"This collection exemplifies the high qualities of scholarship, originality and forceful expression which characterized its lamented author. All serious work on Bede and his age has to reckon with these papers!"
–James Campbell, University of Oxford
"Patrick Wormald’s research, driven for over more than thirty years by the quest to understand and assess Bede, produced work of a profound coherence and consistency. Here, then, is more than a collection of classic papers. From two parts, on Bede as a thinker who didn’t so much reflect as reinflect his world, and on the afterlife of Bede’s critique in later Anglo-Saxon England, is constructed something wondrously balanced and whole: a masterpiece of a book."
–Janet Nelson, Kings College London
From the Inside Flap
The Times of Bede
Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian
Patrick Wormald
Edited by Stephen Baxter
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.
From the Back Cover
The Times of Bede
Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian
Patrick Wormald
Edited by Stephen Baxter
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.
About the Author
The author
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.
