Bede: Part 1, Fascicles 1–4 by George Hardin Brown and Frederick M. Biggs (review)

This helpful book by Frederick Biggs and George Hardin Brown is an addition to the recent quiet renaissance in source studies that may become the most enduring academic contribution of our age. Alongside new scholarly editions and translations, there is now a growing collection of encyclopedic, cross-cutting works such as Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge's Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts in England before 1100 (2014), or Lapidge's Anglo-Saxon Library (2006). In addition, the opportunities that new technologies provide for disseminating, expanding, and updating such material have been willingly embraced in projects such as the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, the Dictionary of Old English, and the electronic Sawyer catalogue of charters.

It is in such a context that this volume, Bede: Part I, and its promised successor, Bede: Part II, should be seen and rightly praised. Biggs and Brown have benefited from all the products named above, but their own work also contributes to the growing stock of such enterprises. Bede I and II are the latest installments in the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (SASLC) series, which traces the use of the works of authors in Anglo-Saxon England. These books on Bede, arguably the most influential Anglo-Saxon scholar, go beyond previous offerings, however, taking the series in an important new direction, since they will eventually appear electronically. This innovative publishing model is a brave departure and Amsterdam University Press are to be congratulated for putting the interests of scholarship above potential profit.

In this first volume, Biggs and Brown examine the influence of Bede's "Educational Works," "Histories," "Poetry," and "Saints' Lives." The next book will cover: "Aids to Biblical Study," "Chapter Divisions," "Commentaries," "Homilies," "Letters," "Lost works," and the "Martyrology." There will be differences of opinion about whether these were the right lines upon which to divide Bede's works. Can we be sure that texts such as De locis sanctis were intended simplistically as "aids to Biblical study"? How does one classify the Historia abbatum? There is still no thorough treatment of Bede's attitude to genre, but there are signs that it was important to him, and so it should affect our appreciation of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, for present purposes, Biggs and Brown have ensured that between the two books they do not omit any Bedan, or potentially Bedan, work.

Each entry begins with a summary of the individual Bedan text and an analysis of its content and context that is up-to-date, though occasionally somewhat partisan. Together with the stimulating Introduction to Bede and his corpus with which the volume begins, these commentaries by two eminent Bedan scholars make the book a valuable aid for those working on Bede himself as well as on later writers. The entries collect and discuss five categories of information in what is termed the headnote: manuscripts, booklists, Anglo-Saxon versions, quotations and citations, and references. At first glance the array of data looks complex, presented as it is with plentiful abbreviations (and with the Bibliography only to be included in the second volume), but the system is sensible, and readers will soon find it second nature.

These sections represent the bulk of the volume. The meticulous detail is impressive. Typos and other minor errors—Penda did not "support" Edwin at Hatfield Chase (p. 174), but helped to overthrow and kill him—are few and far between. The catalogue of usages would be helpful on its own, but the authors go much further. They discuss the quotations, sometimes at great length, dealing with often very complicated material. By reassessing every citation identified in earlier editions, Biggs and Brown provide greater accuracy in the attributions, at times dismissing some of the vaguer possibilities previously suggested. In places, they have even gone back to the manuscripts to make their commentary more robust.

These discussions act...