The purpose of this research is to provide a critique of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal design and plan of the History, and then to discuss those elements of the book that may have the effect of providing insight into its enduring importance. As appropriate, those elements of the book that place it into a discernible sociohistorical context for modern review will also be noted.
The individual stories related in the History contain elements that, as Farmer comments, may throw light on the archeology of England, even as the archeology of England may inflect the modern understanding of Bede's "motives, his limitations and his omissions . . . his regional bias, his academic partisanship and the paucity of his sources" (p. 23). Farmer refers to Bede's moral purpose as in part one that would inure to the good of the English people (pp. 25-6), and this is supported by the fact that the History contains a number of stories of miracles.
In addition, of course, the History provides a chronology of events in the England that had been historicized up to Bede's time; Farmer comments that Bede's principal sources were, however, more contemporary than ancient. This implies that Bede's motives for writing the History lay as much in developing a way of viewing history for his contemporaries as in creating an accurate chronicle of past events leading to his present time. In other words, behind the ecclesiastical survey is an important ecclesiastical subtext.
Bede's subtext is not merely to show the resilience of the Church in England through history, although that element is clearly present. For example, when in Book I Bede discusses the Roman persecutions of Christians, particularly under Diocletian, and the martyrdom of priests and others in Rome and in England, as with St. Alban, he is showing the dramatic spiritual power of Christ to el...