Fides Gratiae Caelestis: Bede, Pelagius and Divine Grace

2019 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 342-356
Author(s):  
Aaron D. Matherly
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
History Of ◽  
Venerable Bede ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Writing from his monastery in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Venerable Bede (ca. 672–735) was one of the foremost scholars of his era. Primarily known for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede’s vast corpus also included theological works, sermons, and biblical commentaries. Although most scholarly attention focuses on his historiography, this article explores Bede’s views on the notorious fifth-century monk, Pelagius. After surveying the works of both authors and commenting on the spread of Pelagianism in Britain, the article concludes that Bede saw Pelagianism as a persistent threat to orthodoxy, some three hundred years removed from the Pelagian controversies in the fifth century.

scholarly journals The sword of god: Plague and episcopal authority in the Late Antique West

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Amanda Kenney
Keyword(s):  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Gregory The Great ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Venerable Bede ◽  
Understanding Of Illness ◽  
Episcopal Authority

This thesis examines three major historical figures of Early Medieval Europe to discover the attitudes and responses to the plague: Pope Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, and the Venerable Bede. Gregory the Great provides the standard for episcopal reaction to plague with his own example and with the advice given to two bishops whose districts suffered outbreaks of plague. I then examine Gregory of Tours' 'History of the Franks' and the Venerable Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People' to discover their understanding of illness in general, plague in particular, and the types of responses praised and condemned in their accounts.

An Eighth-century Poem on St. Ninian

Antiquity ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 14 (55) ◽  
pp. 280-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilhelm Levison
Keyword(s):  
Church History ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Northern Province ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Spiritual Instruction ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Whithorn in Galloway and Kirkmadrine nearby are famous to the archaeologist and historian as the homes of the oldest Christian monuments in Scotland, namely the memorial stones still to be found there. They were erected in a district where the church history of Scotland originated through the efforts of St. Ninian. A few lines in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, III, 4, contain the earliest traditions about him which have come down to us. According to this late record, ‘Nynia’ was a British bishop who brought the Christian faith to the southern Picts (australes Picti). He had got his spiritual instruction in Rome, and had his episcopal see and his last resting-place amidst other saints-at Whithorn, Ad Candidam Casam, so called after the church dedicated to St. Martin which he built of stone, a fashion unusual to the Britons. As to his age, Bede merely says that he was at work a long time before St. Columba came to the northern Picts in 565. The intercourse with Rome can hardly have been later than the fifth century; a dedication to St. Martin who probably died in 397, cannot have been made before the same century. When Bede finished his History in 731, Whithorn was under Northumbrian rule, belonging to the northern ‘province’ of Bernicia. An English episcopal seat had been erected there shortly before, having Pecthelm as first bishop (Hist. eccl v, 23); he had been a long time deacon and monk in Wessex with Aldhelm, the abbot of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherborne, famous for his writings, who died in 709. Pecthelm was one of Bede’s authorities (ib., v. 13, 18); so it has been suggested that the latter was indebted to Pecthelm for his knowledge of Ninian. Pecthelm was one of the correspondents of St. Boniface who also came from Wessex, and who wrote him a letter on a question of canonical law shortly before he (Pecthelm) died in 735. It must also be noted that Bede distinguishes clearly between Whithorn, situated amongst the British, and the Pictish country, the scene of Ninian’s missionary efforts.

Tisias and Corax and the Invention of Rhetoric

1940 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. G. Hinks
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Common Effect ◽  
Eminent Scholar ◽  
History Of ◽  
Venerable Bede ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Made In

A Lasting tradition among the ancients marked Sicily as the birthplace and Tisias and Corax as inventors of the art of rhetoric: and in this tradition, legendary though it became, there is a stricter truth than in most of the stories related about the foundation of invented arts. We, with more elaborate historical views, shall still say of rhetoric that it was created at a certain epoch; and can still point to the Sicilians Tisias and Corax as its authors. Oratory, to be sure, has existed almost as long as speech. Its beginnings are prehistoric, and must in any case be imperceptible; and if by rhetorician we meant no more than one who uses speech with more than common effect, we might set the origin of rhetoric as far back as we chose, and could hardly bring it lower than the beginning of recorded literature. Indeed we are told that under the Antonine Emperors the eminent scholar Telephus of Pergamum wrote a book on Rhetoric in Homer, in which he illustrated from the Poet the whole contemporary system of the art down to the thirteen constitutions of Minucian; and in the same spirit the Venerable Bede, resenting the claim of the Greeks to have invented tropes and figures of speech, wrote a short work to show that they could all be found in Holy Scripture. But such inquiries, even when conducted less foolishly than by Telephus and less incompetently than by Bede, are irrelevant to the proper history of rhetoric. Let the practice of oratory have begun when it may, the first attempts known to us in Classical Antiquity to formulate a series of principles for the art of speech were made in the fifth century before Christ. These earliest systems were naturally very imperfect: they could not immediately be either comprehensive or well organized. But they were something that had not existed at all before: methodical principles for speaking. At the moment when these were first set out the art of rhetoric began.

Monasticism and Reform in Book IV of Bede's ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’

2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT DeGREGORIO
Keyword(s):  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

The reform of the Northumbrian Church constitutes a predominant theme in much that Bede wrote in his later years. Recent analyses of his later biblical commentaries have confirmed this, although a tendency remains to treat his historiographic masterpiece, theEcclesiastical history of the English people, completed in c. 731, as only aloofly reformist in outlook. This article contests such a view through an analysis of the narrative and characters of book iv, which when scrutinised can be seen to amplify some of the key reform-oriented issues voiced in Bede's last and most openly reformist work, theLetter to Egbert.

scholarly journals Marginalised Texts: The Old English Marginalia and the Old English Bede in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41.

2015 ◽  
pp. 152-157
Author(s):  
Patricia O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
English History ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historia Ecclesiastica ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Bede was a prolific writer in Anglo-Saxon England who, over the course of his prodigious literary career, produced a diverse range of Latin texts encompassing educational and scientific treatises as well as Biblical commentaries. Out of all his Latin works, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) is regarded as his greatest achievement, as it provides significant insights into a largely undocumented period in English history. The Historia Ecclesiastica was translated into the vernacular sometime in the late ninth or early tenth century and this translation is commonly referred to as the Old English Bede. The Old English Bede survives in five extant manuscripts, dating from the mid tenth and late eleventh century: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 10; London, British Library, Cotton Otho B. xi; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 279; Cambridge, University Library Kk. 3.18 and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 41, the last of which ...

Nicholas Orme, The History of England’s Cathedrals. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2017, 304 pp, color ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-301
Author(s):  
Charlotte A. Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Development ◽  
Engineering Technology ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Cathedrals are buildings of cultural weight. They have frequently drawn attention from architectural historians, especially in the medieval era, as examples of Great Churches: leaders in artistic development or pioneers in engineering technology. When one thinks of Gothic buildings in <?page nr="300"?>particular, it is the cathedral that comes foremost to mind as example. Salisbury, Canterbury, York, and their fellows continue to draw both scholarly attention and popular attraction.

Epidemics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document