Bede Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A monk, teacher, historian, and biblical interpreter usually called “the Venerable,” Saint Bede was the most influential scholar from Anglo-Saxon England. At the age of seven, Bede was given as an oblate (child dedicated to religious life) to the monastery of Wearmouth, newly founded by Benedict Biscop. When Jarrow was founded in 682, Bede was transferred to this abbey and to Ceolfrith, its abbot. Bede was ordained a deacon at age 19 and a priest at 30. He never traveled beyond Northumbria (northeast England) and spent the remainder of his life at Jarrow reading, writing, teaching, and explicating Scripture.

Bede was a prolific writer whose interests and expertise were wide-ranging. He wrote treatises on grammar, poetry, computation, and natural phenomena (for example, On Orthography, On Metrical Art, On Time, On the Nature of Things). Each of these works survives in many manuscript copies, suggesting the important role they played in the medieval liberal arts curriculum. Bede was also well known as an hagiographer (a biographer of saints’s lives), composing works on Saints Felix and Cuthbert as well as revising Jerome’s Martyrology. Yet Bede was perhaps most renowned in the medieval period for his commentaries on biblical books, which were based largely on the prior interpretive work of Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great. Bede composed commentaries on the Old Testament books of Genesis, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Ezra, Nehemiah, Isaiah, the 12 Minor Prophets, and Daniel. In the New Testament he commented formally on the Gospels of Mark and Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, the Catholic Epistles (James; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2 and 3 John; and Jude), and the Apocalypse (Revelation).

Bede is best known as a historian, and is sometimes described as the “Father of English History.” His Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, remains one of the great works of medieval historiography and the single most important source for our understanding of the religious history of early England. The Ecclesiastical History is also particularly noteworthy because it introduces anno Domini (abbreviated a.d., meaning “in the year of the Lord”) as a way of dating events in the Christian era.

We know from the eyewitness account of one of his devoted students (the Letter of Cuthbert on the Death of Bede) that Bede continued to teach, write, and interpret Scripture until the end of his life. Cuthbert’s letter to Cuthwin, another of Bede’s disciples, relates that their teacher was producing an Old English translation of the Gospel of John when he died on May 26, 735. Bede was buried at Jarrow, the place of his death, but in the 11th century his relics (bones) were moved to Durham, where a conspicuous tomb in the cathedral still commemorates him. Within a century after his death Bede was honored with the title “Venerable,” and in 1899 Pope Leo XIII declared him a “Doctor of the Church” (a title given since the medieval period to certain Christian theologians of outstanding merit and remarkable saintliness). Bede’s feast day is celebrated on May 25 (formerly May 27).

Bibliography :

Wormald, Patrick. The Times of Bede: Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian. Edited by Stephen Baxter. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006;
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1990.

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