Bede
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
Bede (also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, or (from Latin) Beda), (ca. 672 or 673 – May 27, 735), was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Wearmouth, today part of Sunderland, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow (see Wearmouth-Jarrow), both in the English county of Durham (now Tyne and Wear). He is well known as an author and scholar, whose best-known work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) gained him the title "The father of English history".
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[change] Name
Bede became known as Venerable Bede (Lat.: Beda Venerabilis) soon after his death, but this was not linked to consideration for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church.
[change] Life
Almost all that is known of Bede's life is contained in a notice added by himself when he was 59 to his Historia (v.24), which states that he was placed in the monastery at Wearmouth at the age of seven, that he became deacon in his nineteenth year, and priest in his thirtieth, remaining a priest for the rest of his life.
[change] Work
His works show that he had at his command all the learning of his time. It was thought that the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow was between 300-500 books, making it one of the largest and most extensive in England.
[change] Historia Ecclesiastica
The most important and best known of his works is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, giving in five books and 400 pages the history of England, ecclesiastical and political, from the time of Caesar to the date of its completion (731).
[change] Other websites
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Books 1-5, L.C. Jane's 1903 Temple Classics translation. From the Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
- Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Continuation of Bede (pdf), at CCEL, edited & translated by A.M. Sellar.
- Bede's World: the museum of early medieval Northumbria at Jarrow
- Bede’s Ecclesiastical History commentary from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume I, 1907–21.
- Catholic Encyclopedia
- The Venerable Bede from In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)
- Bede At Find A Grave
