The Times of Bede: Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian

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.

Foreword. Editorial Note by Stephen Baxter. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Part I An Early Christian Culture and its Critic. 1 Bede and Benedict Biscop. 2 Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo Saxon Aristocracy. 3 Bede, the Bretwaldas and the origins of the Gens Anglorum . 4 Bede and the conversion of England: the charter evidence. Part II The Impact of Bede′s Critique. 5 Æthelwold and his Continental Counterparts: Contact, Comparison, Contrast. 6 Bede and the ′Church of the English′. 7 How do we know so much about Anglo Saxon Deerhurst? 8 Aristocrats as Abbots: a context for the making of Brixworth. Appendix: Hilda, Saint and Scholar (614–680). Index.

Before his death in 2004, Patrick Wormald was a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He was previously a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Glasgow, and a Student of Christ Church, Oxford. He lectured widely in Europe, Scandinavia and North America and had an international reputation as an early–medieval scholar secured by many impressive and meticulously researched articles and by his most magisterial achievement, The Making of English Law . The Editor Stephen Baxter was one of Patrick Wormald′s students, and is a Lecturer in Medieval History at King′s College, London.

"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)