Bede and His World (review)

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 to encompass the diversity of the thirty-six lectures collected in these two volumes, but Michael Lapidge's preface solves the problem. Lapidge borrows the categories employed by the first Jarrow lecturer , Bertram Colgrave, to outline Bede's achievement, and uses them to summarize the concerns of the lectures themselves: "Bede's life and writings; the historical and cultural milieux in which he worked, including not merely the immediate Northumbrian context, but also the wider English and European arenas which shaped his perceptions; Northumbrian manuscripts; Northumbrian art; and Northumbrian architecture" Q, ix). Nearly one-third of the lectures fall into each ofthe first two categories; the more specialized subjects are treated in four or five lectures each. The lectures have been given every year since 1958 in Bede's own church, St. Paul's, which Colgrave rightly called "perhaps the most historic parish church in England" (1,3). The forum ofthe lectures is peculiarly British;they are learned talks not just for a general public but even for a local one, including "the English motorist, hurrying north along Al on his way to Scotland" (so pictured in the introduction to Colgrave's lecture, 1, 1). The first Jarrow lecture was held on the 1273rd anniversary of the dedication of the church, an event Colgrave sketches memorably. It was attended by Bede, then age 12, and probably also by King Ecgfrith, whose mind, Colgrave imagines, wandered from the proceedings to an impending, ill-advised, and ultimately fatal expedition against the Picts (I, 3). As the lectures have developed over the decades, they have come to serve the needs of scholars rather than those of the general public. To signal this change, Lapidge points to Paul Myvaert's 1964 discussion of Bede and Gregory the Great (1, 103-132), which included full scholarly apparatus, as opposed to recommendations for further reading (I, xv). But the lectures that preceded Meyvaert's are by no means general disquisitions for the benefit of a curious laity. For example,the fourth,Harold McCarterTaylor's description of English ar- 516 BOOK REVIEWS chitecture in the time of Bede, an excellent primer, is detailed and somewhat dry. And some of those that followed Meyvaert's, such as David Wilson's "Reflections on the St. Ninian's Isle Treasure" (1969), retain a gratifying, personal perspective. Speaking more than a decade after the discovery of the treasure, which he describes as "the most important Scottish hoard of the early Christian period,"Wilson remarks that unpacking it at the British Museum was "the most exciting moment of my life as an archaeologist" (I, 249). Equally engaging is Patrick Wormald's eloquent and witty presentation of the charter evidence for the conversion of England,which is designed to persuade readers that "charterstudy is not without its charms" GI, 613). His lecture, which shows the subject to be both complex and compelling, includes appendices listing the charters and offering, for "both the interested amateur and the professional expert," a guide to their reliability and to secondary sources (?, 636-640). Several of the lectures are classic essays in Anglo Saxon scholarship. These include R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford's discussion of the Codex Amiatinus, with twenty plates (J, 185-234), and T.J. Brown's 1971 extraordinary, even revolutionary lecture on "Northumbria and the Book of KeUs" (I, 285-320). The index...