Bede and the Future ed. by Peter Darby and Faith Wallis (review)

In bringing together nine original essays, this collection demonstrates the great value of asking a group of scholars involved in particular areas of research on the preeminent author of Anglo-Saxon England, Bede (672/3-735), to consider an overarching theme in his work, his understanding of the future. Developing out of a session at the 2011 International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, it extends the pioneering work of Scott DeGregorio, evident in his own collection, Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede (2006), to challenge the view that Bede merely transmitted earlier traditions. In this case, the organizers and editors, Peter Darby and Faith Wallis, were both already enmeshed in the topic. Wallis, to take the more senior scholar first, had been working on it at least since her translation—accompanied by an erudite introduction, notes, and commentary as well as a translation of Bede's letter to Plegwine, a central text in her construction of Bede's developing thought on this issue—of the De temporum ratione as Bede: The Reckoning of Time (1999). Moreover, at the start of the decade, she must already have been far into her translation of his Expositio Apocalypseos, Bede: Commentary on Revelation (2013). Darby would have been revising his doctoral thesis, written under the direction of Nicholas Brooks, into Bede and the End of Time (2012).

Although the editors discuss the "many futures" that they find in Bede's writings, there are, it appears to me, two main ones, the stronger shaped further by their Introduction and by their arrangement of the papers "in broadly chronological order" (pp. 3-4). While sharpening some of the individual arguments, this decision also makes their conclusions appear at times more certain than they are. Let me explain. The editors are right when they assert that "the next great task of Bede studies will be a synthetic intellectual biography of the man set against the latest scholarship on his milieu and his age" (p. 4). And yet their own division of Bede's writing by "six important milestones for his career" (p. 7) has the effect of emphasizing changes in his thought as he responded to immediate crises such as the apocalyptic speculation that gathered around the year 703 (Wallis's "Why did Bede Write a Commentary on Revelation?"), the uncertainty in his own monastery caused by his abbot's sudden departure in 716 (Christopher Grocock's "Separation Anxiety: Bede and Threats to Wearmouth and Jarrow"), and an increasing unease in his final years about the future of the Church in Northumbria (Alan Thacker's "Why did Heresy Matter to Bede? Present and Future Contexts" and DeGregorio's "Visions of Reform: Bede's Later Writings in Context"). The alternative is to see a greater continuity found in what they, citing the scholarship of Jan Davidse and Thacker, identify as fundamental in all of Bede's writings: "[H]e looked to the biblical and post-biblical periods with one eye on the time to come, in the hope that those who read his works would understand God's message and divine plan more fully" (p. 2). Indeed, this longer view appears more strongly in Darby's "Bede's History of the Future," James T. Palmer's "The Ends and Futures of Bede's De temporum ratione," Máirín Mac Carron's "Christology and the Future in Bede's Annus Domini," and Paul C. Hilliard's "Quae res Quem sit Habitura Finem, Posterior Aetas Videbit: Prosperity, Adversity and Bede's Hope for the Future of Northumbria." Calvin B. Kendall's "Bede and Islam" does not fit into either group because it introduces a major geopolitical shift that occurred during this time, but one that, the author concludes, Bede did not recognize. Whether Bede's career was defined by constant anxiety over changing circumstances or by a security that allowed him to pursue his many interests has yet to be answered. In either...