07 — Sources
The source-critical heart of the collection: an honest reckoning with the documentary basis for everything that can be said of Hilda. Almost the whole of her life descends from a single chapter of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (IV.23), warm but partial and written half a century after her death; the one other near-contemporary monument of her world is the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great, the literary output of her own community.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; abbess of Whitby)
A reference guide to Hilda must be candid that it is, very largely, a reference guide to one chapter of Bede. He is the source of her royal descent, her conversion, her abbacies, her foundation of Whitby, her counsel to kings, the bishops she trained, the visions of her death — and he wrote as a Roman partisan, some fifty years after she died, drawing on the recollections of others. The Whitby Vita Gregorii, composed at Hilda’s own house a generation later, does not narrate her life but shows us the mind and learning of the community she made. These files set out what Bede gives and at what cost, and what the Vita Gregorii adds.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Bede on Hilda | Bede’s HE IV.23 as the principal — for most of her life the only — source; its warmth, its purposes, its silences and partialities; how the historian gathered his information and how an Orthodox reader weighs so singular a witness. |
| The Whitby Life of Gregory | The anonymous Vita Gregorii written at Whitby c. 704–714 — the earliest Life of Gregory the Great, evidence of the learning of Hilda’s community and of the cult of Gregory and of the Northumbrian royal saints there. |
See Also
- Counsellor to Kings and Bishops — the portrait that depends on this single source
- The Nurturing of Learning — the school whose learning the Vita Gregorii attests
- St. Bede the Venerable — the historian himself
- St. Gregory the Dialogist — the subject of Whitby’s great Life
References
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
- Colgrave, Bertram, ed. and trans. The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968.
- Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.