[In the following excerpt, Brown examines stylistic differences among the four different genres in which Bede composed: homilies, hagiography, poems, and letters.]

These popular medieval genres, once dismissed as dull or derivative, have peculiar qualities that have elicited a good deal of interest and study in recent years. But, despite Bede's important contributions and fame in each of these categories, his own creations have received little theological, historical, or literary attention. Bede's writing was often praised in his age and is esteemed in ours for its clarity, cleanness, straightforwardness, and force.¹ Yet there has not yet been any comprehensive investigation into the sources of his style or any extensive study of the style itself.² Similarly, the other literary qualities the work possess have with few exceptions only been alluded to. At present relatively few students learn and become competent in Latin and particularly in postclassical Latin, so the laborers in this fruitful vineyard are scarce. Still, now that we have better editions of Bede, we may hope the literary neglect of his work, so immensely popular and influential in the early Middle Ages, will be remedied by dedicated and intelligent scholars.

The Homilies

"Homilies on the Gospel: two books" (HE V. 24, pp. 568-69). For Bede, preaching as a form of teaching the meaning of Scripture, correct theological understanding, and moral rectitude had a special, even sacramental, significance. According to his view, preachers are the successors of the prophets and apostles.³ Bede considered preaching the primary function of a priest: "spiritual pastors are especially ordained for this, that they preach the mysteries of the word of God, and the wonders that they have learned in the Scriptures they should display to their hearers to be wondered at" (I.7, CCSL 122, p. 49, 11. 100-4; see also p. 281). As a priest Bede took that function seriously indeed, as his collection of sermons on the Gospels, renowned and used widely throughout the Middle Ages, demonstrates. Many more sermons were attributed to Bede over the course of the Middle Ages than he authored. Further, many sermons were made by simply excerpting sections from his commentaries, especially on Mark and Luke, and assigning them to the Sundays when the gospel texts occur in the liturgy. Finally, the homilies that were his were transferred to different days to accommodate them to the later liturgy. The fact is, Bede composed fifty homilies, in two books of twenty-five each, ordered in the sequence of major feasts and Sundays of the liturgical year according to the Romano-Neapolitan use.⁴ Since they are designed for general use (except for one that commemorates Benedict Biscop (Homelia I. 13, CCSL 122, pp. 88-94), they provide few personal or local details about Bede and his immediate world; but they are clear indicators of Bede's religious attitudes and mature artistry. Although individual pieces may have come from an earlier period, he most likely assembled the collection between 730 and 735.

Bede's method of preaching is not greatly different from his exegetical procedure; that is, he takes the assigned gospel text for the day's feast and probingly comments on its verses, extracting its meanings, for the edification of the attentive Christian. It is a meditative process of rumination, savoring the spiritual content.⁵ Since his sermons are essentially reflective, with the purpose of meditation on the divine mysteries, interior compunction, and quiet attainment of virtue, they differ from the public sermons of the Fathers. As usual he borrows pertinent parts from their works,⁶ but he transforms them all into his monastic modality. His homilies do not display the rhetorical and oratorical flights of Ambrose's sermons to his Milanese church. They do not exhibit the pyrotechnics and rhetorical verve of Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, preached to a noisy African congregation. They do not even directly resemble the papal sermons of Gregory the Great, though Gregory's attitudes and spirituality Bede greatly admired and imitated. They do posses their own splendid qualities of clarity, sincerity, and sobriety; they are also inventive. They remind one of the complex simplicity of Gregorian chant, in contrast to the bravura of a polyphonic orchestrated chorale.

Granted that Bede's homilies resemble the commentaries in general tone and technique, within the limits set for them they show a considerable range of artful diversity.⁷ Sermons for the great high feast days of joy—Christmas, Easter, Pentecost—display more overall shape, structural symmetry, figures of speech, cadenced endings, liturgical formulae, and a higher style. Homilies for vigils, Advent, and Lent display a simpler mode, and a more verse-by-verse approach.

Even for the more austere occasions, however, there is no lack of artistry. Take, for a random example, homily II. 14 for Rogation Days (or Greater Litanies), In litaniis maioribus (pp. 273-79). The Gospel for the day is Luke 11:9-13, in which Jesus says:

I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

After introducing the general intention of the text, Bede explains that "asking" refers to our praying, "seeking" describes right living, and "knocking" means our persevering. He develops the semantic fields of asking, seeking, and knocking for thirty lines. Then with a series of ipselnos phrases, he contrasts the healing power of the Lord with our diseased condition (ll. 46-64). Next he turns to the reliability of God's response to those "calling upon him in truth" (Ps. 144:18): "They call upon the Lord in truth who say in their praying what they do not contradict in their living" (ll. 71-73). (Surely that phrasing is worthy of Augustine.) He moves from the concept of those seeking the Lord in truth to their opposites, those who seek badly (James 4:3; p. 274, ll. 88-89). He succinctly describes the four types of those seeking badly with a phrase beginning male petunt followed by a slightly but pleasingly varied clause (qui 89, qui 97, quia 104, et illi qui 107), all neatly turned to exhortation and giving the section closure: "It is true that all these kinds of seekers in so far as they seek badly (male petunt) will not merit to receive; let us strive, beloved, to seek well and to be worthy of obtaining what we seek" (p. 275, ll. 123-25). He proceeds to the next verses in Luke (11-12): At the literal level he stresses the comparison between an earthly father and the heavenly Father, emphasizing the sublimer qualities of the latter. Then he takes up the figural meanings (iuxta typican intelligentiam, 149) of bread (charity, as the principal spiritual food), of fish in the water (faith in the element of God and surrounded by the pressures of adverse surroundings), and of the egg (hope for the future). These are the goods we are to ask for of the Father (186). God will not give us hardness of heart (stone), allow the poison of infidelity (serpent), or encourage back-sliding (the sting in the scorpion's rear). Bede concludes the homily by identifying the "good spirit" given by God in verse 13 with the Holy Spirit who comes with the seven gifts prophesied by Isaiah (11:2-3). The sermon ends on a confident note of encouragement and promise (ll. 258-69). The homily is not elaborately rhetorical, but it does use a number of tropes and figures in a quietly effective way; it is not structured like a classical oration but it does move forward effectively and cumulatively to a strong conclusion; it does not move the emotions wildly, but it exhorts warmly; it pleases.

Hagiography

"Also the histories of the saints: a book on the life and passion of St. Felix the confessor, which I put into prose from the metrical version of Paulinus; a book on the life and passion of St. Anastasius which was badly translated from the Greek by some ignorant person, which I have corrected as best I could, to clarify the meaning. I have also described the life of the holy father Cuthbert, monk and bishop, first in heroic verse and then in prose" (HE V.24, pp. 568-71.)

Bede composed these pieces with the conviction shared by all Christians, that God has conferred virtues and superior gifts on certain men and women who have responded courageously to his special call. With Augustine, Bede believed that their lives were signs of the wonderful rule and love God exercised in his world. The miracles they performed in life and after death were revelations of God's power and his intervention in history. God's justice, blessing the good through the saint and punishing the wicked who have oppressed him or her, is manifest in a fallen world in which injustice and suffering are the usual human experience.

Bede also understood well and carefully incorporated the literary conventions that had been established traditionally for the description of those saints' lives.⁸ In this genre, the saint's career had to conform to accepted essential patterns and be characterized by a set of standard deeds that served as credentials and proof of divinely inspired life. Moral qualities, not individual characteristics, were paramount.

The story could be expressed in prose or poetry, or transferred from prose into poetry or vice versa. Bede exercised his talents in both forms. While discussing Aldhelm's works he calls the dual format opus geminatum (HE V.18).⁹ It represents a development of the classical training program of conversio, paraphrase, an exercise of turning prose into poetry and vice versa. Prudentius, Juvencus, Caelius Sedulius, Arator, and Venantius Fortunatus developed the practice in Christian Latin literature. Although Aldhelm's prose version of De virginitate is more difficult than his poetic rendition, Bede and Alcuin used prose to provide accessibility and clarity, poetry to provide artifice and grandeur. A straightforward prose account could be read aloud to the community and be more or less understood at a first reading. It served to edify the simple as well as the learned. A simple style, with the use of direct quotation and unobtrusive rhetoric, was the norm. But a higher style, in poetic form, was used as panegyric for the saint.

For the Vita Felicis Bede paraphrased in chaste prose the ornate poetic version of the life and miracles of the third-century saint, Felix of Nola.¹⁰ Writing quite early in his career, probably before 709, Bede explains what he has done to his source, the series of panegyrics by Paulinus of Nola (353-431) celebrating the Natalicia (that is, the birthday into heaven, 14 January) of Felix: "The most felicitous triumph of blessed Felix, which he merited with God's help in the Campanian city of Nola, the bishop Paulinus of that same city has described most beautifully and fully in hexameter verses. Because they are fitting for those versed in metrics rather than for simple readers, for the benefit of the many it has pleased me to elucidate the account with plainer words and to imitate the industry of the author who translated the martyrdom of blessed Cassian from the metrical work of Prudentius into common and suitable speech" (PL 94.789B).

Comparing Bede's clean, short, easily readable prose version with the elaborately florid poetic panegyrics of Paulinus is very instructive.¹¹ Although Bede picks up some of Paulinus's wordplay, especially at the beginning and end on the name Felix, the relatively simple structure, short sentences, uncomplicated syntax, and prosaic vocabulary of his text make it suitable for reading aloud to the monks in chapter or refectory.¹²

Why did Bede take the trouble to rewrite a life of this particular southern Italian saint? First, the cult of Saint Felix is part of the southern Italian influence on the Anglo-Saxon liturgy, much of it under the aegis of Hadrian when he became prior of Saint Peter's (later, Saint Augustine's) at Canterbury.¹³ Other evidence of this influence includes Bede's ordering his homilies according to the Roman-Neapolitan tradition, the southern Italian features of books produced in the Wearmouth-Jarrow scriptorium, particularly its Bibles (the pandects), and the Bedan testimonies to the cultural influences of Theodore and Hadrian in the Ecclesiastical History. Second, as with his educational tracts and his exegetical commentaries, Bede is filling another gap in the Northumbrian Christian cultural void. Finally, this little life, a successful exercise in transfer from poetry to prose, is a charming and entertaining narrative, with its tale of Felix's using physical and verbal strategems to elude the pursuing Romans, of stolen cattle finding their way home to a grieving old man by the intervention of Felix, of uncooperative tenants refusing to move their shabby dwellings and belongings from the immediate vicinity of Paulinus's elegant chapel for Felix.

Bede reworked a badly written life and passion of Saint Anastasius, the Persian monk martyred in 628 by Chosroes II. His relics were honored in Rome, and his cult was probably brought to England by Theodore and Hadrian (again that southern Italian connection). Until recently, Bede's version of the life of Saint Anastasius was considered lost. Now it seems that we possess not only the version "badly translated from the Greek by some ignorant person" but perhaps also Bede's own revision of it.¹⁴ We have editions of the original Greek version of Anastasius's life and martyrdom. The slavish and awkward Latin translation, which Bede justifiably but rather peevishly criticizes (Bede was a man of standards), has come down to us in a single tenth-century manuscript witness, MS F.III.16 of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin, from the monastery of Bobbio. Most remarkably, according to the preliminary but painstaking analysis by Carmela Franklin and Paul Meyvaert, the version of BHL 408 may very likely be Bede's: the careful revision with respect for the integrity of the text, the aim to make sense of everything in the original, and the clean and orderly prose, all suggest Bede's work. On the other hand, the manuscript tradition does not attribute BHL 408 to Bede, and there are a few minor discrepancies between the wording of his Chronicle and that of BHL 408. Since his version was only a correction and not a total recasting of the life and passion of Saint Anastasius, Bede may not have claimed or been assigned authorship; moreover, the discrepancies between the life and chronicle entry are minor enough to be argued away.¹⁵ Still, only more research can lead to a firmer decision about the identity of the reviser.

Bede's most important hagiographic writing is an opus geminatum on the life of Northumbria's great ascetic, Saint Cuthbert (ca. 634-87), successively monk, recluse, and bishop of Lindisfarne. Both Bede's versions represent a thorough reworking of an earlier (between 699 and 705) anonymous prose life by a brother or "brothers of the church of Lindisfarne" (HE prologue, pp. 6-7). The anonymous life is not without its virtues; as a matter of fact, some eminent Bedan admirers— Plummer, Colgrave, Levison, Jones—have preferred it in some major ways to his versions.¹⁶ Despite its wholesale borrowings from the Epistola Victorii Aquitani ad Hilarium, Athanasius's Vita Antonii, Sulpicius Severus's Vita sancti Martini, and the Actus Silvestri in the first sections, and despite its obvious use of motifs from hagiographic lore, specifically Celtic, the four books of the anonymous vita present a fairly detailed but quick-moving narrative of Cuthbert's life.¹⁷ It possesses simplicity and spriteliness; its strained attempts to relate the saint's actions to those of prominent types in the Bible are winsome. Indeed, its unsophisticated freshness and spareness does contrast both with Bede's artifical and learned poetic panegyric and with his carefully structured, stylistically superior, and generically more suitable prose account. The criticism directed against Bede's versions seems to stem from a misunderstanding of medieval literary genre and Bede's objective for these works. The metrical version represents the same kind of literary exercise that Juvencus and Sedulius performed on the Gospels by transforming the humble prose account into highly stylized hexameter verse, the same kind of artistic heightening that hymnists did for the liturgy, and that Christian men of letters such as Augustine sanctioned as a means of glorifying God.¹⁸ The prose version, on the other hand, served another purpose. Bede's words in the preface to Bishop Eadfrith and the congregation of monks at Lindisfarne clearly intimate that he has been commissioned by them to write an official life of the recent saint whose fame and cult, no longer only familiarly local, had become widespread. As the best writer around, he accepted the task of writing the life and miracles of the saint in a form acceptable for lectio divina, for perusing not only in private devotion but also for annual public reading on the feast of the saint. He therefore took the anonymous Lindisfarne life as the most reliable textual history of Cuthbert's life and added to that his own findings from witnesses, particularly Herefrith. In order to improve the style of his source, he completely rewrote the life in his own lucid fashion, rearranging the sequence of events, smoothing transitions, adding quotations and augmenting plot to form a continuous narrative. By drawing out the spiritual and moral lessons to be derived from hagiographic reading, he observed the requirements of the genre. As J. F. Webb points out, "His main aim was not historical accuracy but imaginative truth within the framework of a conventional literary form, the saint's life."¹⁹

Bede wrote the metrical version of 979 competent hexameter lines between 705 and 716, according to the reference to Osred's reign in verses 552-55.²⁰ In the dedicatory preface Bede tells the priest John that he was unable to include all Cuthbert's wondrous deeds because new ones were daily being done through his relics and old ones were newly being brought to light. He then adds the striking comment: "One of those wondrous deeds I myself experienced by a guidance [or: curing] of the tongue (per linguae curationem), as I have already told you, while I was singing his miracles" (Vita Cuthberti, ed. Jaager, p. 57, ll. 17-19). Whether this means that Bede received direction and guidance through Cuthbert's inspiration as a saintly muse or whether he was cured of some lingual affliction is unclear because the Latin bears both meanings, "administration, attention, treatment, guidance," or "cure, healing," but modern critics favor the former.²¹

As the apparatus criticus of Jaager's edition makes clear, Bede's metrical version owes very little to the wording of the anonymous life, but it does remain closer to the order and arrangment of that source than does the prose version. Bede includes all miracles of the anonymous life except those only summarily mentioned without detail. And Bede adds a dozen chapters' worth of material.²² But his poetic version provides less historical detail than the anonymous and certainly less than his prose version; in the former he placed greater emphasis on Cuthbert's wonders. Stylistically the poem follows the late antique classical tradition of Juvencus, Sedulius, and Arator, from whom Bede takes phrases and vocabulary; but he also uses Virgil copiously, and (according to the editor Jaager's conservative reckoning) in descending order of frequency, Cyprianus Gallus, Venantius Fortunatus, Paulinus of Nola, Dracontius, Prudentius, Aldhelm, Paulinus of Périgueux, Alcimus Avitus, Damasus, Serenus Sammonicus, Ovid, Horace, Prosper, Orientius, Augustine, and Persius. His metrics and prosody are enviably correct despite an occasional variation from classical usage; he uses rhyme and alliteration sparingly (indicating how little Bede carries over the Anglo-Saxon poetic verse tradition into his Latin). For anyone familiar with early medieval poetry the poem offers no great difficulty and considerable pleasure.

The poem is nicely constructed, moving from the general view of the Lord's numerous and various saints as lights of the Church to examples of individuals, who shine particularly for their own locale—e.g., Peter and Paul for Rome, Cyprian for Africa, John Chrysostom for Constantinople, and finally Cuthbert for the English. Thus, at the outset Bede places Cuthbert in a cosmic setting as the patron of the English but honored universally. In the spirit and with the world as audience, Bede presents in studied and solemn verse the glorified Cuthbert. In contrast to the solemnity of the proem and the gravity of the prophetic warning of the destruction of the monastery (chap. 37), some of the account is charming, mock-pastoral and mock-heroic. The amusing mixture of Virgilian bucolic and epic verse in the following passage reveals not only Bede's command of classical verse but also his sense of humor:²³

XVII

Quique suis cupiens victum conquiere palmis
Incultum pertemptat humum proscindere ferro
Et sator edomitis anni spem credere glebis.
Dumque seges modico de semine surgeret
 ampla,
Tempus adest messis; rapidae sed forte
  volucres
Flaventes praedare senis nituntur aristas.
Talia qui placidus saevis praedonibus infit:
"Quid precor inlicito messem contingitis ausu,
Quae vestro sulcis non est inserta labore?
Pauperies an vestra meam transcendit, ut istud
Incurvam merito falcem mittatis in aequor?
Quod si forte deus iubet his instare rapinis,
Non veto; sin alias, vos finibus indite vestris."
Dixerat, et cessit mox plumea turba nec ultra
Militis audebat domini iam leadere iura.
Quin potius dulci pacis quasi foedere nexum
Unanimemque sui generis redamabat amicum,
Nam teneras ceu pastor oves hanc ipse
 regebat.
(11. 413-30)

(Desiring to get food by means of his own hands, he works to cut through the uncultivated soil with iron tool; and as a sower he entrusts the hope of the year in the tamed glebe. After an ample crop results from the bit of seed, it is time for the reaping. However, by chance quick birds strive to plunder the old man's golden ears of grain. Placid, he begins to speak to the savage thieves: "Why, I beg you, do you reach with illicit daring for the harvest, which was not planted in the rows by your labor? Or does your poverty exceed mine, that you should send your curved scythe justly into that plain? If perhaps God orders you to press on with this rapine, I do not forbid. If otherwise, put yourselves in your own territories." He had spoken, and immediately the plumed mob ceased and dared not further violate now the laws of the soldier lord. Rather, it formed a bond with him as by a sweet pact of peace, and loved him as a united friend of its race, for he ruled this group as a pastor his tender sheep.)

The prose life owes very little to the metrical life but a great deal to the anonymous. Forty miracles are related in this version; only eight are not in the anonymous (Colgrave, Two Lives, p. 14). Bede points out in the preface that he showed his notes to the monks of Lindisfarne for their criticism. Additional fine material, such as chapter 33, and his beautiful account of Cuthbert's death, related in chapters 37-39, he owes as he says to Herefrith. In Bede's hands the life displays a skillful blend of the Roman and Celtic ideal ways of monastic life. This is fitting not only because the writer himself owes so much to both traditions but because the hero Cuthbert was according to both biographers an interlocking cornerstone for the two modes of life. In many respects Cuthbert resembles the enterprising Irish ascetics and pilgrim monks in his heroic penitential practices, his search for solitude, and his missionary activity. The arrangements of his Lindisfarne discipline and the relationship of bishop, abbot, and community reveal elements of both Irish and continental monasticism, which Bede feels obliged to explain ("ne aliquis miretur" ["lest anyone should marvel"], chap. 16, p. 206).²⁴ Bede does not include the detail from the anonymous life, that as prior Cuthbert instituted a rule "which we observe even to this day along with the rule of St. Benedict" (III. 1, pp. 95-97). In the death scene, however, which is totally absent in the anonymous life, Bede has Cuthbert command: "Have no communion with those who depart from the unity of the Catholic peace, either in not celebrating Easter at the proper time or in evil living" (chap. 39, pp. 284-85).

Each of the three versions of Cuthbert's life has its literary and hagiographic merits, but these attributes differ greatly. It is clear from manuscript history that Bede's prose life won the palm in the Middle Ages: extant are seven manuscripts of the anonymous version, nineteen of Bede's metrical version, and thirtysix complete manuscripts of the prose version, not counting two containing extracts only and evidence for many more lost ones.²⁵ Just as it would prove enlightening to compare the entirety of one of Bede's biblical commentaries with its major source or sources, so a comparison of the three lives tells a student much about Bede's qualities as an author of hagiography.²⁶ His works invite a closer comparative analysis.

"A martyrology of the festivals of the holy matryrs, in which I have diligently tried to note down all that I could find out about them, not only on what day, but also by what sort of combat and under what judge they overcame the world" (HE V. 24, p. 571). Besides the four saints' lives, Bede made another major contribution to hagiography. Using the pseudo-Jerome martyrology, a simple liturgical calendar naming the martyrs and the places of their martyrdom, Bede composed between 725 and 731 what is termed an historical martyrology, which includes a brief account of each saint's life and death. As the above quotation suggests, Bede did a great deal of research for this project, and, once again, the work is witness to an impressive number of sources, including some fifty lives of saints, ecclesiastical histories, writings of Fathers of the Church, and the Liber pontificalis.²⁷ A typical entry is that for Saint Cassian (the martyr, not the monk) on 13 August:

On the Ides of August. The birthday [into heaven] of St. Cassian, at Rome. When he had refused to adore idols, the persecutor demanded to know what his profession was. He answered that he taught students grammar (notas). Then, stripped of his clothes and bound with his hands behind his back, he was placed in the center. The boys to whom by his teaching he had become hateful were called, and permission was given them to destroy him. In so far as they suffered while learning, to that degree they enjoyed vengeance. Some beat him with their tablets and boards, others wounded him with their pens. In as much as their hands were weak, so much heavier, by an extended death, was the pain of his martyrdom. Prudentius the poet has written the life. (Quentin, p. 68; Dubois and Renaud, p. 149)

Bede's martyrology contained 114 notices. This left a number of calendrical spaces open. With the medieval horror vacui, later less careful, more sensational-minded editors encrusted Bede's work beyond recognition with their supplemental entries.²⁸

Poems

A book of hymns in various meters and rhythms. A
book of epigrams in heroic and elegiac meter.
(HE, V. 24, pp. 570-71)

It seems that these two books did not survive the Middle Ages,²⁹ although a number of individual poems have come down to us. Besides the metrical life of Saint Cuthbert in almost a thousand lines of skillfully wrought hexameters, we have approximately two dozen poems of varying length and meter, some certainly by Bede and the rest quite probably so.

One poem, in honor of Saint Æthelthryth, we know is genuine because Bede includes it in the Ecclesiastical History (IV.20, pp. 396-401), with the introductory remark: "It seems fitting to insert in this history a hymn on the subject of virginity which I composed many years ago in elegiac meter in honor of this queen and bride of Christ, and therefore truly a queen because the bride of Christ; imitating the method of holy Scripture in which many songs are inserted into the account and, as is well known, these are composed in meter and verse."

Alma Deus Trinitas, quae saecula cuncta
   gubernas
 adnue iam coeptis, alma Deus Trinitas.

Bella Maro resonet; nos pacis dona canamus,
 munera nos Christi; bella Maro resonet.
Carmina casta mihi, fedae non raptus Helenae
 luxus erit lubricis, carmina casta mihi.

(All-bounteous Three in One, Lord of all time,
 Bless mine emprise, all-bounteous Three in
   One.
Battle be Maro's theme, sweet peace be mine;
 Christ's gifts for me, battle be Maro's
   theme.
Chaste is my song, not wanton Helen's rape.
 Leave lewdness to the lewd! Chaste is my
   song.)

From this sample of the beginning lines, which bravely restate the topos of the "contrast between pagan and Christian poetry," it is evident that the poem is something of a tour de force; it is not only alphabetic (twenty-three distichs each beginning with another letter, plus four for AMEN) but also epanaleptic (that is, the last quarter of the distich repeats the first; termed in the Middle Ages reciprocal, echoic, or serpentine).³⁰

Unfortunately, the most recent edition by J. Fraipont in CCSL 122 of most of the rest of the poetry attributed to Bede has serious defects.³¹ Fraipont's edition goes by the title "Bedae Venerabilis liber hymnorum, rhythmi, variae preces" (p. 405). This is misleading, since there are no "rhythmi" in the collection that accord with Bede's definition from late Latin grammarians in his De arte metrica 1.24, where rhythmic poetry in contrast to metrical means accentual verse.

Thirteen of the fifteen hymns taken by Fraipont from Dreves 1907 edition are probably by Bede; two, IV and V, are most probably not, since they were never even attributed to him in the Middle Ages.³² Hymns I through XIII are in traditional Ambrosian hymn meter, iambic dimeter.³³ Hymn I, Primo Deus caeli globum, is on a topic dear to Bede's heart, as we have seen in his other works: the six days of creation and the six ages of the world. After two introductory stanzas, the first line of one stanza becomes the last line of the next, up to stanza 19, which, after the sabbath rest of souls on the seventh day, deals with the extra-temporal eighth day of eternal bliss. On that day and age,

Vultumque Christi perpetim
Iusti cernent amabilem
Eruntque sicut angeli
Caelesti in arce fulgidi.

(The just behold forever the lovable countenance of Christ; they will be as shining angels in the celestial citadel.)

Stanza 28 ends the poem with a praise to the Trinity. Fraipont unaccountably includes the spurious stanzas 29 to 33, metrically defective and anticlimatic (pp. 410-11).

Hymn II, Hymnum canentes martyrum, is for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December). Bede again uses the echoic stanza form, but here throughout the entire sixteen stanzas of the poem. Hymn IX, In natali SS. Petri et Pauli, another alphabetic poem, honors the two patron saints of Wearmouth and Jarrow.

Judging from the number of manuscripts extant, Hymn VI, Hymnos canamus gloriae, on the Ascension, was Bede's most popular.³⁴ The poem, with its emphasis on Christ's harrowing of hell and royal entrance into heaven, is an epitome of the early medieval theology of glory. It contains many of the scriptural and patristic motifs that will be used by Cynewulf in his Old English poem, Christ II or The Ascension.³⁵ After the beauty and regular meter of the first seventeen stanzas, the interpolated and defective stanza 17a spoils the flow, but 18 through 32 restores the reader's equilibrium.

Another hymn interesting because of its use of a device also found in Old English vernacular literature is the second hymn in honor of Saint Andrew, XIII, Salue, tropaeum gloriae (pp. 437-38). In this poem, the first seven stanzas are Andrew's address to the personified cross; they manifest Bede's literary debt to The Passion of Saint Andrew the Apostle and suggest some similarities to the prosopopoeia of The Dream of the Rood.³⁶

A third poem, De die iudicii (XIV, pp. 439-44), is still more closely linked with the vernacular, since the fine Old English poem of the late tenth century, Judgment Day II, formerly called Be Domes Dœge, is a 304-line paraphrase of it.³⁷ The dactylic hexameter Latin poem, thought to have been composed between 716 and 731, is not in a usual sense a hymn, though it has been included in hymn collections, but a 163-line poem of meditation. Although the poem's authenticity has been questioned in the past, the evidence overwhelmingly supports Bedan authorship. Thirty of the thirty-nine extant manuscripts ascribe it to him; and it has been assigned to no other writer. In Northumbrian manuscripts the poem has a personal epilogue in lines 156 to 163 (p. 144) addressed to Bede's patron, Bishop Acca, and his monks at Hexham. The theme of doomsday is consonant with Bede's other writings, such as De temporum ratione (68-70) and Dryhthelm's account of his trip to the otherworld in HE V. 12 (pp. 488-99). Nevertheless, Jean Mabillon's impression "it does not seem to follow Bede's vein" still finds adherents, especially since Bede does not elsewhere dwell so on physical pain and torment as depicted in lines 72 to 122 of the poem; in the commentary on Revelation he prefers to transfer such descriptions to an allegorical plane.³⁸ Still, in addition to the other evidence, it must be admitted that the competent hexameters, poetic but restrained diction, and clean style point to Bede as author. The subject matter of the poem, the separation of the just and unjust according to their merits, their rewards and punishment, naturally prompts a contrastive treatment, but this is done quite effectively. The poem starts out with a line describing a pleasant glade, using the classical and medieval topos of the locus amoenus, but immediately wheels about in the second line with a description of a powerful wind that brings on melancholy in line four. The earthly flowery scene in the first line parallels the rosy aspect of heaven in 146-47; the list of hell's sufferings, 93-97 (beginning "Nec uox ulla") contrasts exactly with heaven's joys, 124-28 (echoing with "Nox ubi nulla"). A careful reading of the poem renders F.J.E. Raby's dismissal of it highly contestable: "Its merits are small and it displays nothing half so well as the piety of its author."³⁹

Poem XV, Oratio Bedae Presbyteri, is a twenty-six line prayer in elegiac couplets. XVI, XVII, and XVIII are poems based on Psalms 41, 83, and 112.

Occasionally Bede inserted a brief poem, epigram, or epitaph before, in, or after a prose work.⁴⁰ We apparently also now have some remnants of his lost Liber epigrammatum. John Leland, commissioned by Henry VIII to search out British antiquities in ecclesiastical libraries, relates in his Collectanea that he inspected a very old collection of epigrams (the manuscript is now lost) belonging to Milred (bishop of Worcester from 745-75), five of which were attributed to Bede apparently on good grounds; Leland transcribed two of them, which Michael Lapidge has recently published and discussed.⁴¹ The last, acephalous epigram in Milred's collection may also be from the concluding lines of Bede's book.⁴²

We have Bede's own authority and that of his contemporary Cuthbert that he translated Latin into Old English (Letter to Cuthbert, EHD I, p. 801; Letter on the Death of Bede, HE, pp. 582-83), and Cuthbert also says that Bede was versed in Old English poetry (Letter, pp. 580-81). Furthermore, from his account of Cædmon's poetic gift and career in HE IV.24, (pp. 414-21), we know that Bede was sensitive to the beauty and uniqueness of Old English verse and acknowledged it as a medium for translating and embellishing the sacred text. But there is no compelling evidence that he composed the five-line poem called "Bede's Death Song." The evidence of the early and best manuscripts of Cuthbert's letter indicates only that Bede repeated the little poem as a favorite during his last days. Cuthbert's words are: "In nostra quoque lingua, ut erat doctus in nostris carminibus, dicens de terribili exitu animarum et corpore" ("And in our own language,—for he was familiar with English poetry,—speaking of the soul's dread departure from the body, he would repeat: …

(Facing that enforced journey, no man can be
More prudent than he has good call to be,
If he consider, before his going hence,
What for his spirit of good hap or of evil
After his day of death shall be determined.)
(HE, pp. 580-83)⁴³

Letters

"Also a book of letters to various people: one of these is on the six ages of the world; one on the restingplaces of the children of Israel; one on the words of Isaiah, 'And they shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited'; one on the reason for leap year; and one on the equinox, after Anatolius" (HE V.24, pp. 568-69).

From this epistolary catalogue it is obvious that Bede did not will to posterity a collection of warm and familiar letters. Although the book itself has not come down to us as such, we have all the five letters listed, in addition to two others, written after the Ecclesiastical History was finished.

The first letter (CCSL 123C, pp. 617-26), on the six ages, was discussed in connection with the De temporibus. … Addressed to Plegwin, monk of Hexham, Bede responds heatedly to the charge of heresy for his reckonings concerning the time span of the ages and Christ's birth in the sixth age; he refutes the accusations laid against him at Bishop Wilfrid's feast and asks that "the most learned brother David" set things straight.⁴⁴

The last two letters listed (four and five) also deal with computation questions put to Bede by colleagues, but in less controversial areas. After removing the paragraph of salutation addressed to Helmwald (printed in CCSL 123C, p. 629), Bede makes the verbatim text of the fourth letter serve as chapters 38-39 of De temporum ratione (CCSL 123B, pp. 399-404) to explain bissextile (leap year) intercalation (see above, Chap. 2). The fifth, the letter to Wicthed (CCSL 123C, pp. 633-42), wrestles with problems about the vernal equinox for the dating of Easter in the Anatolian Canon and serves as sort of an appendix to the treatment of equinoxes in De temporum ratione. …

The second and third letters respond to questions of exegesis asked by Bede's patron, Bishop Acca, for whom he wrote so much. Bede interrupted his commentary on 1 Samuel to compose the letters (PL 94.699A and 702B). They are like the Eight Questions … in that they take a particular biblical topic and discuss it discursively rather than by Bede's usual method of verse-by-verse commentary. De mansionibus enumerates and describes the Israelites' stopping places in Exodus and then, following Jerome's interpretation, explains the allegorical, moral meaning of those resting areas (701C-D). The third letter deals with a harder nut, Isaiah 24:22, which seems to prophesy a punishment in hell that will end, since the Vulgate texts says, "they will be visited" (not "they will be punished" [RSV]). The latter part of this long letter discusses the apocalyptic visitation of the Antichrist.

Along with a copy of the recently completed Ecclesiastical History, Bede sent a short letter of appreciation to Albinus, abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Canterbury (Plummer I, p. 3).⁴⁵ In the preface to the Ecclesiastical History Bede recognizes Albinus as "the principal authority and helper" in the historical enterprise by his generous provision of documents from Canterbury and Rome (HE, pp. 3-4). In conjunction with the information contained in the preface to the History and in the prologue to the life of Saint Cuthbert, this letter tells us something of Bede's publishing procedures: he sent out drafts (schedulae) for verification and correction, then a fair copy (membranulae) for final approval and copying. Since the manuscript was publicized and copied in various degrees of revision, different versions, or editions, naturally ensured.⁴⁶

The last letter and the last surviving work of Bede is also the most critical of church and state. It is a letter calling for reform. Although all the principal works of his late years deal to some extent with reform of church, to be brought about by a rejuvenated monasticism and episcopate, and reform of society, to be brought about by a well-counseled king and advisors, Bede spells out in detail what a program should entail.⁴⁷ On 5 November 734 Bede writes to Ecgbert, who would be elevated as the first archbishop of York in 735, and whose brother Eadbert would become king of Northumbria in 737 (EHD I, pp. 799-810; Plummer I, pp. 405-23; II, pp. 378-88). Though in weakened condition physically, Bede energetically admonishes the prelate to carry out much-needed reforms. The tone is that of a prophet exhorting a high priest, and may remind us of another monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, reproving the pope. Actually, this seems to be an early instance of a traditional Christian genre called the sermo ad clerum, an admonition to the hierarchy by a respected but lesser ranking member of the clerical club, a convention familiar to students of the English Renaissance in the sermons of Colet and Latimer.

Bede had complained of ecclesiastical abuses of his day in his commentaries and history,⁴⁸ but nowhere is he as detailed as he is in this outspoken letter. After calling attention to reports about bishops associating with "those who are given to laughter, jests, tales, feasting and drunkenness, and the other attractions of the lax life" (reminiscent of his censure of Bishop Wilfrid's court in his letter to Plegwin), he points out that the distances are too great in the diocese to serve all the people (p. 801). He notes with some bitterness "that many villages and hamlets of our people are situated on inaccessible mountains and dense woodlands, where there is never seen for many years at a time a bishop to exhibit any ministry or celestial grace; not one man of which, however, is immune from rendering dues to the bishop" (p. 802). He therefore recommends that new bishoprics be established, with sees established and financed at wealthy monsteries. Pseudomonasteries, set up as personal familial institutions to acquire lands held by hereditary title by royal indult, to evade taxes, and to avoid public service, he entreats be abolished.⁴⁹

For—what indeed is disgraceful to tell—those who are totally ignorant of the monastic life have received under their control so many places in the name of monasteries, as you yourself know better than I, that there is a complete lack of places where the sons of nobles or of veteran thegns can receive an estate. … But others give money to kings, and under the pretext of founding monasties buy lands on which they may more freely devote themselves to lust, and in addition cause them to be ascribed to them by hereditary right by royal edicts, and even get those same documents of their privileges confirmed, as if in truth worthy of God, by the subscription of bishops, abbots and secular persons. (p. 805)

This sour complaint serves as an interesting complement to the description in the Historia ecclesiastica (V.23): "In these favorable times of peace and prosperity, many of the Northumbrian race, both noble and simple, have laid aside their weapons and taken the tonsure, preferring that they and their children should take monastic vows rather than train themselves in the art of war. What the result will be, a later generation will discover" (pp. 560-61).

Although this statement seems either contradictory or ironically cynical when placed against the text of his letter to Ecgbert, Bede is actually expressing the complex state of affairs in contemporary Northumbria, where the presence of the church is hearteningly affirmed by dedication of lives and land to its service, but also where the quality of the church is seriously vitiated by greed, subterfuge, and fraud. What saves the letter from querulousness are its positive recommendations with a true hope of improvement.⁵⁰

After pleading for adequate spiritual teachers for the laity, Bede ends the letter with a fervent appeal that Ecgbert avoid avarice, remembering its effects on religious leaders in the Old and New Testaments (pp. 809-10). Bede's swan song is a strong and urgent cry.⁵¹

Notes

1. These two quotations may serve as a just sample of the praise accorded Bede's style:

   Bede's command of Latin is excellent, and his style is clear and limpid, and it is very seldom that we have to pause to think of the meaning of a sentence. There is no affectation of a false classicality, and no touch of the puerile pomposity of his contemporary Aldhelm, for whom, however, he cannot help feeling a kind of admiration. Alcuin rightly praises Bede for his unpretending style. (Plummer I, pp. liii-liv)

   But such is the pleasing simplicity, clarity, and grammatical superiority of his prose style that at least his narrative and historical works can be read with some aesthetic satisfaction. He habitually spoke, wrote, and taught in Latin all his life, so that there is a natural ease and directness in his prose which contrasts markedly with the rather 'showing-off style of St Aldhelm, who perhaps wished to demonstrate that he could equal the Irish Latinists in stylistic learning. On the other hand, Bede's interest in metre, which produced his treatise De Arte Metrica, was due mainly to the value he set on the study of Latin metre as a necessary aid to the discipline of the effective use of that language. (C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature [New York: Norton, 1967], p. 63)

2. Winthrop Weatherbee, "Some Implications of Bede's Latin Style," in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 1978), pp. 23-31, shows that Bede's style with its ease, purity, and freedom from self-consciousness contributed to the development of a medieval Christian humanism.
3. See Alan Thacker, "Bede's Ideal of Reform," in Ideal and Reality, ed. Wormald, pp. 130-31.
4. For the summary results of Dom Germain Morin's researches into the original Bedan collection and of his own findings, consult Laistner, Hand-List, pp. 114-16. Reflecting the medieval accretions to Bede's collection and its confused order, the editions of Giles and Migne present a muddle. Indeed, one homily is printed twice as I.17 and II.24 in PL 94.89-96 and 262-67. Only the modern edition of Dom David Hurst, CCSL 120, is reliable for authenticity and order. For a list of the factitious homilies extracted from Bede's commentaries on Mark and Luke, see Hurst's appendix, pp. 381-84. For the dating of the collection, see his preface, p. vii.
5. On Bede's elaborate use of the metaphor of rumination, see Gernot Wieland, "Caedmon, the Clean Animal," American Benedictine Review 35 (1984): 194-203, and the bibliography cited.
6. For a conspectus of his homiletic use of Scripture and the Fathers, see CCSL 120, Index Scriptorum, pp. 387-99 and 401-3.
7. See the two valuable but uneven articles on Bede's homiletic art by Philip J. West, "Liturgical Style and Structure in Bede's Homily for the Easter Vigil" and "Liturgical Style and Structure in Bede's Christmas Homilies," American Benedictine Review 23 (1972): 1-8, 424-38. These are important because they are among the very few specific treatments of Bede's style. In making his point in the second article about the artistry of the sermon for midnight on Christmas (I.6), however, West belittles the form and treatment of the Vigil homily that precedes it (I.5), calling it "almost impoverished" (p. 425). West did not recognize that Bede is using two different methods, both artistic, for two different occasions: the one a simple reflection on the verses of the Gospel, echoing the simplicity of the mass text and spirit; the other, an elaborately structured and linguistically brilliant exposition for a brilliant night. West blames Bede for his procedure in the homily for the second mass, in which Bede "builds his sermon around allegorical interpretation of the Gospel's six main verbs: transeamus, uideamus, uenerunt festinantes, uidentes, cognouerunt, and reuersi. The sermon's limitation seems [sic] that this arbitrary organizational principal [sic] forced Bede to subordinate unity and continuity to ingenuity" (p. 432). West then praises Bede for holding allegory "to a minimum" in his sermon for Christmas Day (I.8). The arbitrariness is on the part of West, not Bede. If one appreciates Bede's (and the Fathers') allegorical art, then West's literary criticism appears perverse.
8. For a comprehensive survey of hagiography see René Aigrain, L'hagiographie: ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1953). For an understanding of the literary conventions used by hagiographers, see the studies by Hippolyte Delehaye, such as The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), and Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, 2d ed. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1966). For a still stimulating essay on hagiography, see chapter 4 in Charles W. Jones's Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1947), pp. 51-79. For a summary of the influential Augustinian view of the miraculous, see Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), introduction and chap. 1, pp. 1-4.
9. On the development of the opus geminatum see, with the attendant bibliography, Peter Godman, "The Anglo-Latin opus geminatum: from Aldhelm to Alcuin," Medium Aevum 50, no. 2 (1981): 215-29, and his edition of Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, pp. lxxviii-lxxxviii; and Gernot Wieland, "Geminus Stilus: Studies in Anglo-Latin Hagiography," in Insular Latin Studies, ed. Michael Herren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981), pp. 113-33. Wieland's study is particularly profitable for its explorations into the purposes and uses of the geminated format: "The conclusion to be drawn from this is not that the gemina opera were written to exemplify 'the interchangeability of metrical and non-metrical discourse,' but that the prose was written to complement the verse and the verse was written to complement the prose" (p. 125).
10. Thomas W. Mackay has furnished us with an analysis of the work in his "A Critical Edition of Bede's Vita Felicis" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1971; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1972), and in his article, "Bede's Hagiographical Method: His Knowledge and Use of Paulinus of Nola," in Famulus Christi, ed. Bonner, pp. 77-92. The factual details about the Vita and its source are drawn mainly from his introduction and article. Although I have studied his edition, my references will be to the text in Migne, since Mackay's edition is not yet available in CCSL.
11. The best edition of the poems of Paulinus is Sancti Pontii Meropii Paulini Nolani Carmina, ed. Wilhelm von Hartel, CSEL 30 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1894). The Natalicia celebrating Felix are poems 12 to 29; the biography used by Bede is found in poems 15 and 16, the Nachleben especially in 18, and the buildings of Nola in 28. For a description and translation of the poems, see P. G. Walsh, The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola (New York: Newman Press, 1975).
12. In the preface to the prose life of St. Willibrord, Alcuin describes the purpose of the opus geminatum thus: "At your behest I have put together two small books, one moving along in prose, which could be read publicly to the brothers in church, if it seems worthy to your wisdom; the other, running along with Pierian feet, which ought only to be ruminated by your students in the private room" (Vita Willibrordi archiepiscopi Traiectensis, ed. W. Levinson, MGH, Scriptores rerum Merowingicarum VII. 113).
13. See Mackay, Introduction to his critical edition, pp. xxv-lxi, esp. liii-liv, and "Bede's Hagiographical Method," p. 78; Hunter Blair, World of Bede, pp. 119-20.
14. Carmelo V. Franklin and Paul Meyvaert, "Has Bede's Version of the 'Passio S. Anastasii' Come Down to Us in 'BHL' 408?" Analecta Bollandiana 100 (1982):373-400. BHL 408 refers to Bibliotheca hagiographica latina, ed. Socii Bollandiani (Bruxelles, Belgium: Bollandists, 1898-99)1:68, no. 408.
15. Franklin and Meyvaert, "Bede's Version," 394-95.
16. The most damning censure was leveled by Bede's ablest and kindest critic, Charles Plummer:

    In the case of Cuthbert's Life it cannot, I think, be said that Bede has bettered his original. He has improved the Latinity no doubt, and made the whole thing run more smoothly. In fact he seems to take delight in altering the language for the mere sake of alteration, while keeping closely to the sense. But he has obliterated many interesting details of time and place, he shows a marked tendency to exaggerate the ascetic and miraculous element, he amplifies the narrative with rhetorical matter which can only be called padding, inserts as facts explanations of his own, and has greatly spoiled one beautiful anecdote. On the other hand, his account of Cuthbert's death, derived from an eye-witness, is of real and independent value. (p. xlvi)

    For the others, see the remarks and documentation in Lenore Abraham, "Bede's Life of Cuthbert: A Reassessment," Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference 1 (1976): 23-24.

17. On the narrative qualities of the anonymous Vita Cuthberti see Theodor Wolpers, Die englische Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters, Buchreihe der Anglia, no. 10 (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1964), pp. 74-75.
18. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine IV. 19.38, p. 146. Cf. Wieland, "Geminus stilus" pp. 124-26.
19. J. F. Webb, ed. and trans. Lives of the Saints (Harmondsworth, England, and Baltimore: Penguin, 1981), p. 23. Webb's introduction to Bede's prose life is an excellent rebuttal to Plummer's opinion quoted in n. 6 above.
20. On the dating from this reference, see Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literature des Mittelalters, Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Walter Otto, sec. 9, part 2 (Munich, Germany: C. H. Beck, 1911; rpt. 1965), 1:84; and Werner Jaager, Bedas metrische vita sancti Cuthberti, Palaestra 198 (Leipzig, Germany: Mayer and Müller, 1935), p. 4.
21. On the word curatio see Thesaurus linguae latinae, IV. 1476-77. For a discussion of the various understandings of Bede's gift in both the medieval and modern periods, see Whitelock, "Bede and his Teachers and Friends," p. 21 and nn. 15-21.
22. See Jaager's introduction and statistics, pp. 2-3, and B. Colgrave's concordance of the three lives, in Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 375.
23. Jaager's three brief references to Virgil's Georgics in this passage, I.244 (should read I.224) and II.14 for lines 415 and 16 and I.509 for 423 do not at all convey the amount of Virgilian imitation in the passage. Cf., for example, Georgics I.50 and 111; I.219-24; II.237; IV. 158; Aeneid VII. 721; XI.301. As for the mockepic quality, note that dixerat, 1. 426, is used by Virgil for epic discourse twenty-five times in the Aeneid, but never in the Eclogues or Georgics. For Bede's use of Virgil in the metrical life, see further Neil Wright, "Bede and Vergil," Romanobarbarica 6 (1981): 363, 367-71.
24. For a discussion of the peculiarities of this monachism see A. Hamilton Thompson, "Northumbrian Monasticism," in Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, pp. 60-101, esp. p. 72; and Colgrave's n., p. 347.
25. See Jaager, Bedas metrische Vita, pp. 24-32; Colgrave, Two Lives, pp. 17-50; Laistner, Hand-List, pp. 88-90.
26. For text and translation, unfortunately without commentary, of three accounts of the two sea otters wiping and warming Cuthbert's feet, see Bolton, Anglo-Latin Literature, pp. 136-38.
27. Dom Henri Quentin, Les martyrologes historiques du moyen âge, 2d ed. (Paris: Lecoffre, 1908), in a brilliant scholarly enterprise in chap. 2 (pp. 17-119) presents Bede's contribution to the martyrological genre. The martyrology itself is now in a convenient form, Edition practique des martyrologes de Bède, de l'anonyme lyonnais, et de Florus, ed. Dom Jacques DuBois and Geneviève Renaud (Paris: CNRS, 1976).
28. The main contributors before the fixing of the Roman Martyrology were the ninth-century writers Florus of Lyons, Hrabanus, Ado, and Usuard. The composite jumble is represented by the martyrology printed with Bede's works in PL 94.799-1148. Until a new edition appears, only Quentin's is reliable.
29. The usually careful Laistner has misled a number of later scholars about the history of these books. In the Hand-List he avers: "Neither of these collections of poems has survived as such, but, according to John Boston of Bury, the library of Bury St Edmunds early in the fifteenth century had a Liber Hymnorum and a Liber Epigrammatum bearing Bede's name" (p. 122). Richard H. Rouse, "Bostonus Buriensis and the Author of the Catalogus Scriptorum Ecclesiae," Speculum 41 (1966): 471-99, demonstrated that Bostonus Buriensis was only the scribe of the catalogue and Henry of Kirkestede, subprior and librarian, was the author; but Rouse also made clear that Kirkestede's catalogue was not an actual catalogue of library holdings but a bio-bibliographic union catalogue which comprised a list of all the books by authoritative and approved authors that Kirkestede knew of and wished to get if they were not yet available (pp. 471-72, 493-94). It is clear that Kirkestede learned about Bede's works from Bede's own bibliography, which he copied in the same order and wording as found in HE V.24 (pp. 566-71). That neither Bury St. Edmunds nor the Franciscan convents or neighboring monasteries possessed Bede's poems is manifest from the fact that Kirkestede was unable to supply an incipit and explicit for the works nor a reference number for the location (see p. 496, items 40 and 41). Laistner's misunderstanding of the nature of the list has been repeated by recent, also usually careful, scholars. Michael Lapidge, for instance, in "Some Remnants of Bede's Lost Liber Epigrammatum," English Historical Review 90 (1975): 798, states that a copy of the book of epigrams "was known to Henry of Kirkestede."
30. On the alphabetic and reciprocal form, see Plummer II, 241. Bede cites the well-known accentual alphabetic poem, Apparebit repentina in De arte metrica I.24, p. 139. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), pp. 235-36, identifies and describes the use of the topos, which he labeled "contrast between pagan and Christian poetry." Bede would be familiar with it from his reading in Juvencus, Paulinus of Nola, and Paulinus of Périgueux.
31. Anyone using the Fraipont edition should pay attention to Walther Bulst's learned, scathing critique of it, "Bedae Opera Rhythmica?" Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 89 (1958-59): 83-91. My remarks on the form and contents of the CCSL edition draw on his expertise, as well as on the learning of Josef Szövériffy, Die Annalen der lateinischen Hymnendichtung (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1966), 1:168-76.
32. G. M. Dreves, Lateinische Hymnendichter des Mittelalters, Analecta hymnica medii aevi, 50 (Leipzig, Germany, 1907, reprint ed. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1961), p. 98, takes over eleven hymns attributed to Bede in George Cassander's Renaissance collection from a tenth-century manuscript but adds another four, including the two hymns, from manuscript Bamberg B.II.10, among the hymn fragments without authorial ascription, found next to hymns attributed to Bede. As Bulst expostulates, that is no good reason to ascribe these two to Bede, which are, moreover, "dürftig, plump und mühselig zusammengestückt"; they could be by any of a dozen hymn writers (Bulst, "Bedae Opera Rhythmica?" pp. 88-89).
33. For a description of the hymni Ambrosiani, see F. J. E. Raby, A History of Christian-Latin Poetry, from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 28-41, esp. p. 33.
34. See A. S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922; reprint ed., 1966), pp. 371-76. Walpole's book with its excellent introduction and notes remains the best introductory text for the early hymns.
35. See Daniel G. Calder, Cynewulf, (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), chap. 3, pp. 42-74; and George H. Brown, "The Descent-Ascent Motif in Christ II of Cynewulf," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73 (1974): 1-12. A. S. Cook suggested a relationship between Bede's and Cynewulf' s poems in his edition of The Christ of Cynewulf (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1909), pp. 116-18.
36. M. Bonnet, ed., Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha II. 1 (Leipzig, Germany: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1898), pp. 24-26. See the notes, particularly to verses 39a, 42a, 87-89a, of The Dream of the Rood in Bright's Old English Grammar & Reader, ed. Frederick G. Cassidy and Richard N. Ringler, 3d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1971), pp. 309-17; also The Dream of the Rood, ed. Michael Swanton (Manchester, England: University Press; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 42-78.
37. The poem was edited with an English translation by J. Rawson Lumby as Be Domes Dœge, De Die Judicii, Early English Text Society Original Series, no. 65 (London: Trübner, 1876). The best edition of the poem, titled Judgment Day II, is in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. E. V. K. Dobbie, Vol. 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); the most recent English translation is that by S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Dent, 1982), pp. 528-35. An Old English prose adaptation of Judgment Day II appears as part of sermon xxix in Wulfstan, Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, ed. A. S. Napier, (Berlin, 1883; reprint ed. with bibliographic appendix by Klaus Ostheeren, Zürich: Weidmann, 1967), 1:vi, 136-40. Both Bede's Latin text and the Old English versions have been the subject of extensive investigation over the years by Leslie Whitbread, in preparation for a new, needed (but unfortunately not forthcoming) edition. All Bedan and Old English research is indebted to his research, reported in a series of articles, of which the following pertain to the Latin poem: "A Study of Bede's Versus De Die ludicii," Philological Quarterly 23 (1944):194-221; "Note on a Bede Fragment," Scriptorium 12 (1958): 280-81; "The Sources and Literary Qualities of Bede's Doomsday Verses," Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 95 (1966): 258-66; "The Old English Poem Judgment Day II and its Latin Source," Philological Quarterly 45 (1966): 635-56; "Bede's Verses on Doomsday: A Supplemental Note," Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 485-86; "After Bede: The Influence and Dissemination of His Doomsday Verses," Archiv 204 (1967): 250-66. For further information about the Old English versions one should consult Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986), pp. 238-40, and for bibliography on the OE poem, see A Bibliography of Publications on Old English to the End of 1972, ed. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1979); thereafter, the annual bibliographies in Anglo-Saxon England and the PMLA.
38. For Whitbread's final and best argued grounds for attributing the poem to Bede, see his "After Bede," 251-54. Mabillon's remark, "nec Bedae venam assequi mihi videtur" ("this does not seem to me to follow the vein of Bede") found in PL 120.22, is cited in Whitbread's n. 4, along with the opinions of most critics for and against Bede's authorship. The attribution of the poem to Alcuin, often repeated in OE scholarship from Lumby's remark in the preface, pp. v-vi, is due to a chance juxtapostion of the poem next to one attributed to Alcuin in Vienna, MS 89 (See Whitbread, "After Bede," p. 251 and n. 3).
39. Raby, Christian-Latin Poetry, p. 148. In his and James L. Rosier's edition of Aldhelm, The Poetic Works (Cambridge, England: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p. 31, Michael Lapidge boldly brands Raby's hitherto revered study "a tissue of errors and wrong-headed opinions."
40. For a list and location on of most of the poems atributed to Bede, see Bolton, Anglo-Latin Literature, pp. 167-68. To this should be added the two epigrams from John Leland's De rebus brittanicis collectanea, ed. Thomas Hearne, 2d ed. (London: Benjamin White, 1774), 3: 114-15, printed by Lapidge, "Some Remanants," as nos. 2 and 10 (pp. 802, 805); and an eleven-line epigram assocated with the preface to Bede's commentary on the Apocalypse (see Laistner, Hand-List, p. 129).
41. See Michael Lapidge, "Some Remnants of Bede's Lost Liber Epigrammatum," pp. 798-820, with transcript of the epigrams on pp. 802-6. A notation by Leland about Enigmata Bedae as part of this manuscript suggests that Bede like Aldhelm and Tatwin authored aenigmata (learned riddles) (Collectanea, 3:114; Lapidge, "Remnants," p. 803).
42. Patrick Sims-Williams, "Milred of Worcester's Collection of Latin Epigrams and its Continental Counterparts," Anglo-Saxon England 10 (1982): 38.
43. On this text Colgrave remarks, HE, pp. 580-81, n. 4, "Only a comparatively small group of the MSS. of the Letter attribute the composition of the poem to Bede himself, and those the later ones." See Dobbie, The Manuscripts of Cœdmon's Hymn and Bede's Death Song. A. H. Smith's statement in his edition of Three Northumbrian Poems, rev. ed. (Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 1978), p. 17, "On Cuthbert's testimony the Death Song is Bede's," is certainly not valid without qualification. He includes the Latin phrases of the earlier and later manuscript recensions on pp. 41-43. See also Michael W. Twomey, "On Reading 'Bede's Death Song': Translation, Typology, and Penance in Symeon of Durham's Text of the 'Epistola Cuthberti de Obitu Bedae,'" Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 84 (1983): 171-81.
44. Concerning the content of the letter, see Bedae opera de temporibus, ed. Jones, pp. 132-35. Both Jones and Bolton (in Anglo-Latin Literature, p. 151) mistranslate a portion of the letter, so that the David whom he asks to come to his aid becomes the original perpetrator of the accusation against Bede. See Dieter Schaller, "Der verleumdete David: zum Schlusskapitel von Bedas 'Epistola ad Pleguinam,'" Literatur und Sprache im europäischen Mittelalter: Festschrift für Karl Langosch, ed. Alf Önnerfors, Johannes Rathofer, Fritz Wagner (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), pp. 39-43.
45. This letter exists only in a printed version transcribed from a now lost manuscript of the monastery of St. Vincent in Metz, published by Jean Mabillon in Vetera analecta (Paris: Montalant, 1723; reprint ed., Farnborough, England: Gregg, 1967), p. 398. No known manuscript contains it. See Laistner, Hand-List, p. 119.
46. See Plummer II, pp. 1-2; Levison, "Bede as Historian," p. 128.
47. See Thacker, "Bede's Ideal of Reform," pp. 130-53.
48. For a summary of Bede's protests against clerical abuses, see the texts cited by Plummer I, p. xxxv, and II, pp. 381-86.
49. The abusive system of founding familial monasteriola under the rule and control of a family members as abbot or abbess was, according to Bede, already in existence for thirty years, since King Aldfrith's days. It was also widespread on the Continent. When Ecgbert and Eadbert attempted to put Bede's recommendation into effect, they incurred papal displeasure (see EHD I, no. 184). The abuse was again attacked by the tenth-century Benedictine reformers.
50. See Jan Davidse's thoughtful analysis in "The Sense of History in the Works of the Venerable Bede," Studi medievali, 3d ser., 23 (1982): 668-70.
51. Davidse, "Sense of History," p. 670, justifiably calls in question the tone of Bede's swan song as interpreted by John Smith (1722), Plummer II, p. 378, and Musca, II venerabile Beda, p. 345.