occasionally gives a personal detail in one of his other
works. Bede was born on land that a year or two later
(674) was given by King Oswiu (Oswy) to Benedict
Biscop to build the very monastery Bede would enter
at age seven, St. Peter’s, Wearmouth. In 681, two years
after Bede’s initiation into the community, Benedict
established at nearby Jarrow the twin foundation of St.
Paul’s, formed as an integral part of a single monastery
with St. Peter’s. At some point Bede was transferred
to this new foundation under the strict and learned
Ceolfrith, whose place was later fi lled by Hwætberht.
With the exception of a few short trips to Lindisfarne
and York Bede spent his entire life as a monk-scholar
at St. Paul’s.
Ordained a deacon at the age of nineteen (six years
before the usual canonical age), Bede then proceeded to
the priesthood at age 30 (703). He became the “beloved
father and master,” as his disciple Cuthbert called him, of
the thriving intellectual and spiritual center of learning.
Bede taught the basic disciplines of grammar and com-
putus: grammar, the science of the Latin language and
its interpretation; computus, the science of determining
time, especially the ensemble of rules by which the date
of Easter is reckoned. Since the master in many early
monasteries was also responsible for teaching psalmody,
Bede also may have taught chant.
Bede wrote several educational treatises to comple-
ment the texts available from late antiquity. He wrote
“a book on the art of meter,” the De arte metrica, a
systematic exposition of Latin versifi cation by means
of a judicious compilation of late-antique commentaries
on the grammarian Donatus, demonstrated by examples
from Virgil and Christian poets. The book makes evident
Bede’s qualities as a textbook writer: apt selection, con-
centration on essentials, simplicity, and precision. His
own contribution to metrical history is his description in
chapter 24 of isosyllabic stress rhythm, accentual meter,
which eventually superseded quantitative Latin verse
in medieval poetry. Bede appended to this work his De
schematibus et tropis, “a small book on fi gures of speech
or tropes, that is, concerning the fi gures and modes of
speech with which the holy scriptures are adorned.”
Bede adds considerably to Donatus’s section on the trope
of allegory, with a section on symbol in deeds and in
words. Bede’s De orthographia, “a book about orthog-
raphy,” consists of short alphabetized entries about the
meaning and correct usage or spelling of words likely
to cause diffi culties for a medieval Latinist.
For the basic curriculum Bede composed another
little educational piece, De natura rerum, “a separate
book on the nature of things,” serving as an introduction
to cosmology in 51 chapters on the earth, the heavens,
stars, and planets. The text, a reworking and betterment
of Isidore’s Liber rotarum and Pseudo-Isidore’s De
ordine creaturarum, incorporates much from Pliny’s
Natural History. Near the beginning and near the end of
his distinguished writing career Bede composed works
on time and its calculation. The fi rst, De temporibus,
a radical revision of material in Isidore’s Etymologies
and Irish supplements, consists of 22 brief chapters on
measurement of time, the six ages of the world, and a
short chronicle of the most important events in salva-
tion history. His recalculation of the time spans of each
age according to Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew
Bible instead of Jerome’s earlier fi gures from Eusebius
led to a charge of heresy being leveled against Bede in
Bishop Wilfrid’s court at Hexham, on the grounds that
he placed Christ in the fi fth instead of the sixth age—a
charge he vigorously denied in a formal and ferocious
letter to Plegwin, a monk of Hexham.
Bede’s students found the fi rst book on time to be too
dense for easy learning, so Bede remedied this by pro-
ducing a new, expanded version, De temporum ratione.
After initial chapters on fi nger calculation, Greek and
Roman letters symbolizing numbers, various aspects of
time and historical modes of measurement he proceeds,
as he did in the De temporibus but in much greater detail,
from the smallest to the largest units of time. He includes
a chapter on English months, with precious information
for students of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon culture. He
concludes the work with an extended discussion of the
ages of the world.
Bede considered all his educational treatises, gram-
matical and scientifi c, as preparatory instruction for
the study of scripture. Although Bede is known today
mainly as an historian, in his own time and throughout
the Middle Ages he was known primarily as an exegete.
The books of the Bible he chose to interpret are of two
kinds: those that were already favorites of the Fathers,
such as the commentaries on Genesis and on Luke,
and those that were largely ignored by earlier exegetes,
such as the commentaries on Ezra and Nehemiah and
on the New Testament Catholic Epistles. Both fi lled
pedagogical needs: the former, selected and simpli-
fi ed for his English pupils, display Bede’s talents as an
adapter and synthesizer; and the latter, supplementing
the Fathers, demonstrate his originality within the ex-
egetical tradition.
Bede’s usual method of commentary is the early-
medieval one of phrase-by-phrase exegesis of a biblical
text, from beginning to end; it is a process of rumination,
fostered in the monastic tradition. Bede relies heavily
on Augustine for doctrine and much of his exposition,
but in interpretive spirit he favors Gregory the Great,
with whom he shares a kind of spiritual affi nity. Like
Gregory and many of the Fathers he interprets the Bible
both literally (according to the basic, obvious, surface
meaning) and allegorically (according to the deeper,
hidden, spiritual, symbolic meaning). Bede’s exegeti-
cal practice is eclectic and literary. If appropriate, heBEDE THE VENERABLE