Description
Book SynopsisWritten 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.
Trade Review"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)
Table of ContentsForeword.
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.
