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Bede : On the nature of things and On times

The Venerable Bede composed On the Nature of Things (De natura rerum) and On Times (De temporibus) at the outset of his career, about AD 703. Bede fashioned himself as a teacher to his people and his age, and these two short works show him selecting, editing, and clarifying a mass of difficult and sometimes dangerous material. He insisted that his reader understand the mathematical and physical basis of time, and though he was dependent on his textual sources, he also included observations of his own. But Bede was also a Christian exegete who thought deeply and earnestly about how salvation-history connected to natural history and the history of the peoples of the earth. To comprehend his religious mentality, we have to take on board his views on "science" -- and vice versa. On the Nature of Things is a survey of cosmology. Starting with Creation and the universe as a whole, Bede reads the cosmos downwards from the heavens, through the atmosphere, to the oceans and rivers of earth. This order (recapitulating the four elements or fire, air, water and earth) was derived from his main source, Isidore of Seville's On the Nature of Things. However, Bede separated out Isidore's chapters on time, and dealt with them in On Times. On Times, like its "second, revised and enlarged edition" The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione), works upwards from the smallest units of time, through the day and night, the week, month and year, to the world-ages. Bede's innovation is to introduce a practical manual of Easter reckoning, or computus, into this survey. Hidden beneath the matter-of-fact surface of the work is an intense polemic about the correct principles for determining the date of Easter -- principles which in Bede's view are bound up with both the integrity of nature as God's creation, and the theological significance of Christ's death and resurrection. In these works Bede re-united cosmology and time-reckoning to form a unified science of computus that would become the framework for Carolingian and Scholastic basic scientific education.

Bede's Latin poetry

"Although his historical and exegetical works are better known, Bede's small corpus of Latin poetry was widely read and imitated throughout the Middle Ages. Yet in spite of its importance as a keystone in medieval Latin literature, there has not previously been an attempt to collect and edit this corpus of verse in light of all the surviving manuscript evidence. Bede's Latin Poetry is the first edition of his poetic corpus based on all surviving manuscripts. It includes new editions of his two major poems, the 'Verses on Judgement Day' (Versus de die iudicii) and the metrical 'Life of St Cuthbert' (Vita metrica S. Cudbercti), and also includes reconstructions of his two other poetic collections - a book of epigrams and a book of hymns - which were not preserved intact during the Middle Ages and which have had to be assembled from various disparate sources. The editions of all these works are provided with translations and detailed notes, revealing Bede's debts to earlier poets, and illustrating his remarkable skill in understanding the intricacies of Latin verse composition. A series of appendices discuss and print many other poems which have been erroneously attributed to Bede by earlier editors, and include the first edition of a hitherto unknown early draft of his metrical 'Life of St Cuthbert'."--Although his historical and exegetical works are better known, Bede's small corpus of Latin poetry was widely read and imitated throughout the Middle Ages. Yet in spite of its importance as a keystone in medieval Latin literature, there has not previously been an attempt to collect and edit this corpus of verse in light of all the surviving manuscript evidence. Bede's Latin Poetry is the first edition of his poetic corpus based on all surviving manuscripts. It includes new editions of his two major poems, the 'Verses on Judgement Day' (Versus de die iudicii) and the metrical 'Life of St Cuthbert' (Vita metrica S. Cudbercti), and also includes reconstructions of his two other poetic collections - a book of epigrams and a book of hymns - which were not preserved intact during the Middle Ages and which have had to be assembled from various disparate sources. The editions of all these works are provided with translations and detailed notes, revealing Bede's debts to earlier poets, and illustrating his remarkable skill in understanding the intricacies of Latin verse composition. A series of appendices discuss and print many other poems which have been erroneously attributed to Bede by earlier editors, and include the first edition of a hitherto unknown early draft of his metrical 'Life of St Cuthbert'.

Bede's Latin poetry

'Bede's Latin Poetry' is a collected edition of Bede's corpus of Latin verse, based on all surviving manuscript evidence. It includes editions of several hymns and epigrams which have not previously been attributed to Bede, and provides the first edition of an early draft of his metrical 'Life of St Cuthbert'

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