This second volume completes our survey of the reception of Bede's writings in Anglo-Saxon England. Reading Bede through the works of his immediate followers makes us aware of how useful he was to them, providing the tools they needed to carry on, most prominently, recording history and spreading the faith through preaching. With its entries on the HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM and the two chronicles that are part of DE TEMPORIBUS and DE TEMPORUM RATIONE, volume one focused on the first topic. With those on HOMILIES and on the EXTRACTS from the COMMENTARIES on Mark and Luke, which served the same purpose, volume two is dominated by the latter. There is much else in both, but in these areas, geography, hagiography, metrics, orthography, rhetoric, and science, Bede primarily taught.

Bede's theology is only occasionally a focus of the entries in this volume, in part because he chose not to accentuate doctrinal differences. This is not to say he avoided these issues when they arose. As Faith Wallis (2013) and Peter Darby (2012) have demonstrated, it appears to have been his interest in combatting eschatological speculation around the year 700 that led to both his De temporibus and the COMMENTARIUS IN APOCALYPSIM. Similarly, his unprecedented commentaries on the tabernacle and the temple demonstrate the degree to which Bede pursued topics that caught his interest. Here the study of Conor O’Brien (2015) breaks new ground in our understanding of Bede's developing thought. Passing over much other scholarship, we would finally note the work of Benedicta Ward (1995) and Sarah Foot (2014) on Bede's understanding of prayer, particularly as it applied to female monastic communities. There is much more to be learned in these areas; and yet, for the moment, it appears that Bede stood out from his contemporaries in having the time and inclination to read deeply in the Fathers and engage with their work in order to produce original commentaries on the Bible.

So we return to Bede the preacher to conclude this introduction.

Although Bede is now known primarily as an historian, he considered himself foremost a biblical exegete, and most of his works are exegetical. He emphasized this role in the bio-bibliographic note at the end of the HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM, which suggests that there were two overlapping phases in his study of the Bible. The first covered his entire intellectual and spiritual life, beginning when, at the age of seven, he was given to the abbey of Monkwearmouth (ed. Lapidge 2010 2.478-80; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969 p 567):

As this passage makes clear, his study of and meditation on scripture was a life-long occupation, fit in around his other duties in the monastery, observing the monastic rule, learning, teaching, and writing.

After describing his ordinations as a deacon and a priest at the ages of nineteen and thirty, Bede focused more specifically on his biblical commentaries: “ex quo tempore accepti presbyteratus usque ad annum aetatis meae LVIIII haec in scripturam sanctam meae meorumque necessitati ex opusculis uenerabilium patrum breuiter adnotare, siue etiam ad formam sensus et interpretationis eorum superadicere curaui” (ed. Lapidge 2010 2.480; “from the time I became a priest until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy Scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation,” trans.

The relationship of Bede's letters to his other works is more complex than his statement in HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM V.xxiv (ed. Lapidge 2010 2.482) that he placed five in a LIBER EPISTOLARUM suggests. While we could have limited this section to these five and to two more, the EPISTOLA AD ALBINUM and the EPISTOLA AD ECGBERCTUM, that also circulated independently, to do so would have been to overlook what even they indicate about the different ways that Bede used this genre. Instead we discuss these seven letters along with fourteen additional texts that, while serving as prefaces to other works and so considered primarily as such in these fascicles on Bede, either began as letters or follow epistolary conventions; we exclude, however, prefaces without these conventions. We also include two letters, the EPISTOLA AD NAITONUM (Nechtan mac Derile) and the EPISTOLA AD GREGORIUM PAPAM, which Bede wrote for successive abbots, CEOLFRITH and HWÆTBERHT, and then included in other works, the Historia ecclesiastica and the HISTORIA ABBATUM. As a group these letters reveal a surprising fluidity in Bede's manipulation of generic conventions. Moreover, on a practical level, considering them together helps us not only to assess the immediate reception of these texts but also to date much of Bede's corpus.

The survival of the original letter, datable to 704/5, from WEALDHERE, bishop of London, to BEORHTWALD, archbishop of Canterbury, provides a dramatic reminder that sending and receiving epistolae would have been a normal (and yet not constantly interrupting) part of Bede's life. From his reading, he would have understood that this experience was part of a much older practice, which we may recall here with a few examples that appear to have been significant to him. Both his COLLECTIO EX OPUSCULIS AUGUSTINI IN EPISTULAS PAULI and his COMMENTARIUS IN EPISTOLAS SEPTEM CATHOLICAS attest to the importance he placed on the New Testament Epistles. Indeed, the latter work begins with a comment about the Epistle of James that establishes a letter's ability to stand in for its author: “therefore, because he had been ordained an apostle for the circumcised, he took care both to teach those present from among the circumcised by speaking to them and also to encourage, instruct, rebuke, and correct the absent by letter” (trans. Hurst 1985 p 7).

Since Bede's Martyrologium is related to several of his other works, particularly the KALENDARIUM AD USUM COMPUTANDI, which he used to teach computus (see EDUCATIONAL WORKS), but also his HISTORIES and his SAINTS’ LIVES, it is treated here in its own section.

According to Jacques Dubois (1978 p 13), the word “martyrologium” was first used in the Latin West by Bede in HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM V.xxiv (ed. Lapidge 2010 2.484) when he applied it to his own work. It was, however, a term that he would have both heard and spoken throughout his life, especially if the text that influenced his own work, the MARTYROLOGIUM HIERONYMIANUM, was indeed brought to Monkwearmouth in 679 by John the Arch-Chanter, as both Padraig O Riain (1993 p 1 and 2002 pp 338-39) and Michael Lapidge (2005b p 45) have argued. Bede would have been six or seven at this time, and might well have also just arrived, if in humbler fashion, at the monastery. Even if not instructed directly by this new teacher, he would have been influenced by the changes to the liturgy that John would have introduced. It also seems likely that the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, a document that combined the local celebrations of saints throughout the Christian world and so a source of geographical and historical information, would have fascinated the young Bede. His own interest in local saints, although not martyrs, is recorded, for example, in his metrical VITA CUTHBERTI and his hymn to Athelthryth, ALMA DEUS TRINITAS QUAE SAECULA CUNCTA GUBERNAS. Yet Bede's thoughts moved well beyond Northumbria as he sought to understand God's plan as it unfolded throughout the world and time. Like the opening of Genesis and the Acts of the Apostles, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum would have been a primary source for plotting the spread of the faith. Unlike Genesis or Acts, however, it had, as a historical document, a serious defect: as a list of places and names associated with particular days of the year, it lacked the narrative details necessary to keep the accounts of the separate martyrdoms distinct. Bede solved this problem by creating a new kind of work, the historical martyrology, providing identifying material for each saint he included.

Although the homilies in the work that Bede referred to in HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM V.xxiv as “omeliarum euangelii libros II” (ed. Lapidge 2010 2.482; “homilies on the Gospel: two books,” trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969 p 569) have been identified (Morin 1913), edited (CCSL 122), and translated (Martin and Hurst 1991), their popularity has, for three reason, left many basic questions about their circulation unanswered. First, Bede's careful fashioning of his collection was quickly obscured by PAUL THE DEACON's dismemberment of it for his own widely-influential HOMILIARY, commissioned by CHARLEMAGNE before he became emperor; see Reginald Grégoire (1980 p 422). This work contains 36 sermons from Bede's HOMILIARY (Grégoire pp 427-78; HOMILY I.4 appears twice, in I, 12 and II, 76, Grégoire pp 432 and 467). Second, similar passages from Bede's other works – the COMMENTARIUS IN MARCUM, the COMMENTARIUS IN LUCAM and, in a few cases, the Historia ecclesiastica itself – readily adapted to the same purposes of preaching and spiritual reading were extracted and disseminated alongside of his actual homilies. Paul the Deacon included 22 such passages (two are used together in II, 75, Grégoire pp 466-67), all taken from the Commentaries on Mark and Luke (Grégoire pp 427-78), and later English versions of his Homiliary contain around 40 more. Finally, following in Bede's footsteps, Carolingian writers, especially HAYMO OF AUXERRE, SMARAGDUS, and HEIRIC OF AUXERRE, used both his works and his main sources, AUGUSTINE and GREGORY THE GREAT, in writing sermons similar to Bede’s. The result is that while we know in this case as in most others what Bede wrote, establishing the form in which his words were read or heard by later Anglo-Saxons is often still unclear.

To respond to this problem, we have separated this section on the homilies, which consists of an entry on the collection as a whole, and individual ones on each homily, from Bede's other exegetical works among which he included his “two books” in the list in the Historia ecclesiastica, where they follow the Commentarius in Lucam and precede the COLLECTIO EX OPUSCULIS AUGUSTINI IN EPISTULAS PAULI.

Three items in the list of works at the end of HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM establish that Bede wrote sets of short summaries, which he called capitula lectionum and which he used to divide particular books of the Bible. In investigating these summaries, Paul Meyvaert (1995) also noted that since those for the Pauline Epistles had been connected to a set of prologues to the same letters, Bede must have been their author as well, even though he did not include them in his list of his works. Because Meyvaert's study is essential for understanding both these chapter divisions and prologues and because the works themselves are found in similar sources, we will consider both in this section, beginning with the capitula lectionum. Most of the information that we present here derives from Meyvaert's study.

The first list of capitula lectionum in the Historia ecclesiastica, which is accurate even though it is a scribal addition, appears between the references to the COMMENTARIUS IN CANTICA CANTICORUM and to the COMMENTARIUS IN EZRAM ET NEEMIAM. It reads (ed. Lapidge 2010 2.480; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969 p 569),

The second, which is authorial apart from its last seven words, appears at the end of the list of works on the Old Testament (ed. 2.482; trans. p 569, except for the last seven words):