Bede

St. Bede the Venerable, born sometime around 673 CE in Jarrow, England, was a poet, theologian, and historian. Bede is primarily known for Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum  (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731), which documents the conversion of Anglo-Saxon tribes to Christianity and popularized the method of dating events from the time of Christ’s birth. Most of Bede’s roughly 38 works have survived for more than a thousand years through duplication. “Bede’s Death Song,” also known as “Bede’s Lament,” is the most-copied Old English poem in historical manuscripts, surviving in over 35 extant iterations.

As Bede himself documents in Historia ecclesiastica, he was raised from the age of seven in the monastery of St. Peter at Monkwearmouth, where he was ordained a deacon when he was 19 and became a priest at 30. Aside from his early childhood and short trips, Bede spent his entire life at the monastery. His earliest-known works were treatises on epigrams, verse, and hymns. De temporibus (On Times), Bede’s first major writing on chronology, was written in 703 and expanded in 725 within a larger version, De temporum ratione (On the Reckoning of Time). Bede was renowned throughout England and Europe for his writing. He is the only Englishman to be named a Doctor of the Church, and the only Englishman admitted into Dante’s Paradiso.

Bede completed Historia ecclesiastica roughly three years before his death in 735. It is mythologized that “Bede’s Death Song” was written on his death bed, but there is no evidence that Bede was the author of this poem. His disciple, Cuthbert, describes Bede as feverishly working on translating—or possibly correcting—Isidore of Seville’s De natura rerum at the time of his death. Bede was declared Venerable in 836 and canonized in 1899. Bede was buried near his monastery until 1370, when his body was interred in a shrine at the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral.