02 — The Scholar-Monk
How a monk on the northern edge of the known world came to write with a precision the early medieval West would not see again for centuries. This section treats the two things that made Bede’s scholarship possible — the extraordinary library Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith gathered for Wearmouth-Jarrow, and the disciplined method Bede built upon it — and then turns to Bede the teacher and computist, the master of the monastic school whose textbooks and works on the reckoning of time shaped the education and the calendar of the Latin West.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)
Bede (c. 672–735) almost never left his monastery, and the range and accuracy of his learning have therefore always seemed something of a paradox. The resolution lies in two facts. The first is material: the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, founded by Benedict Biscop and consolidated by Ceolfrith, possessed by Bede’s maturity what was very probably the largest and best library north of the Alps, stocked on repeated journeys to Rome and Gaul. The second is personal and methodological: Bede used that library with a scrupulousness — in naming his sources, distinguishing what he had read from what he had been told, and asking his readers to blame his authorities rather than himself — that anticipates the apparatus of modern scholarship and is genuinely rare for his age. This section sets out both, and then the schoolroom and the computus in which Bede’s learning was passed on and put to use: the science of time, and above all of the date of Easter, on which the unity of the Church’s calendar turned.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Library and the Method | The books Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith brought from Rome and Gaul — the great library of Wearmouth-Jarrow and what Bede actually had to read (Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, Isidore, Pliny, the grammarians, and a little Greek); and Bede’s working method — his care for his sources, his habit of naming his authorities in the margins, and the prefaces in which he asks the reader to blame the sources, not him. |
| Teacher and Computist | Bede the schoolmaster and his textbooks (De orthographia, De arte metrica, De schematibus et tropis, De natura rerum) and his works on the reckoning of time (De temporibus, 703; De temporum ratione, 725); the computus, the science of calculating the date of Easter, and Bede’s championing of the Dionysian/Alexandrian reckoning that had triumphed at the Synod of Whitby (664) — and why the unity of the calendar mattered. |
See Also
- Wearmouth-Jarrow — the twin monastery and the library that stood behind everything in this section
- The Monk from the Age of Seven — Bede’s life within the cloister, the setting of his scholarship
- The Commentaries — the scriptural exegesis in which Bede’s source-method is most fully on display
- Anno Domini and the Computus — the Anno Domini dating and the calendar science the computist works carried forward
- St. Colman of Lindisfarne — the Lindisfarne bishop who lost the Easter case at Whitby that Bede’s computus presupposes
- The Church Calendar — the Paschal reckoning Bede’s computus served
References
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
- Bede. The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione). Trans. Faith Wallis. Translated Texts for Historians 29. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.
- Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
- DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Laistner, M. L. W. “The Library of the Venerable Bede.” In Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson, 237–266. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.