05 — Hagiography and History

Bede was a hagiographer as well as a historian, and the two vocations met in him under a single discipline: even when writing saints’ Lives and recording wonders, he named his witnesses and distinguished what he found written from what he had on testimony. This section treats the prose and verse Lives of Cuthbert — and Bede’s careful, purposeful reworking of the earlier Anonymous Life of Lindisfarne — together with his handling of the miraculous in the Ecclesiastical History, where his miracles are pinned to the authorities he names. Throughout, the wonders are received per METHODOLOGY §3.5: as what Bede attests on the authority he gives, never adjudicated here as bare historical fact.

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

The two files in this section examine the meeting-point of Bede’s hagiography and his history. The first treats his three accounts of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne — the metrical Life, the prose Life, and the chapters of the Ecclesiastical History — and above all what Bede did with the Anonymous Life written by a monk of Lindisfarne before him: how he smoothed the Latin, reorganized the narrative for monastic reading and liturgical use, added fresh oral testimony from named witnesses, softened or removed some local detail, and gave the whole an explicit didactic purpose. The prose preface to Bishop Eadfrith, in which Bede names the men from whom he had his information, is a notable instance of his source-care surviving even into the genre least disposed to demand it.

The second file surveys how Bede handles the miraculous in the Ecclesiastical History — the historian and the holy. It traces the kinds of wonder he records: healing miracles, the relics of Oswald and the healing earth, the incorrupt and healing relics of Cuthbert, Caedmon’s miraculous gift of poetry, the miracles of Germanus taken from Constantius, and above all the visions of the world to come — the great vision of Dryhthelm and the otherworld journeys of Book 5. The thread through all of them is Bede’s habit of attribution: he tells his reader where he learned a thing, and that habit is what sets his History apart from the freer hagiography of his age.

Together these files make visible the discipline that runs through the whole collection: edification undertaken by a man who could not help being careful about his sources, with the miraculous reported soberly and pinned to its witnesses, in the key an Orthodox reader will recognize.

Files in This Section

File	Description
The Lives of Cuthbert	Bede’s metrical Life (c. 705–716) and prose Life (c. 721) of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and his purposeful reworking of the earlier Anonymous Life: the smoothing of the Latin, the reorganization for monastic and liturgical use, the named witnesses of the prose preface (Herefrith and the rest), the softening of local detail, the otters of Inner Farne, the incorrupt body and the elevation of 698; and what hagiography is — edification, not modern biography — held against Bede’s unusual care for testimony.
Miracles in the History	How Bede handles the miraculous in the Ecclesiastical History, pinned to his sources: healing miracles, the relics and healing earth of Oswald (HE 3.9–13), the relics of Cuthbert (HE 4.30–32), Caedmon’s gift of poetry (HE 4.24), the miracles of Germanus from Constantius (HE 1.17–21), and the otherworld visions — Dryhthelm (HE 5.12) and the visions of Book 5. Bede’s restraint, his chains of testimony, and the providential purpose the miraculous serves; received per §3.5 as what Bede attests.

See Also

• The Historia Ecclesiastica — the History itself, its structure and providential purpose, within which the miracles function
• Bede’s Sources and Reliability — the documentary and oral sources and the naming-of-witnesses method this section sees applied to hagiography
• The Monk from the Age of Seven — Bede’s monastic formation at Wearmouth-Jarrow, the world from which he wrote
• The World Chronicle and Eschatology — Bede’s restrained eschatology, the frame for the otherworld visions
• Relics at Durham — incorrupt relics in the Northumbrian tradition, Cuthbert’s and Bede’s
• St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne — the saint whose Lives Bede wrote, treated in full in his own collection
• St. Aidan of Lindisfarne — the Irish apostle of Northumbria among the holy men of Bede’s History
• Eschatology — the Orthodox witness to the soul after death, with which the Dryhthelm vision is read
• The Church Fathers — the patristic and desert-monastic tradition behind Bede’s hagiography
• Bede the Venerable: Reference Guide — the master index for this collection

References

• Bede. Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
• 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.
• Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989. (Including Stancliffe, “Cuthbert and the Polarity Between Pastor and Solitary,” and Berschin, “Opus deliberatum ac perfectum.”)
• McCready, William D. Miracles and the Venerable Bede. Studies and Texts 118. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1994.
• Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.
• Ward, Benedicta. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
• Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
• DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.