As
someone interested in source criticism, one can only be pleased at the renewed
interest in Bede. Sourcing those texts
is an ongoing process. But while much
has been done in detailing and rebuilding Bede’s sources and library for his
various texts, as well as noting where he was going beyond his sources, it occurred
to me as a matter of curiosity to ask who in Anglo-Saxon England read
Bede. Or to put this another way, who in
Anglo-Saxon England is using Bede as a source.
We
are accustomed to think of Bede as a seminal figure not only in Anglo-Saxon
England, but as a primary author for the whole of the medieval period with
mentions in Biblical commentaries, in the Glossa Ordinaria, in Dante’s
Paradiso, and other references and citations.
His influence on the continent beginning with Boniface and then the
Carolingians and beyond is well established, but Bede among his contemporaries
and own people is less so well established.
These questions three I wanted to explore and answer: who is reading
Bede measured and charted chronologically, what are they reading, and where are
they reading, that is, the what and who both charted geographically to see what
if anything that tells us about reading Bede in Anglo-Saxon England.
Of
course, a careful listener will have already caught out the problems in
addressing these questions, one medieval problem and one modern one. The medieval problem is the question of
survival: both in terms of Bede’s own works as well the survival of potential
readers’ works; too often we simply don’t know what we have lost, and in some
cases what we might yet find, and this
fact impairs any conclusions we might wish to draw. Thus, manuscripts may have disappeared
through just natural decay, lack of care, during raids, wars, or even the
Dissolution of Monasteries or other events that threaten manuscript
survival. So manuscripts of Bede, copies
of Bede’s readers’ works, all may have disappeared without a trace in the
historical record. Or they may never
have existed. We don’t know. We can only see through the glass darkly, and
sometimes not at all.
The modern problem
relates to the nature of source criticism: identifying usage of Bede as a
source is only as good as the source critic, and should that critic not be up
to snuff, that too certainly skews the results, or if a work has not yet been
sourced or studied from a source critical perspective, or even has been done
well but something missed. So any
project of this source depends to a great deal on an ever changing source
critical state of the field in Bedan studies. Thus, even when this project is complete, and
it is still in process, the results can ever only be preliminary: the next
critic may find additional citations, or a new manuscript and text found, or
worst case scenario, that which is lost to us now is lost forever. But, in spite of the “futility” of ever
coming to firm conclusions, I press heroically, or perhaps fatalistically, onward.
The
method is fairly simple and straightforward.
For citations and references to Bede, I consult and use a combination of
my own reading, poring over editions of Bede’s works, articles on Bede from
source critics, and the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici web site and Sources Of
Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, particularly the work of George Brown on Bede for
the latter. Beyond these tools, I
consult manuscript catalogs, chart origin and provenance where those can be
known, so Gneuss’ Handlist, Ker’s catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and
every other manuscript catalog looking not only where the manuscripts are, but also
examine the manuscripts themselves for signs of reader’s use such as glossing
and other tracks past readers left behind for me to follow.
One
of the surprises for me was what Bedean work in ASE is the most read. I have been telling my students for years a
little truism that I learned: while for us moderns the first Bede text we
encounter and the most important is the Historia, that isn’t true for the
medieval period. I tell them that Bede
was better known then as a biblical commentator and it is for his commentaries
that he is best known. This truism I can
no longer maintain. The plain fact of
the matter is that the most quoted and cited and even influential work of
Bede’s in the period is the Historia.
Now, some in my audience might be thinking, Swain, of course, if you’re
just counting citations, the Old English Bede is obviously going to skew the
total. Silly Swain. And of course those thinking that would be
absolutely correct. But even treating
the OE Bede as a unit rather than a large collection of Bede citations, by a
clear margin the Historia Ecclesiastica is the most referred to work from
Bede’s desk by Anglo-Saxon writers.
The
uses to which the Historia is put are also interesting. Some are unexpected: the Historia is used in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, particularly version E as an immediate source, and
to a lesser extent as an immediate historical source in Asser’s Vita Alfredi,
and a few other places beyond the Old English Bede. But the interesting, at least to me, uses are
the number of texts that use sections of the Historia to construct a “saint’s
life” or combine material from the Historia with other material in the
construction of the same. Examples of
this procedure include Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, the Old English homily on the
life of St. Chad, the Old English Martyrology, and similar texts. Often Bede is the chief if not the only
source in England about these figures and so his text becomes the basis for a
sermon or vita with little change. Our
two other readers today will examine two such texts, so I won’t go any further
down this path.
Turning
to manuscript survivals, the Historia survives in almost twice as many
manuscripts as any of Bede’s other works: 21 manuscripts contain all or some
portion of the HE, surviving from dates as early as the mid 8th
century all the way through to the end of the 11th, though the
majority are from the 10th and 11th centuries. The texts whose survival comes closest to
this record are De temporum ratione and the verse Vita Sancti Cuthberti. Both the latter survive in 11 manuscript
copies ranging in date from the end of the 9th century to the
beginning of the 12th. The
Old English translation of the Historia survives in six Anglo-Saxon
manuscripts, so if we add those to the Latin, 27 copies of that one text. The unmistakable conclusion which rather
surprised me given that I’ve taught that Bede is more important as a biblical
commentator is that Bede’s history is in fact if not in perception a far more
important text in Anglo-Saxon England that it has been given credit for.
If
we treat them as a collection, Bede’s Homilies come in the next place as the
most cited and read of Bede’s texts.
Interestingly though, citation of these texts is limited to a few
authors. The chief author is Aelfric who
often throughout Lives, Catholic Homilies, and the so-called Supplemental
homilies will “reckon” into English one of Bede’s homilies or a part of one and
then add some additional material from elsewhere. Some homilies appear cited elsewhere: Bede’s
homily on the Nativity in Book 1, #3 shows up in the first Blickling homily on
the Nativity as well as in the gospel of Ps. Matthew. Without question though, in spite of the
smattering of citations such as the one just sampled, Aelfric is the author who
seems to have read and used the homilies in ASE.
The
homilies on the gospels also only survive in two manuscripts from the
period. Both come from the Benedictine
Reform, the late tenth possibly early 11th centuries and from
Glastonbury and Abingdon. So if we put
together the fact that it is largely Aelfric who uses the homilies in his own
collection, and that the two surviving manuscripts come from Reform centers
where Aethelwold’s name would be important, it suggests that Bede’s homilies
were part of the Reform’s rediscovery of Bede and little read otherwise. From here they spread to be cited by the
contemporaneous Blickling and Vercelli homilists (once each so far as I can
find), the Ev. Ps. Matthew (late 10th), and a few other 11th
century homilies. The only fly in that
ointment is Cynewulf Christ II about whom so little is known in terms of
debated date and provenance: he cites Bede twice, the first being homiliy 2.15,
the second I hope to come back to. But if we say he is ninth century, he at
least knows this homily and another of Bede’s works, whatever his provenance
may have been.
Surprisingly,
given again the above mentioned truism about Bede’s importance to the middle
ages as a Biblical commentator, there is only one author who actually quotes
from or refers to several of Bede’s commentaries: Aelfric of Eynsham. This author refers to the commentaries on
Canticles, Luke, Mark, and if we include the Bede’s works on time and the
temple as Biblical explication, to both of these works as well. Aelfric is in fact the only author to refer
to the commentary on Mark, though several others also refer to the Lucan
commentary, particularly the Vercelli homilist who cites that work more than
three times. Quotations from Luke also
show up in the Old English Exodus poem, the old English Gospel of PS. Matthew,
so whomever that translator may have been, he was not shy about including
references to other material. One
surprising place that seemingly cites the commentary on Luke is a Charter,
Sawyer 742, a gift of land from King Edgar to his wife Aelfthryth in 966. However, this quote illustrates one of the
problems of source criticism that I mentioned above. The phrase in question is
ideo debemus excutere mentis nostre desidiam ut
etiam exteriora nostra dampna per similitudinem non deducantur—therefore ought
we to shake our minds of idleness, so that our exterior stuff does not lead
astray through similarity. It is true
this line does occur in Bede’s commentary on Luke, but it also occurs in Bede’s
source, Gregory the Great’s Homilies on the Gospel on Luke; between Bede and
the charter it is cited by at least one important Carolingian whose works were
present and read in 10th century England, Smaragdus. Thus, the question is, when the charter cites
the line, is it cited from Gregory, Smaragdus, or Bede and do we have any
mechanism to tell? Since the charter
writer did not leave any clues, attributing this citation to Bede is
problematic: nor is this the only such citation often attributed to Bede that
Bede is actually deriving from his own reading.
A related difficulty with
determining readers of Bede’s homilies and commentaries is that they were
anthologized, particulary in the homiletic collection of Peter the Deacon. That Carolingian collection proved to be
extremely popular and long lived. So, for
example, in one of Aelfric’s sermons that depends on Bede, it has been shown by
Smetana that Aelfric there is using the homiletic collection rather than a copy
of Bede’s homilies. But to make matters
even more complex, Joyce Hill has convincingly argued that not all of Aelfric’s
sermons from Bede are solely dependent on the Carolingian collection, but that
Aelfric also knows a copy of the homilies.
So in any particular case of citation of the homilies or the commentaries
of Mark and Luke, somehow, if possible, a methodology should be developed to
differentiate between use of the homiletic anthology and actual knowledge of
Bede’s own writings. The problem is akin
to someone who quotes a lot of Shakespeare, but all the quotations come from
what is included in the Oxford Book of Poetry.
So does our Shakespeare quoter know Shakespeare or should we say instead
that he knows the Oxford Book of Poetry?
The same issue pertains to Peter the Deacon’s collection: when an author
is seemingly citing Bede is that author citing Bede or citing Bede’s work as
included in the collection, and if the latter, is that then a “reader of
Bede”? Good question, and I have no
definite answer.
A related issue occurs especially
with the homilies but also with other works.
Bede, as is well known, often cites previous authorities, like Gregory
the Great for example. So in the example
related a few moments ago with the charter writer citing a line of homily that
is transmitted from Gregory to Bede to Smaragdus, how do we determine if
reading Bede was involved. This issue is
further complicated by the fact that Smaragdus often is reading Bede, but when
he cites Bede citing someone else, he cuts out the middle man: that is to say,
if he is quoting a line that Bede says comes from Gregory, then Smaragdus says
it comes from Gregory even if he is reading Bede to do so. We know this for example because the form of
Smaragdus’ quote matches how it appears in Bede contrasted to the slightly
different forms the quotation will have in Gregory’s actual work. So when Smaragdus or another author makes
Bede a silent intermediary, we must be triply careful in uncovering that fact
and giving correct attribution.
