The Library and the Method

Bede’s learning was made possible by a particular place — the library that Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith assembled at Wearmouth-Jarrow, very probably the largest north of the Alps — and by a method he brought to it that was remarkable for his age: a scrupulous care for his sources, a habit of naming his authorities, and a stated unwillingness to vouch for what he could not verify. This file sets out what books Bede actually had, and how he used them — the working practice that has earned him the title of the first critical scholar of the medieval West.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)

The Books from Rome

The paradox of Bede is that a man who, by his own account, spent his whole life from the age of seven within a single Northumbrian monastery, and who tells us he scarcely ever travelled, commanded a range of patristic and classical learning unequalled in the Latin West of his day (HE 5.24, the autobiographical note; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The resolution of the paradox is institutional. Bede’s abbot and the founder of his house, Benedict Biscop, was a Northumbrian nobleman who made no fewer than five or six journeys to Rome and who returned from them laden not only with relics, vestments, pictures, and the chant-master John the Archcantor of St. Peter’s, but above all with books (Bede, Historia abbatum 4–6, 9; Brown 2009). Bede records in his Lives of the Abbots that Biscop brought back “a great mass of books of every kind” (innumerabilem librorum omnis generis copiam) and that his successor Ceolfrith doubled the library Biscop had begun, so that by the time Bede was writing the two foundations of Wearmouth (St. Peter’s, 674) and Jarrow (St. Paul’s, 681/682) held between them a collection that scholars take to have been the richest in the Anglo-Saxon world and very likely the best north of the Alps (Historia abbatum 9, 11, 15; Laistner 1935; Brown 2009).

The books came chiefly from Rome and from Gaul — Biscop bought a library at Vienne on one return journey — and the traffic was deliberate and sustained over a generation (Historia abbatum 4, 6; DeGregorio 2010, Hill on Bede’s libraries). The single most spectacular surviving witness to the wealth and ambition of this scriptorium is the Codex Amiatinus, one of three complete single-volume Bibles (pandects) that Ceolfrith had made at Wearmouth-Jarrow; he set out in 716 to carry one of them to Rome as a gift to St. Peter, and that copy survives today in Florence as the oldest complete Latin Vulgate in existence (Bruce-Mitchell and others; Brown 2009; Ward 1990). The manufacture of three pandects — requiring, by modern estimate, the hides of well over a thousand calves apiece — is itself evidence of a scriptorium operating on an extraordinary scale, and of a community for which the accurate copying and study of texts was a central labour.

What Bede Actually Had

The size of the library can only be estimated, since no catalogue survives; M. L. W. Laistner’s classic study reconstructed it not from a book-list but from the works Bede demonstrably used, and the resulting picture is of a collection of perhaps two hundred or more titles — modest by later standards, but immense for its time and place (Laistner 1935; Brown 2009). What Bede had, on this reconstruction, was first of all the Latin Fathers in strength. Above all he had the four great Latin Doctors: Jerome, whose Vulgate and biblical commentaries underpin Bede’s own exegesis; Augustine, the most pervasive single influence on his thought; Ambrose; and Gregory the Great, the pope of the English mission whom Bede revered as “our apostle” and whose Moralia in Iob and Homilies he drew on constantly (Laistner 1935; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, Love on Bede and the patristic inheritance). To these he added the encyclopaedic learning of Isidore of Seville, whose Etymologiae and De natura rerum Bede used and, characteristically, sometimes corrected, and a range of lesser patristic and exegetical writers.

Alongside the Fathers stood a body of classical and technical literature. Bede knew Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on which he leaned for his cosmology and his account of tides and the natural world; he had the late-antique grammarians — Donatus, Charisius, and others — whose works lie behind his own textbooks; and he commanded the Christian-Latin poets and the metricians whom he quotes in his treatise on metre (Laistner 1935; Brown 2009; Wallis 1999, introduction). It is worth marking what Bede did not have, since the limits of the library are as telling as its riches. He shows no first-hand knowledge of the great pagan classics in their entirety — no complete Virgil read as Virgil rather than mined for examples, little of Cicero, nothing of the Greek philosophers in the original — and his classical learning is overwhelmingly the Christianized and excerpted classicism of late antiquity, received through grammarians and Fathers rather than from the ancient authors direct (Laistner 1935; Brown 2009). The shape of Bede’s mind was set by this: he was a man of the patristic and biblical inheritance who used the classical tools that inheritance had retained, not a humanist reading antiquity for its own sake. His Greek is the one real further qualification. Bede did acquire some Greek, almost certainly fostered by the school of Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian at Canterbury whose influence reached north, and late in life he used a Greek-and-Latin bilingual manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles to refine his text and his commentary; but his command of the language was limited, and he depended for the Greek Fathers overwhelmingly on Latin translations and on the citations embedded in the Latin Fathers (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010; Laistner 1935). The point matters for any account of Bede as a transmitter of the Eastern tradition: what reached him of the Greek Fathers reached him, for the most part, already in Latin dress.

The Scriptorium as Engine

None of this learning would have been usable without the institution that produced, corrected, and preserved the books: the monastic scriptorium and the discipline of lectio that governed the monk’s day. Bede’s scholarship is inseparable from the Rule under which he lived and from the labour of copying that filled his community’s hours; the Codex Amiatinus and its sister-pandects are the visible monument of that labour, and the accuracy of their Vulgate text — corrected, scholars believe, against good Italian exemplars Biscop and Ceolfrith had brought home — is itself a scholarly achievement (Brown 2009; Ward 1990). Bede ends the Ecclesiastical History by listing his own writings and adding the prayer that he has spent his life “amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily care of singing in church,” always finding it sweet “to learn or to teach or to write” (HE 5.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The library was the engine, but the scriptorium and the choir were the workshop, and Bede never separated the two: his scholarship was an act of the monastic life, not an alternative to it.

The Method: Naming the Authorities

What raises Bede above a merely well-stocked compiler is the way he handled his sources, and here the prefaces to his works are the decisive evidence. Bede was acutely aware that the patristic method he practised — gathering and weaving together the comments of the Fathers on a passage of Scripture — risked passing off the words of others as his own, and he took deliberate steps against it. In the preface to his commentary On the Gospel of Luke, addressed to Bishop Acca of Hexham, Bede explains that he has gathered his exposition “from the works of the venerable Fathers” — naming Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome — and asks that what he has taken from them be credited to them and not to himself (Bede, In Lucae evangelium expositio, preface; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, DeGregorio on Bede’s exegesis). More than this, Bede tells Acca that he has had the names of his sources written in the margins, so that the reader can see at a glance whose comment is being reported.

This habit — the placing of abbreviated source-marks in the margin (AG for Augustine, AM for Ambrose, GR for Gregory, HR or IER for Jerome, and the like) keyed to the passages drawn from each Father — is the heart of the claim that Bede anticipates the modern scholarly apparatus. It is a system of attribution built into the page itself, designed so that a borrowed exegesis cannot silently become Bede’s own, and it is genuinely unusual among early medieval writers, most of whom borrowed without acknowledgement (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, DeGregorio on the commentaries; Ward 1990). The same conscience appears in Bede’s complaint, made in more than one preface, that careless copyists confuse the work, and in his anxious requests that his texts be transcribed faithfully and his source-attributions preserved — an author’s care for the integrity of his own apparatus that is itself a mark of the scholar (Bede, prefaces to the commentaries; Brown 2009). Where a later writer might cite a Father loosely from memory, Bede’s practice is to quote with the name attached and the boundary marked, treating the words of Augustine or Gregory as a deposit to be transmitted intact, not raw material to be absorbed. The marginal sigla did not always survive the hazards of copying — later scribes dropped or garbled them — but Bede’s intention is unambiguous from the prefaces, and where the marks do survive they show a writer scrupulous about the boundary between his authorities and himself. He distinguishes, in effect, between citation and composition, and he wants his reader to be able to draw the same line.

The Preface to the Ecclesiastical History

The same conscience governs Bede’s history-writing, and it is in the preface to the Ecclesiastical History, addressed to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, that his method is most fully and famously stated. There Bede sets out, almost like a modern historian’s note on sources, exactly where his information has come from. For the mission of Gregory and the early Roman material he names Albinus, abbot of Canterbury, as his chief authority and Nothhelm, a London priest, as the man who searched the papal archives in Rome and brought back copies of the letters of Gregory and other popes; for Northumbria, Lindsey, East Anglia, Wessex, and the other kingdoms he names his informants region by region, citing the testimony of “innumerable faithful witnesses” where no written record existed (HE, preface; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). The preface is, in substance, an acknowledgement of sources of a kind almost without parallel in the historiography of the early Middle Ages (Ray, “Bede’s vera lex historiae”; Brown 2009).

The most quoted sentence of that preface is its disarming request to the reader. Bede asks that, if anything in the work should be found other than the truth, the reader “not impute it to me, who, as the true law of history requires, have laboured sincerely to commit to writing such things as I could gather from common report (vera lex historiae), for the instruction of posterity” (HE, preface; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The phrase vera lex historiae — “the true law of history” — has been much discussed: Roger Ray showed that Bede took it from Jerome, where it meant the historian’s licence to report what his sources say without himself vouching for its truth, and that Bede used it precisely to shift responsibility for unverifiable report onto the testimony he had received (Ray, “Bede’s vera lex historiae,” Speculum 55, 1980; Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Brown 2009). Far from a careless disclaimer, it is a considered statement of method: Bede will faithfully transmit what his witnesses tell him, but he asks not to be held personally to the truth of every item where he depends on report rather than on what he has himself read or verified.

Written and Reported

That distinction — between what stands written and what rests on testimony — runs through Bede’s work as a controlling discipline. In the Ecclesiastical History he repeatedly marks the difference, naming the documents he reproduces (the letters of Gregory, the canons of councils, the papal privileges Nothhelm had copied) and, separately, the oral or hagiographical traditions he reports on the authority of named informants (HE, preface; HE 4.19, the miracles of Æthelthryth “as related by those who knew”; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). When he recounts a wonder, he characteristically pins it to a source — “as I have learned from the brethren,” “as Bishop Acca was accustomed to relate,” “as trustworthy men have told me” — rather than asserting it on his own authority, so that the miracle is reported as the testimony of those who attest it (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see Miracles in the History, where this is treated in full). The same scruple governs his quotation: Bede is careful to quote his documents at length and accurately, preferring to give the reader the text of a letter or a canon rather than a paraphrase, so that the evidence can be weighed.

It is this combination — a great library, used with a conscience about attribution, a system of source-marks, an explicit acknowledgement of informants, and a stated distinction between the verified and the merely reported — that has earned Bede the description of the first critical scholar of the medieval West. The judgement should not be overstated: Bede was a man of his age, who believed in the providential shaping of history and recorded wonders his modern readers cannot share, and his “criticism” is not the source-criticism of the nineteenth century (Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Ray 1980; see Bede’s Sources and Reliability). But within the resources and assumptions of his own world, his care for where his knowledge came from, and his honesty about its limits, set him apart, and they are the foundation on which both his history and his commentaries rest.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The preface to King Ceolwulf, naming Albinus and Nothhelm and stating the vera lex historiae; the autobiographical note and list of writings at HE 5.24; the miracles of Æthelthryth at HE 4.19.)
Bede. Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Historia abbatum). Cited by chapter for Benedict Biscop’s journeys to Rome and the books he and Ceolfrith gathered (chs. 4–6, 9, 11, 15).
Bede. In Lucae evangelium expositio (Commentary on Luke). Preface to Bishop Acca, naming Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome and describing the marginal source-marks. In Bedae Venerabilis Opera, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 120.
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. (The reconstruction of Bede’s library from the works he used.)
Ray, Roger. “Bede’s Vera Lex Historiae.” Speculum 55, no. 1 (1980): 1–21. (The Jeromian source and meaning of the phrase in the HE preface.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Chapters by Joyce Hill on Bede’s libraries, Rosalind Love on the patristic inheritance, and Scott DeGregorio on the biblical commentaries.)
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.
Wallis, Faith. Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Translated Texts for Historians 29. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. (Introduction, on Bede’s classical and technical sources.)