Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of The Venerable Bede ed. by Scott DeGregorio (review)

REVIEWS 289 man himself, especially when read alongside other solid and exhaustive biographies of Marlowe, such as the volumes by Kuriyama and Riggs. NEEMA PARVINI, English, Royal Holloway, University of London Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of The Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio, Medieval European Studies 7 (Morgantown, WV: West Viriginia University Press 2006) xii +287 pp. The essays of Innovation and Tradition largely grew out of paper sessions at the International Medieval Congress, and they lay stress on what the book’s excellent editor Scott DeGregorio calls the most important new trends in Bedan scholarship: the new prominence of Bede’s enormous exegetical output for students of Bede; the rising number of inquiries which treat Bede’s work as a whole and draw attention to the numerous points of contact between his spiritual , scientific, and historical works; and a growing skepticism of Bede’s selfpresentation as a humble monk who did not dare elaborate or contest the work of the Church Fathers. The collection thus heavily emphasizes Bede’s exegetical output at the expense of the historical works for which Bede is more famous. The first two essays in the volume, Roger Ray’s “Who Did Bede Think He Was?” and Alan Thacker’s “Bede and the Ordering of Understanding,” together make an excellent entry point for the kind of approaches championed by DeGregorio. Thacker provides a compelling overview of Bede’s life and work from the perspective of his development as an exegetical scholar, and Ray’s engaging discussion of Bede’s many departures from tradition show that we cannot take Bede’s protest that he was merely “following in the footsteps of the fathers” (patrum uestigia sequens)2 at face value. The arguments in both articles ought to be seen as forming the background for the papers that follow. Nevertheless, it bears saying that Ray’s speculations about how Bede might have felt about his intellectual pre-eminence “in his heart” do not invite much confidence (14). Thacker is likewise guilty of speculation when he wonders whether the Hieronymian vitriol Bede unleashed against detractors was because he had royal blood (40) or whether Bede “thought of himself as the Augustine of his age” (63). The authors might have been better served if, rather than ask the now unanswerable question “what did Bede think of himself,” they concentrated on how Bede’s conventionally self-deprecating authorial persona in some contexts relates to his outstanding self-confidence in others. To cite the need for captatio benevolentiae, as Ray does (17), is an obvious starting point, but it is just the beginning of a better understanding Bede’s textual self-projection. Perhaps these two essays’ greatest shared strength is the way in which both demonstrate the great need for such a reappraisal of Bede’s monkish humility. In the collection’s final paper, Joyce Hill details some of the ways in which the Carolingians, who quickly accepted Bede as doctor, used Bede’s work. “Carolingian Perspectives on the Authority of Bede” makes a fitting end to the book, not only because it focuses most exclusively on Bede’s posthumous reputation, but also because its broad view of Bede’s achievement comple2 This phrase is a leitmotif uniting most of this collection’s essays. Appearances of the Latin phrases in Bede’s own work are most exhaustively cited by Ray, 11 n. 2. REVIEWS 290 ments the perspectives of the opening essays. Hill also argues that Bede’s interest for the Carolingians partly rested on the fact that they viewed him as a compiler like themselves, a picture of Bede that is otherwise rejected by most of the papers on Bede’s exegesis presented in this volume. Several of these essays on Bede’s spiritual writings focus on just one or two works. “Footsteps of His Own: Bede’s Commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah” by DeGregorio stands out among these for the way it integrates Bede’s exegetical innovations (here, a complete commentary on the books Ezra and Nehemiah along allegorical lines) with his commitment to church reform in the Northumbrian church (most famously on display in Epistola ad Ecgberhtum and in the Historia Ecclesiastica). This essay is the clearest example...