many books his way, creating a scholar’s paradise, as he saw it. Closer examination of his commentary on Genesis shows that the works mentioned in that letter to Acca were known to Bede not merely by reputation, but that copies of them lay open before him. Basil’s commentary in the translation from the Greek by Eustathius, Ambrose’s Hexaemeron, and several relevant works by Augustine (primarily his De Genesi ad litteram but also De Genesi contra Manichaeos, his Confessiones, and the treatise Contra adversarium legis et prophetarum) are just the authors and books which Bede himself named in describing his sources. Once we begin to read his commentary, we can quickly fill Bede’s desk with the other works which he was able to use: writings by Jerome, Gregory, Isidore, Pseudo-Clement, Josephus, Orosius, Pliny and Vergil, as well as a relatively new work, an anonymous treatise on the order of creation (De ordine creaturarum), thought to have been composed in seventh-century Ireland. That is already an impressive list. To consider, then, that the commentary on Genesis was just one of over forty works which Bede wrote (counting only those which survive and can be attributed to him with certainty), suggests the importance of assessing the extent of the library used by the man who was arguably the most productive of all known authors active in Anglo-Saxon England.

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