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Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.
Revered by contemporaries and posterity for both his sanctity and his scholarship, Bede (672-735) is a pivotal figure in the history of the Church. Known primarily as an historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede was also an accomplished pedagogue, hagiographer, and biblical scholar. Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality takes a fresh look at this classic Christian thinker, exploring the gamut of Bede's literary corpus. The book investigates key themes, including Bede's understanding of the theological significance of time, his conception of the relationship between the temporal and eternal orders within history, his theological use of rhetoric, his foray into narrative theology, and his spirituality. The purpose of this volume is to introduce the reader to principal theological themes in Bede's thought. Bequette's thesis is that Bede was a theologian writing in continuity with the Christian tradition and yet making creative, original contributions to that tradition for the sake of his contemporaries, both in the monastery and in the culture at large. The method involves a close reading and analysis of key texts within Bede's corpus of writings. These texts include the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Life of St Cuthbert, and several of Bede's biblical commentaries (On the Tabernacle, On the Temple) his homilies, and didactic treatises (On the Reckoning of Time, Concerning Figures and Tropes in Sacred Scripture). Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality constitutes a scholarly study of Bede's thought as an integral whole, identifying key themes and ideas that pervade his writings. Thus, it can serve as an introduction to Bede's thought for non-specialists in the areas of theology, religious studies, and other areas of the humanities.
This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.
The period from the fifth century to the eighth century witnessed massive political, social and religious change in Europe. Geographical and historical thought, long rooted to Roman ideologies, had to adopt the new perspectives of late antiquity. In the light of expanding Christianity and the evolution of successor kingdoms in the West, new historical discourses emerged which were seminal in the development of medieval historiography. Taking their lead from Orosius in the early fifth century, Latin historians turned increasingly to geographical description, as well as historical narrative, to examine the world around them. This book explores the interdependence of geographical and historical modes of expression in four of the most important writers of the period: Orosius, Jordanes, Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede. It offers important readings of each by arguing that the long geographical passages with which they were introduced were central to their authors' historical assumptions and arguments.
Pioneering examination of the Old English version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica and its reception in the middle ages, from a theoretically informed, multi-disciplinary perspective. The first full-length study of the Old English version of Bede's masterwork, dealing with one of the most important texts to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. The subjects treated range from a detailed analysis of the manuscriptsand the medieval use of them to a very satisfying conclusion that summarizes all the major issues related to the work, giving a compelling summary of the value and importance of this independent creation. Dr Rowley convincingly argues that the Old English version is not an inferior imitation of Bede's work, but represents an intelligent reworking of the text for a later generation. An exhaustive study and a major scholarly contribution. GEORGE HARDIN BROWN, Professor of English emeritus, Stanford University. The Old English version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum is one of the earliest and most substantial surviving works of Old English prose. Translated anonymously around the end of the ninth or beginning of the tenth century, the text, which is substantially shorter than Bede's original, was well known and actively used in medieval England, and was highly influential.However, despite its importance, it has been little studied. In this first book on the subject, the author places the work in its manuscript context, arguing that the text was an independent, ecclesiastical translation, thoughtfully revised for its new audience. Rather than looking back on the age of Bede from the perspective of a king centralizing power and building a community by recalling a glorious English past, the Old English version of Bede's Historia transforms its source to focus on local history, key Anglo-Saxon saints, and their miracles. The author argues that its reading reflects an ecclesiastical setting more than a political one, with uses more hagiographical than royal; and that rather than being used as a class-book or crib, it functioned as a resource for vernacular preaching, as a corpus of vernacular saints' lives, for oral performance, and episcopal authority. Sharon M. Rowley is Associate Professor of English at Christopher Newport University.
Through a close reading of Bede, N. J. Higham assesses how best to approach the text as an historical source and offers a fresh approach to how we should engage today with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History – the most important source for early medieval history ever written.
Saint Patrick Retold draws on recent research to offer a fresh assessment of Patrick's travails and achievements. This is the first biography in nearly fifty years to explore Patrick's career against the background of historical events in late antique Britain and Ireland.
The subject of this book is the concept of miracles in the thought of the Venerable Bede. Its specific focus is Bede's understanding of the miracles of modern saints, miracles of the sort that he himself describes for us in his Ecclesiastical History.
In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.
Brought together by an impressive, international array of contributors this book presents a representative study of some of the many misinterpretations that have evolved concerning the medieval period.