Vererable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of English People

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, be

ry into which the History fits on one hand, and on the other to declare a very concept of ecclesiasticism itself in England. All of this is by way of saying that a careful reading of the History may result in the reasonable inference that Bede was engaged, by means of his writing, in the formal institutionalization of the Roman Church in Britain; that is, he sought to establish the Roman Church in Britain, not the British Roman Church, which would have been rather different. This is a very important point, and it is the only inference that explains why Book V (and indeed the rest of the work) is organized as it is. The fact that Bede appears to digress in the middle of Book V, after stories of miracles, after stories of a beatific vision, after stories of the investiture of sundry bishops, into a lengthy recitation (i.e., quotation) of writings on the sites of the Birth and the Passion might seem confusing, were it not that he is quoting Irish-English Bishop Adamnan, who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The issue upon which Bede's design appears to have turned is the controversy over the "correct" dating of Easter. Bede's faction (i.e., the Roman Church's faction) won the controversy, and as Farmer notes in the Introducti

Category: Philosophy - V