Historical Re-Collections: Rewriting the World Chronicle in Bede’s De temporum ratione.

Ildar H. Garipzanov, Andrew Rabin.

Writing at the very edge of the Latin world, Bede locates the experience of his fellow Northumbrians at the center of the Christian historical narrative and, in so doing, provides a model for other marginal peoples attempting to understand their place in Western Christianity. In particular, Bede introduces a new vocabulary of computus based on the theory of signs and language set forth by Augustine in his De doctrina Christiana. As I argue, Bede uses the relationship Augustine draws between signa and the writing of historia to justify the inclusion of the narrative of English Christianity in the Chronica maiora. In doing so, Bede implicitly pairs the English conversion with the Roman in the triumph of the Christian Church, thereby shifting the Rome-centered biases of previous chroniclers. Reading the De temporum ratione in this way helps us explain its wide popularity, particularly among populations on the margins of Latin Christendom, while also giving us further insight into Bede’s notions of English and Christian history. Ultimately, as we shall see, the De temporum ratione functions less as an exercise in objective or scientific history than as an attempt to introduce uniquely English concerns into the previously closed narrative of Western Christian history.

Ildar H. Garipzanov, Andrew Rabin. ‘Historical Re-Collections: Rewriting the World Chronicle in Bede’s De temporum ratione’. Viator, “Medieval and Renaissance Studies“, Volume 36, pp. 23-39. 2005.

Rabin, Garipzanov. Historical Re-collections – Rewriting the World Chronicle in Bede’s de Temporum Ratione…. by Venerabilis Bedae Studiosus on Scribd

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