Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence ed. by Michael Lapidge (review)

514 BOOK REVIEWS Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence. Edited by Michael Lapidge [Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 11.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xiii, 349) Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury (668-690) was commemorated by a seminar of experts in Cambridge on the thirteen hundredth anniversary of his death. The appointment by Pope Agatho of a sixty-year-old Greek monk with Syriac connections has always seemed bizarre. In the event the choice was a triumphant success. Theodore established a school at Canterbury second only to that based on Jarrow and Wearmouth in Northumbria, a superiority largely dependent on one name, Bede. This book is the result of that seminar together with extra papers supplied later. The book is scholarship at its most austere, but it is pervaded by a sense of barely suppressed excitement in almost all the contributions. Professor Lapidge puts it in his preface (p. viii):"It very quickly became clear from the discussion at the symposium that wholly new—indeed revolutionary—awareness was emerging of the role which Theodore had played in transmitting Greek learning to the Latin West and the establishment of higher education in Anglo-Saxon England. The foundations of this new awareness were twofold: the demonstration that the vast body of scholarship preserved in the so-called 'Leiden family' of glossaries had its origin in the school of Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury; and the imminent publication of the biblical commentaries to the Pentateuch and gospels which were similarly produced in that school. Together these previously untapped sources revealed an enormous range of learning in Greek and Latin patristic literature as well as expertise in scholarly disciplines otherwise scarcely known in the Latin West at that time." Dr. Lapidge does not overstate his case. Richard Marsden gives a study ofTheodore's Bible: the Pentateuch both learned (very) and penetrating . Jane Stevenson and Carmella Vircillo Franklin convincingly identify Theodore as the author of two rare but important texts. The latter is a life of St. Anastasius, a Persian soldier turned Christian martyr, whose cult was the result (as was Theodore's career) of the advance of Islam in the Near East. Anastasius's followers promoted his cult in a Rome where obscure saints were not exactly unknown in a way that shows that hype was as familiar to the seventh century as it is to the twentieth. Sebastian Brock illuminates the Syriac background in a way that shows how inadequate are the conventional accounts of Monophysitism and Nestorianism. Of the very widest interest is Thomas CharlesEdwards on Theodore's Penitential. He shows how easily Theodore's penitential discipline, learned in the tradition ofBasil,fitted in with the needs of Celtic Christianity. He says: "Theodore may be seen, in his penitential teaching, applying rules he had inherited from Basil, and applying them, moreover, to the conditions of a country in which the feud was part of the fabric of society. Inevitably this meant that his approach came close to that of the Irish, for they faced a similar situation." Not that Theodore liked the Irish much. Many Irish students came to Canterbury and he likened them to yapping puppy dogs. He wasn't being racialist. He was probably the most sophisticated intellectual and learned teacher in the Church: his Irish students were hicks from the sticks— BOOK REVIEWS 515 they could hardly have been anything else—in other words, Theodore was not immune to academic snobbery. In this case that was a venial sin. The book opens vistas that promise rich results for the history of the early Middle Ages if there is anyone to make use of them. Most of the contributors to this book are in their early middle age, many of them Cambridge dons the product of a famous generation of Anglo-Saxon scholars. Will they have similar successors? The prospects for the English groves of academe are not brilliant. Ewe John University ofManchester Bede and His World. With a preface by Michael Lapidge. Volume I: The Jarrow Lectures, 1958-1978;Volume II: The Jarrow Lectures, 1979-1993. (Brookfield ,Vermont:Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Company. 1994. Pp. xvi,999. $245.00.) A reviewer might wonder how...