The Venerable Bede dominates the historiography of early medieval England. His retrospective historical narrative, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, remains the primary text used to investigate the English adoption of Christianity during the late sixth and seventh centuries. Recently, scholars have begun to explore Bede’s political biases and layered rhetorical language, namely, his use of biblical and classical tropes in his accounts of early English paganism and his concerns for contemporary ecclesiastical reform, approaches that have challenged the reliability of Bede’s historical accounts of kingship in the EH. reveals a new model of conversion that Bede used to narrate the history of the English Church and changes the way we approach Bede’s textual evidence. I have chosen to examine how Bede deliberately crafted his early English kings into catechumens who received religious instruction and pre-baptismal ceremonies within the liturgical framework of a Roman Easter. His focus on educational and ritualized catechesis in royal conversions reveals Bede’s preoccupations with his contemporary Church and, specifically, the Easter controversy. Viewing the past through Pascha-tinted glasses, Bede constructed an idealized catechumenate for his kings to ultimately emphasize the reform of his contemporary audience and the importance of the correct date of the Easter liturgy. To suit Bede’s larger didactic purposes, the rulers of the EH, like Æthelberht, Edwin, Peada, and Cædwalla, were not only converts, but properly catechized kings.

Originally a Greek word for oral instruction, catechesis was a process consisting of both education and ritual undertaken by would-be Christians in the early Church. This institutionalized process physically and spiritually prepared adult candidates for the reception of the Holy Spirit at baptism and the beginning of their new lives as members of the Christian community. The specific demands of the catechumenate varied regionally across the western and eastern Empire but followed a general pattern of two stages: first, after basic instruction in the tenets of the faith, initiates were made catechumens through a formalized, public entrance rite during which they abandoned former pagan practices, agreed to live a Christian life, and received salt on their tongue and the sign of the cross on their forehead.