The Times of Bede: Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian

by Patrick Wormald, Stephen Baxter (Editor)

Overview

Written by the late Patrick Wormald, one of the leading authorities on Bede’s life and work over a 30-year period, this book is a collection of studies on Bede and early English Christian society.

• A collection of studies on Bede, the greatest historian of the English Middle Ages, and the early English church.
• Integrates the religious, intellectual, political and social history of the English in their first Christian centuries.
• Looks at how Bede and other writers charted the establishment of a Christian community within a warrior society.
• Features the first map of all known or likely early Christian communities in England.
• Includes plans and illustrations of the finest early Christian church in England at Brixworth.
• An appendix considers Bede’s treatment of St. Hilda, the first great English female saint.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631166559
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	09/22/2006
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.35(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

The author

Before his death in 2004, Patrick Wormald was a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He was previously a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Glasgow, and a Student of Christ Church, Oxford. He lectured widely in Europe, Scandinavia and North America and had an international reputation as an early-medieval scholar secured by many impressive and meticulously researched articles and by his most magisterial achievement, The Making of English Law.

The Editor

Stephen Baxter was one of Patrick Wormald's students, and is a Lecturer in Medieval History at King's College, London.

Table of Contents

Foreword.

Editorial Note by Stephen Baxter.

Acknowledgements.

Abbreviations.

Part I An Early Christian Culture and its Critic.

1 Bede and Benedict Biscop.

2 Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo Saxon Aristocracy.

3 Bede, the Bretwaldas and the origins of the Gens Anglorum.

4 Bede and the conversion of England: the charter evidence.

Part II The Impact of Bede's Critique.

5 Æthelwold and his Continental Counterparts: Contact, Comparison, Contrast.

6 Bede and the 'Church of the English'.

7 How do we know so much about Anglo Saxon Deerhurst?

8 Aristocrats as Abbots: a context for the making of Brixworth.

Appendix: Hilda, Saint and Scholar (614-680).

Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This collection exemplifies the high qualities of scholarship, originality and forceful expression which characterized its lamented author. All serious work on Bede and his age has to reckon with these papers!"
–James Campbell, University of Oxford

"Patrick Wormald’s research, driven for over more than thirty years by the quest to understand and assess Bede, produced work of a profound coherence and consistency. Here, then, is more than a collection of classic papers. From two parts, on Bede as a thinker who didn’t so much reflect as reinflect his world, and on the afterlife of Bede’s critique in later Anglo-Saxon England, is constructed something wondrously balanced and whole: a masterpiece of a book."
–Janet Nelson, Kings College London

Editorial Reviews

"The untimely death of Patrick Wormald in 2004 deprived the scholarly community of a brilliant historian best known for his magisterial study of the development of English law during the Anglo-Saxon period. As the volume under review here clearly shows, Worrnald was also a leading figure in revising our understanding of Bede and his early medieval English cultural milieu." (CHURCH HISTORY, March 2008)

“On display throughout … is Wormald’s considerable intellect and erudition and in the earlier essays in particular an enviable familiarity with Continental scholarship. There are also occasional flashes of the theater that was a Wormald lecture.” (Catholic Historical Review, October 2008)

From the Publisher