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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.
Synopsis
Written over a 30-year period by the late Patrick Wormald, one of the leading authorities on the Early Middle Ages, this book is a collection of studies on Bede and early English Christian society. Its central concern is the establishment of a Christian community within a warrior society, and the way this was charted, not always sympathetically, by Bede and other writers of his time. A subsidiary theme is the emergence of a self-consciously English Church, which was in turn the foundation of an English state. An appendix considers Bede’s treatment of St. Hilda, the first great English female saint.
The book will be welcomed for its systematic integration of the religious, intellectual, political and social history of the English in their first Christian centuries.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"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)