Symeon of Durham and the memoria of Bede (original) (raw)
Related papers
2003
This thesis examines in detail the history and use of the Liber Vitae of Durham (BL MS Cotton Domitian A. vii). The manuscript is one of a small group of similar manuscripts created by different monasteries to record the names of associates of the monastery to be remembered during the round of monastic prayer. The Liber Vitae was first created in the mid-ninth century in Northumbria. Between c.1083 and c.1539 the monks of Durham used it to record the names of members of the monastic community together with large numbers of non-monastic names. In the first section of the thesis the history and development of the manuscript is explored through a detailed consideration of its codicology, supported by a discussion of the development of the lists of names over five hundred years. The phases of the development of the manuscript discovered by these means are then placed in their historical context, first in ninth century Northumbria and then in Durham between the eleventh and sixteenth cen...
History of Ancient & Medieval Philosophy at Durham
This is a general history of ancient and medieval philosophy as it has been studied in Durham from the 7th century CE (the Venerable Bede) until the present day. As it is a living document, corrections and additions are most welcome (please email me phillip.horky@durham.ac.uk).
Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU, IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science While writing his prose Vita S. Cuthberti, Bede appears to have made deliberate choices as to which personal names to spell out. Some of those which he omitted, however, can be found in the marginal annotations of three later manuscripts of the work. A number of these names are also mentioned in the earlier Lindisfarne Vita, but some others have only been preserved through those marginalia. The article examines the monastic milieu within which efforts were made throughout several centuries to remember and transmit the names of the people who had witnessed Cuthbert's sanctity without interfering with Bede's text.
Church Archaeology, 2021
In 1083, a priory of Benedictine monks was founded at Durham Cathedral, in the process displacing a college of secular canons that originated with the cathedral's foundation in 995. In the process, the new priory took possession of the body and cult of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. In the early 12th century, an ambitious ideological project to legitimise the new priory and their claims to both Cuthbert's power and his historical legacy were underway, foregrounded by Symeon of Durham, blending and reinterpreting the ancient past and the near present to present a unified history that was realised in the landscape of Northern England, including Cuthbert's own Lindisfarne. This paper will examine the historical and archaeological evidence for the priory's activities in the late 11th to early 12th century, and how they represent an alternative model for cult promotion and institutional legitimisation to the shrine and its corporeal remains.
The starting point for any comment on Bede's agenda in his later years must be Alan Thacker's essay, 'Bede's Ideal of Reform', published in 1983, which explores his intentions in reference particularly to the prose Life of St. Cuthbert (c. 721) and the Ecclesiastical History (731). 2 Thacker is also, however, always mindful of the Letter to Ecgberht, 3 written late in 734 only months before Bede's death, 4 which provides by far his most explicit comments on the reform of the Northumbrian Church. In a consummate analysis, Thacker argued that Bede was looking to the past to construct exemplary individuals with whom he could contrast the sloth and ignorance he was witnessing among contemporaries, and that he was writing with a view to restoring moral and spiritual values in the present to the heights that he considered that they had attained in an earlier, 'golden' epoch. As a Northumbrian, he was interested particularly to address the ills which he saw in that kingdom. The audience for which the Letter was intended allowed him to argue quite explicitly in favour of suppressing monasteries where no proper rule was kept, using the resources released thereby to establish new sees and improve pastoral care. With some passion, he was advocating more teachers, more bishops, better training of clergy and an end to the abuse posed by 'secular' monasteries. That this agenda is not unique to Bede's later 'historical' works but also pervades his exegesis, in particular the commentaries that he wrote in later life, was recognised by Thacker but has since been elaborated in a series of important studies by Scott DeGregorio. 5 His work has identified Bede's On Ezra and
A Stronghold of Letters: Late Medieval Durham as a Symbol of the Epistolarity.
Calíope, 2024
In this article, we will explore how the consumption of ancient letter collections and the development of letter-writing practices, known as dictaminal culture, reflect the grandeur of Durham Cathedral Priory. Located near the Scottish border and in a place with a historical influx of Scandinavians, Durham Cathedral Priory was a distant Benedictine community which stood as one of the most significant examples against the idea of cultural and educational periphery. It had one of the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary libraries in Western Europe, of which a significant part is still available and heavily invested in primary and secondary education. In that context, Durham Cathedral Library was a beacon of erudition, social and political connectiveness and humane growth. Linked to all those advancements, we can find both the consumption of ancient letter collections, which we will present as a product of various techniques and genres and the development of letter-writing techniques, which were inherited from late Antiquity but were transformed into something utterly new in medieval Europe. Therefore, we intend to demonstrate how Durham Cathedral Priory was an epistolary stronghold in all senses, which allowed it to grow further than any other distant and small community in England.
2006
Today, the Venerable Bede’s (672/3-735) Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (HE) is widely considered one of the great works of early medieval historical writing. In the Middle Ages, it was widely known and also greatly admired, but for very different reasons. This dissertation examines two aspects of the HE’s popularity in the medieval period: First, it is a study of the transmission of the work in medieval Germany, a region where the text enjoyed great success. Second, it is an analysis of the manuscript evidence for the text’s reception in the German-speaking world. After a brief introduction in Chapter One, Chapter Two surveys the history of the study of the manuscript tradition of the HE, and groups the manuscripts of the German “textual province” on the basis of test collations. The test collations are given in full in Chapter Three. In Chapters Four and Five, the focus shifts to the reception of the text, first (in Chapter Four) with an analysis of the text’s manuscript context (including mise-en-page, marginalia, and associated works), as a way of getting at its readership. In Chapter Five, the focus is on the text’s library context, that is, it is an examination of the libraries known to have held copies of the HE, and the ways the text seems to have fit into those collections, based primarily on the evidence of medieval library catalogues. Finally, Chapter Six provides a brief concluding summary that emphasizes how the interests of the medieval readers of the HE differed from those of its modern readers, and particularly how the medieval German audience of the work was most interested in the “universal” Christian elements in Bede’s text, especially the lives of popular saints, their miracles, and otherworld visions. The Appendices include a manuscripts finding-list, and a transcription of two hitherto unrecognized copies of the so- called Continuatio Bedae from Prague and Vienna.
Anglo-Saxon England
This article examines a contradiction in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica between Bede’s own claims and the implications of the list of bishops in the conciliar document produced at the Synod of Hertford, concerning the date of Bisi’s consecration. Modern reconstructions of East Anglian episcopal chronology rely on Bede’s account. The article opens by considering Bede’s concern to identify episcopal consecrators, which led to the contradiction. The implications of the Synod of Hertford are then explored for dating East Anglia’s bishops and the consequent impact this has upon interpreting East Anglia’s royal chronology and the evangelization of the kingdom. This further exposes Bede’s motives for writing his history and how he constructed his narrative.