Translated here for the first time into English, Bede's On the Nature of Things and On Times bring together cosmology and time-reckoning to form a unified science of computus —— the basis for the scientific education of the Middle Ages.
The Venerable Bede composed On the Nature of Things (De natura rerum) and On Times (De temporibus) at the outset of his career, about AD 703. Bede fashioned himself as a teacher to his people and his age, and these two short works show him selecting, editing, and clarifying a mass of difficult and sometimes dangerous material. He insisted that his reader understand the mathematical and physical basis of time, and though he was dependent on his textual sources, he also included observations of his own. But Bede was also a Christian exegete who thought deeply and earnestly about how salvation-history connected to natural history and the history of the peoples of the earth. To comprehend his religious mentality, we have to take on board his views on "science" —— and vice versa.On the Nature of Things is a survey of cosmology. Starting with Creation and the universe as a whole, Bede reads the cosmos downwards from the heavens, through the atmosphere, to the oceans and rivers of earth. This order (recapitulating the four elements or fire, air, water and earth) was derived from his main source, Isidore of Seville's On the Nature of Things. However, Bede separated out Isidore's chapters on time, and dealt with them in On Times. On Times, like its "second, revised and enlarged edition" The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione), works upwards from the smallest units of time, through the day and night, the week, month and year, to the world-ages. Bede's innovation is to introduce a practical manual of Easter reckoning, or computus, into this survey. Hidden beneath the matter-of-fact surface of the work is an intense polemic about the correct principles for determining the date of Easter —— principles which in Bede's view are bound up with both the integrity of nature as God's creation, and the theological significance of Christ's death and resurrection. In these works Bede re-united cosmology and time-reckoning to form a unified science of computus that would become the framework for Carolingian and Scholastic basic scientific education.
Calvin B. Kendall is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Minnesota. His many books include The Allegory of the Church: Romanesque Portals and Their Verse Inscriptions (University of Toronto Press 1998) and (with Faith Wallis) Bede: On the Nature of Things and On Times (Liverpool University Press 2010). Faith Wallis is Professor (Retired), Dept. of History and Classical Studies, McGill University. Her many books include Isidore of Seville: On the Nature of Things (2016), Bede: Commentary on Revelation (2013), Bede: The Reckoning of Time (revised edition 2004), all in the Liverpool University Press Translated Texts for Historians series.
Accurate, elegant, utterly clear and easily accessible, even for readers who lack expertise in the relevant disciplines. The Commentaries and Appendices shed floods of light on Bede's mental processes and expertise, and will represent a very significant landmark in Bedan studies. The book, in short, will be a wonderful addition to the series of TTH. Bede, a Benedictine monk (d. 735) from the Abbey of Jarrow in Northumbria, is a stellar witness to the excellence of the monastic schools in the eighth century. Best known for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, his total output consists of twelve folio volumes, with works on theology, Scripture, grammar, and science. He was the last of a group of natural philosophers known as the Encyclopedists: Lucretius, Pliny, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville. At a time when practically the whole corpus of Greek philosophy was eclipsed (only Plato's Timaeus and some parts of Aristotle's logical works being available) this group of scholars kept alive a genuine interest in the natural world for its own sake and a recognition of the need for mathematics. Kendall and Wallis deserve credit for making two of Bede's works available to scholars who are not able to work with Latin texts. Although Bede wrote that he never departed more than fifty miles from his abbey, he had an impressive array of authors available to him: Pliny, Augustine, Isidore, Pseudo-Isidore, Ambrose, Vergil, Dionysius Exiguus,Junilius. Bede's use of these sources was not always critical, sometimes repeating claims he knew to be false. As was typical in the Middle Ages, credit was rarely given to the sources used, but the editors provide a complete set of notes tracking the sources. Consistent with virtually all of the natural philosophers since Aristotle, Bede states that the earth is a sphere (46). What is significant is the casual way that he describes the proof for this assertion: as one travels north and south, different star patterns are visible. For example, in Egypt the constellations of the Great and Little Bear cannot be seen. The claim that Columbus' sailors were afraid of falling off a flat earth is a modern legend (J. Russell: Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians). Considering that Bede was writing nine centuries before the invention of the telescope, he has an impressive knowledge of astronomy-retrograde motion of the planets, the speed of the movement of the sun and the moon through the Zodiac. Of course Bede's interest in these two phenomena is connected with the need to determine the date of Easter, which always occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This date had to be predicted well ahead of its occurrence to allow time for the season of Lent and its antecedents. The science dealing with these calculations has been called computus, and Bede's contributions to it exceed all previous works. As is seen in On Times, dealing with phenomena that are not strictly periodic can be challenging. He notes (ch. 10) that the date of the spring equinox arrives earlier and earlier each year and if an extra day is not added every fourth year, after 365 years the spring equinox would occur on December 20! Actually, since adding this day did not prevent the "creeping" of the date of the spring equinox backward in time, another modification was made by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, when he declared that Thursday, October 4, be followed by Friday, October 15. Bede only deals briefly with tides in On the Nature of Things (39), writing a more extensive work on this subject later. Here he ascribes the tides to a breathing action of the moon (ch. 39). I would translate the first sentence as: "When the moon inhales, the ocean is drawn back, and when it exhales, the ocean recedes." Although the Latin text is difficult, the authors have done a creditable job of translating. However, in chapter 45, it might be important to retain the plural form of ignibus and aquis, because Bede might have wanted to show that he was aware of different kinds of these elements. Also, since some historians have assumed that Copernicus denigrated the earth by taking it out of the center, it is good to remember that the center was the most degraded [humillimumJ position of all. In the same chapter, perhaps in creaturis ought to be rendered among creatures rather than in creation. The past two decades have seen something of a revolution in the study of the works of Bede. The eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk, once seen as a man of one book, has been increasingly studied in the totality of his rich and varied output. An important element in this reappraisal has been the increasing availability of writings other than his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in translation. Liverpool University Press has been at the forefront in producing these translations through their excellent series, 'Translated Texts for Historians'. Both the authors of the present volume have previously translated Bede for the series, and Faith Wallis's magisterial volume on De Temporum Ratione/On the Reckoning of Time has been a particular high-water mark in recent work on Bede's scientific writings. The current volume seems to be a spiritual successor to that work. The two brief treatises translated here were forerunners to De Temporum Ratione, in which Bede was substantially to rework them. De Natura Rerum/On the Nature of Things is a cosmographical treatise in which the author works his way down from the highest heavens to earth, discussing the celestial bodies and meteorological phenomena along the way. De Temporibus/On Times serves as a brief introduction to computus, the science of calculating time and especially the date of Easter. It also includes a brief world chronicle, divided according to the six ages of the world which, although first popularised by Augustine, Bede was to champion passionately. Both works are very compressed and their laconic style frequently hinders rather than helps understanding when the discussion becomes technical. It was partly to deal with such difficulties for his own pupils that Bede seems to have set about expanding on both works in De Temporum Ratione. Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis, however, supply the brief texts with ample notes, a detailed introduction and commentary, and no less than four appendices, one of which provides the translation of a hymn of Bede's composition on the relationship between the six world ages and the six days of creation. In their introduction Kendall and Wallis argue that Bede himself conceived of De Natura Rerum and De Temporibus as a pair, although the treatises were frequently to be separated in the manuscripts. They locate the works in a tradition of writing deliberately aimed at undermining superstition (as was Isidore of Seville's De Natura Rerum) and millenarian tendencies. While the two works are quite probably among Bede's earliest writings, Kendall and Wallis make a convincing case both for their place in Bede's overall corpus (connecting them with his early commentary on the Apocalypse, for instance), and for their definite originality on certain points. In particular, Bede's decision to uncouple the theory of the six world ages from the world chronology established by the Septuagint was aimed at undermining millenarian speculations that the world would end after six thousand years. It was also to lead to an accusation of heresy from some of his less intellectually precise countrymen. Kendall and Wallis also have some valuable things to say about Bede's attitude to Isidore of Seville. It has long been orthodoxy to declare that Bede distrusted his Spanish predecessor. Such a belief, while based on fairly slim evidence, has gained authority through constant repetition, and two articles by William D. McCready published in 1995, aimed at disproving it, have not had the influence they should have had. The authors here return to McCready's arguments and establish a convincing case for Isidore's influence on Bede that should lay the lazy repetition of well-known 'facts' to rest. For a translation of two such small works in a relatively slim volume, Kendall and Wallis's work is impressive for the sheer amount of detail it contains. De Natura Rerum and De Temporibus are unlikely to be many students' first encounters with Bede, but this translation ensures that even beginners will be able to engage with his scientific work without having to go straight to the Latin. If this means that more undergraduates will get to know Bede, not just as the key source for early English history, but as the dominating intellectual figure of his day (Kendall and Wallis show what a capable mathematician he must have been, for example), then so much the better. The volume meets the generally high standards of the series to which it belongs. The interlinear references to the page numbers of the Latin edition, that of Charles W. Jones from Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, cxxiii, are very helpful in works such as this (though on p. 109 the reference to /588/ in the Latin seems to have disappeared; it should appear just after the first semicolon in ch. 5). Much work has been expended on these seemingly slight texts and it is to be appreciated. The volume meets the generally high standards of the series to which it belongs. The interlinear references to the page numbers of the Latin edition, that of Charles W. Jones from Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, cxxiii, are very helpful in works such as this (though on p. 109 the reference to /588/ in the Latin seems to have disappeared; it should appear just after the first semicolon in ch. 5). Much work has been expended on these seemingly slight texts and it is to be appreciated. Following Faith Wallis's 1999 translation of Bede's De temporum ratione of AD 725 (DTR in the following; The Reckoning of Time), the Translated Texts for Historians series (TTH) of Liverpool University Press has now produced another two of Bede's scientific texts, De natura rerum (DNR in the following; On the Nature of Things) and De temporibus (DT; On Times), translated by Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis. With this publication, TTH presents not only another crucial computistical text to its readers, but also introduces cosmology to its genres. The book begins with a rather short introductory section of 42 pages, briefly discussing the date, purpose, structure, sources and models, transmission as well as related issues; on a single page the principles of the translation are outlined before an extensive inventory of the manuscripts containing these works and of their editions (24 pages) are provided. The core of this book consists of the translation of Bede's two texts of AD 703 with explanatory commentary to each chapter. At the end, the reader will find numerous short appendices: a translation of Bede's hymn on the Sex aetatibus mundi (an excellent German translation of this hymn by Fidel Radle already exists), an analysis of Bede's mathematics, of his treatment of the tides, and of his (non-existent) dependency on Lucretius. Finally, a select bibliography, an index of sources, and a general index are provided. In the absence of modern textbooks on the subjects, this translation is ideal as an introduction especially to early medieval cosmology, while, in terms of computistics, Wallis's 1999 translation of DTR presents a fuller picture. Excellent as the translation is, it is obviously designed more for students than for scholars. Bede's success from the late eighth century onwards was principally due to his elegant style of writing. For many medieval scientific texts, translations are absolutely essential for providing scholars with an understanding of a corrupted or extremely difficult technical passages. Not so in Bede's case, as none of the passages proved problematic for computistical scholars to comprehend (save, maybe, for chapter 21 of DNR). Access to Bede's scientific texts was also greatly helped by Charles W. Jones masterful editions, who published DT together with the more significant DTR in 1943, then DNR in 1980. Jones, however, provided a detailed (and as yet unsurpassed) commentary only to DTR, so that the commentary to Bede's early works of 703 in the present translation is the first since van der Hagen's discussion of most of the chapters of DT in his Observationes of 1733, pp. 253- 62 (strangely enough, van der Hagen's pioneering study is not even mentioned by Kendall and Wallis). Kendall and Wallis's commentary does not have the same scholarly depth as Jones's, as it serves merely as additional explanation of the content of the individual chapters. The overall impression is that it is the intention of the authors (and, indeed, of the series editors) not to confuse the reader with too many details, let alone scholarly debate. This approach leads to quite a number of statements remaining unexplained, while for others scholars' opposite opinions are ignored. A few examples may suffice here: On p. 8 it is argued, without any further explanation or cross-reference, that the composition of Isidore's De natura rerum may have been occasioned by the solar eclipse of 2 August 612; this argument is, in fact, taken from Fontaine, Traite de la nature, p. 5, who relies on Oppolzer's 1887 Canon der Finsternisse, map 87, which suggests that a total eclipse crossed the Hispanic peninsula from north-west to south-east on that date; more recent calculations made by NASA php?Ecl=06120802 ), however, illustrate that this eclipse was visible only in south- western Portugal and the southernmost tip of modern-day Spain, which casts doubt on Fontaine's theory; one may well wonder why Isidore was so impressed by a celestial phenomenon he quite certainly did not witness. On p. 22 it is suggested that early Roman Easter tables existed which observed 'the old equinox date,' i.e. 25 March; neither the Hippolytan table nor the Supputatio Romana does so. In fact, the only Easter table known at present that strictly observed the 25 March equinox is the latercus, the 84 (14)-year Easter reckoning which was, in all likelihood, invented in Aquitaine in the early fifth century; it retained its currency in Britain and Ireland right down to the eighth century, but it was never followed in Rome. On p. 24 it is argued that Victorius, in his Easter reckoning, allowed the Easter full moon to fall as early as 18 March; this is a common misconception, taking Victorius's outline in chapter 4 of his Prologue of the criteria employed by the Latini as reference to Victorius's own system. Victorius, however, here simply summarizes rules used by others, and a quick glance at his Easter table reveals that he did not allow the Easter full moon (luna 14) to fall earlier than 20 March, so that Easter Sunday should always occur after the spring equinox of 21 March. On p. 177 the Easter table of Victorius of Aquitaine is called "a clumsy attempt," and on p. 24 this table is described with similar disrespect; this is common scholarly opinion at least since Bruno Krusch's disrespectful statement of 1937 that Victorius was "ein ganz beschrankter Kopf und ausserdem noch nicht einmal ehrlich," presumably based on Columbanus's seventh-century and Bede's eighth- century criticism of Victorius. Rather the contrary, Victorius was one of the best mathematicians of the fifth century, the first person known to us to have calculated a 532-year Easter table. To hold his invention of double dates against him, or his mathematical skill, is to misjudge his intentions; by presenting alternatives, he was simply more tolerant and less dogmatic than his contemporaries. It should be kept in mind that the composition of a new Easter table (not to be confused with the rather simple continuation of an old one) was beyond the skills of seventh- or eighth-century computists, of Bede or any other, and to praise Bede for his mathematical skill while calling Victorius clumsy at the same time appears to be somewhat beside the point. Still, there are many interesting research aspects in this book, some better executed than others. First, the discussion of "Bede's attitude towards Isidore" (13-20), because it is disproportionately longer than comparable chapters in this book, presents an excellent summary of scholarly opinion. Second, as Bede generally followed Isidore as his principal model for the composition of his works of AD 703, the authors of the present book have, in many aspects, accepted and developed further the pioneering research of Jacques Fontaine. Brilliant as Fontaine's edition of Isidore's De natura rerum is, and convincing as many of his conclusions are, more caution is needed on some occasions. The question of the solar eclipse of 612 has already been addressed above. More importantly, Fontaine argued (Traite de la nature, p. 7) that the structure of Bede's two textbooks of AD 703 is principally owed to Isidore's outline, with chapters 9-48 of Isidore featuring in Bede's DNR, while the first eight chapters constitute the backbone of Bede's DT. This view is fully endorsed by Kendall and Wallis (7- 13), specifying this theory by stating that Bede added chapters of more technical content to DT, sometimes based on (not further specified) Irish sources. In fact, it is more the structure than the content of DT which relies directly on Irish sources, as it follows an outline of the divisions of time from momentum to cyclus known from Irish computistical textbooks. Most intriguingly, this outline also features in an as yet unpublished prologue to DT in two Vatican manuscripts, clearly indicating that the author of this prologue understood the importance of this outline for the structure of DT (cf. Warntjes, Munich Computus, pp. cviii-cx). Third, the list of manuscripts containing DT and DNR (43-66) updates all previous accounts and therefore is the most comprehensive inventory to date. It is the more regrettable, therefore, that the information given there is often confusing, sometimes incomplete, sometimes wrong. Again, a few examples may suffice: (i) On p. 48 it is argued concerning Cotton Caligula A XV (no. 42) that ch. 17 of DNR constitutes, in this eighth- century MS, "part of the Computus Cottonianus, the core of which was composed in Spain in the seventh century;" the Computus Cottonianus, however, covers folios 73r-80r in this MS, while ch. 17 of DNR on folio 71r is part of a different computistical text covering folios 65r-72r, which Lowe dates, in fact, to the ninth century (CLA 2, 19); the Computus Cottonianus, on the other hand, has been proved not to be of Spanish origin, as Cordoliani had claimed, by Gomez Pallares, who is here wrongly cited as proof for its Spanish origin; see Gomez Pallares, Studia Chronologica, p. 62: "El texto de C es perfectamente identificable y pertenece a una tradicion insular." (ii) For one MS of DNR, no. 57, it is stated that here DNR appears as part of the Frankish encyclopedia Lib. comp., while for other such MSS, nos. 61, 122, 131, this information is not given, for the first two there is not even a cross-reference Borst's list of MSS (cf. Borst, Schriften, 256-7, 303-4, 311-12, 1076, 1084-5). Likewise, for nos. 63 and 134 it is not mentioned that DNR is here part of the Frankish encyclopaedia Lib. calc. (or, at least, no explanation is given why Borst may be wrong in claiming it is; still, cross-references to his description of these MSS are needed: Schriften, 257-8, 313, 1381-2, 1449). (iii) On p. 65, the information concerning the MS Chartres, Bibliotheque municipale, 70, is not quite right, as a reproduction of 72r has survived, which contains the end of chapter 44 of DNR (ut uinculis discurrentibus...), chapters 45 and 46 complete, and the beginning of chapter 47 (as far as XXI pedum respondent umbrae XVI; I would like to thank the Chartres librarian, Michele Neveu, for clarifying this a while back and for sending me the reproduction). (iv) On pp. 53-4 and 63 the impression is given that DTR appears twice in MS Valenciennes, Bibliotheque municipale, 174 (nos. 115 and 90 respectively) by referring to the Bedan texts in this codex as 'DTR + DNR/DT + DTR'; this is not the case, the codex starts with DNR. (v) On pp. 56 and 64 the Bedan texts in Zurich Zentralbibliothek, Car C 176 are listed as "DT/DNT inserted in DTR?"; "inserted in DTR?" has to be deleted, as only a few scattered chapters of DTR appear, among other computistica, before and after the section containing DT and DNR; also, "DT/DNT" should be "DT + DNR" as DNR does not follow immediately on DT (there are other texts inserted between them on fols. 187v-188r). In BAV Pal. Lat. 1448 (p. 63, no. 96), DT features twice; the authors provide folio-references only for the second copy, for the first one they employ the place- holder "?-?"; the reader should replace these by 1v-6v. (vi)Concerning the use of these manuscripts in the translation, it is not quite understandable why the St Gall manuscripts were included solely on the basis that they are now available online, while other manuscripts of greater importance, especially from Cologne but also from Valenciennes, which are as easily accessible online, have not been consulted. Fourth, one of the main contribution that this book makes is to create an awareness that innovative and, for its time, complex (if from a modern point of view basic) mathematics were executed (pp. 150-2, 186-7) in an age generally assumed to have been stagnant of innovations and ignorant of true science. This argument, and especially the reconstruction of Bede's method of approximation (186-7), would have been respectively strengthened and confirmed had it been compared with similar (and more complex) calculations of the time, especially the division of the 24 hours of the saltus lunae by the 235 lunations of the 19-year cycle found in the contemporary Irish textbooks and numerous other texts and manuscripts (cf. Warntjes, Munich Computus, pp. 272-7), as well as Agriustia's fifth-century duodecimal approximation of 1/14 (see now Alden Mosshammer, "The computus of 455 and the laterculus of Augustalis, with an appendix on the fractional method of Agriustia," in I. Warntjes and D. " Croinin, eds., Easter controversy, pp. 21-47, at 43-7). This last aspect illustrates the more general risk inherent in this fine book: it gives the novice to the field the impression that Bede was, in computistical studies, the only individual who held up the torch of learning in an otherwise not only dark, but rather pitch-black age between Isidore's encyclopaedic and cosmological achievements and the Carolingian renaissance. Two approaches of the editors lead to this impression: first, only verbatim quotes are noted in the translation, and second the commentary neglects all computistical texts which are, in Jones's words, "within Bede's range." The list of computistical texts between ca. 650 to 760 is far too long to be outlined here, and not a single one of these texts is mentioned in the present book. Thus, Bede is here presented in isolation, which must quite naturally lead to an exaggeration of his scientific achievement and only to a limited understanding of Bede's context and, more importantly, his own statements. One example may suffice: In DT chapter 11, Bede argues that "some people" explain the cyclic character of the 19-year cycle by omission of the lunar bissextile days. Who are these people and where did this idea come from? No further comment on the scientific context is given either in the notes to the chapter or in the commentary. As Bede's explains, the 19-year cycle is commonly divided into periods of 8 and 11 years, both non-cyclic. In third-century Rome, an 8-year lunar cycle was applied, the construction of which was discussed by Quintus Julius Hilarianus in the late fourth century. Dionysius Exiguus, when introducing the Alexandrian Easter reckoning which was then also followed by Bede, copied the passage from Hilarianus, which left him with the impossible task of explaining how 11 years could be cyclic when 8 years are cyclic and one year is not. Irish computists of the seventh century made various attempt to explain this apparent mathematical contradiction, and these attempts are well-documented in the Computus Einsidlensis (Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, 321 (647), 114-8) and the Munich Computus (chapter 60; Warntjes, Munich Computus, pp. 256-67), both contemporary with Bede. These are the "some people" referred to by Bede here. As is outlined in the discussion of the manuscript evidence of Bede's work, the wide dissemination of the Bedan texts translated in the book under discussion here started only from about AD 800 onwards. Until then, Bede's texts were not standard and numerous different approaches to the field of computistics existed and were available in the various monastic libraries. To ignore all of these is to paint only a very small part of the full picture. The novice to the field of computistics certainly should not mistake this small Bedan part for the whole picture. Jones's 1943 edition of Bede's computistical works was a milestone in the modern study of computistics. Because of its excellence, it dominated the field for decades and remains unsurpassed to the present day. This led to the fateful belief that Bede's are the only scientific texts worth studying for the early middle ages. Within the past few decades this view has been in a slow process of revision, principally by the edition of other major computistical works of the period ca. 650 to 818, particularly of De ratione conputandi by Daibhi " Croinin in 1988, of 20 important Frankish texts by Arno Borst in 2006, and of the Munich Computus in 2010. Because of the quality of the translation of Bede's DNR and DT discussed here and also of Wallis's 1999 translation of Bede's major computistical work, DTR, but also because of the way these texts are presented by their translators, modern scholarship runs the risk of falling back into the decades following Jones's magnum opus. The only way of avoiding this is by publishing translations in the same TTH series of at least the major Irish computistical texts contemporary with Bede, the Computus Einsidlensis and especially De ratione conputandi, and the principal Frankish texts, edited by Borst under the abbreviations Dial. Burg. of 727, Dial. Neustr. of 737, Lect. comp. of 760, and Lib. ann. of 793. This small volume is packed with material that will be of use to a great many readers. It is of course very handy to have clear, clean translations such as these of Bede's early, paired works, On the Nature of Things and On Times. It is important to be reminded of the place these works have in the history of Bede's development: while Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis's introduction and notes to the translation make clear the relationship between Bede's later The Reckoning of Time and these first efforts at producing educational material, they do so in order to urge appropriate attention to the earlier texts and not merely to what came next. And it is fascinating to trace, through the copious notes and commentaries, both the continuities and the shifts in Bede's representations of time and history across his long writing life. But equally valuable are the many detailed discussions of medieval science found throughout the volume in the introduction, the notes, and the appendices. The authors have set out to illustrate "the scientific dimension" (7) of Bede's imagination, and they have succeeded admirably. The introduction sets out to show the operations and complementarities of On the Nature of Things, "an inventory of the material universe based on a venerable classical model" (1), and On Times, "the new Christian genre of the computus" (1). The translators show that both works are well suited to educational purposes, and that each reveals a desire to demystify natural phenomena as a counter to superstition. (Bede might also, they suggest, have been particularly keen to combat suggestions that the end of days was imminent, a theme to which he returns in his Commentary on the Apocalypse.) While the manuscript transmission rapidly separated the works, Kendall and Wallis demonstrate conclusively that Bede thought of the two pieces as a unit, even though, as they also point out, they represent a splitting of Isidore's De natura rerum. The introduction includes a useful overview of De natura rerum and its circulation in England, while the typographical conventions observed in the translation itself-to present direct use of source material in italic type with attributions in notes at the foot of the page-graphically underlines for a reader the nature of Bede's debt to Isidore (as well as to his other sources). Kendall and Wallis point out that Bede omits Isidore's allegorizations and adds quite a bit of technical material on the calculation of Easter, but they also remark, following William McCready, that the traditional scholarly view of Bede's contempt for Isidore might be overdrawn, and does not take sufficient account of the degree to which Bede made use of Isidore, whatever his opinion of the latter's work might have been. A helpful overview of the Easter controversy follows, as the authors sketch out the development of "a totally different type of book-a manual of Christian time-reckoning, or computus" (21). Next Kendall and Wallis place Bede's interest in time within the context of the Christian world-chronicle, again deftly showing how Bede makes use of his sources. His removal of dating from Isidore's world-histories places the emphasis on sequence rather than on dating; again, an effort to avoid the millenarian implications of traditional readings of the Six Ages might be responsible for Bede's changes. Here as throughout the introduction, the translators present Bede as both a religious and a scientific writer, insisting that we must take on board both aspects of his thought in order to appreciate his project. The introduction is a goldmine for manuscript scholars, offering a detailed discussion of the transmission and glossing of the manuscripts of On the Nature of Things and On Time. A wonderful inventory of manuscripts that gathers dispersed information and corrects and updates, it would itself be enough reason for many readers to buy the book. I have already suggested the usefulness of the presentation of the translations: in On Times, for example, the typographic and notation conventions make it very easy to see Bede jump from Isidore's De natura rerum to his own explanations of the nineteen-year cycle and the "leap of the moon" (174) to Dionysius Exiguus's Argumenta, and then back to Isidore's Chronicon. The notes helpfully indicate where Bede would later expand his points in On the Reckoning of Time, and the detailed commentaries that follow the two translations offer even more discussion and detail. Mathematically curious readers can work through an appendix that suggests how Bede might have constructed his formula "for determining the course of the moon through the signs of the zodiac" (186), while those of a poetic disposition can compare the translation of Bede's Hymn on the Work of the First Six Days and the Ages of the World to the account of the Six Ages in On Times (as well as in The Reckoning of Time and On Genesis). A very useful "Index of Sources and Parallels" rounds out this exemplary piece of work. The introduction is a goldmine for manuscript scholars, offering a detailed discussion of the transmission and glossing of the manuscripts of On the Nature of Things and On Time. A wonderful inventory of manuscripts that gathers dispersed information and corrects and updates, it would itself be enough reason for many readers to buy the book The Venerable Bede (672/3-735 A.D.), early England's preeminent monastic scholar, is known today mainly for authoring The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, that great historiographic masterpiece on the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in England and their conversion to Christianity. Less evident to general readers is that this work came late in Bede's career and that his first ventures in publication go back some thirty years or more, to the year 703, when he wrote two smaller works, known in English by the titles On the Nature of Things and On Times. The present volume, the shared product of two distinguished scholars and proven translators of Bede, brings together these two early pieces for the first time in English translation. In doing so, the volume continues a vital trend in Bedan studies: namely, of render ing his difficult Latin into English, in expert yet affordable volumes with lucid introductions and much helpful commentary, in order to make Bede's thinking and writing more accessible to wider audiences. Like the other Bede translations in the Liverpool University Press's Translated Texts for Historians series, this one is invaluable for its illuminating introduction, which gracefully and articulately places the primary texts within their essential contexts. The major topics include the works' date and purpose, their genre, their content and structure, and their reception and manuscript distribution. Here the editors are keen to overturn some well-worn but unhelpful notions. Although conceived as texts for use in the monastic schoolroom, where Bede as a young priest was quite active, neither On the Nature of Things nor On Times should be thought of as derivative or pedestrian in their respective treatments of cosmology and chronology. On the Nature of Things in fact rather boldly restructures and critiques Isidore of Seville's treatise of the same name, and much of the introduction seeks to dispel the notion that Bede did not like the Spanish churchman. On Times, though it would later be replaced by Bede's later and larger work The Reckoning of Time (completed in 725 A.D.), is presented as equally daring for its blending of Isidorian and Irish traditions, which is evident in the structuring of the work according to units of time, beginning with the subdivisions of the hour and moving on up to world ages. On Times also included a world chronicle in which Bede dropped the bombshell of redating the birth of Christ from annus mundi 5199 to 3952. What is perhaps most illustrative about On the Nature of Things and On Times in this regard, given their status as early works, is their demonstration that Bede was an audacious thinker right from the get-go, even when it came to the utilitarian genres of such didactic treatises. Such a view accords well with what scholars have recently been saying about Bede's biblical commentaries, dispelling any notion that he was an unoriginal or conservative thinker. The translation itself is extremely well produced: it stays close to the Latin yet employs the best in modern idioms; I could uncover no errors of any kind. Scholars of Bede and the early Middle Ages will read these works with great interest for the light they throw on the organization of Bede's thought and the larger trajectory of his biblical vision; historians of science, meanwhile, will enjoy having in so inviting a volume translations of two early medieval works that had a strong hold on understandings of chronology and cosmology up till modern times. The translation itself is extremely well produced: it stays close to the Latin yet employs the best in modern idioms; I could uncover no errors of any kind. Scholars of Bede and the early Middle Ages will read these works with great interest for the light they throw on the organization of Bede's thought and the larger trajectory of his biblical vision; historians of science, meanwhile, will enjoy having in so inviting a volume translations of two early medieval works that had a strong hold on understandings of chronology and cosmology up till modern times.
Bede, a Benedictine monk (d. 735) from the Abbey of Jarrow in Northumbria, is a stellar witness to the excellence of the monastic schools in the eighth century. Best known for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, his total output consists of twelve folio volumes, with works on theology, Scripture, grammar, and science.He was the last of a group of natural philosophers known as the Encyclopedists: Lucretius, Pliny, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville. At a time when practically the whole corpus of Greek philosophy was eclipsed (only Plato''s Timaeus and some parts of Aristotle''s logical works being available) this group of scholars kept alive a genuine interest in the natural world for its own sake and a recognition of the need for mathematics. Kendall and Wallis deserve credit for making two of Bede''s works available to scholars who are not able to work with Latin texts.Although Bede wrote that he never departed more than fifty miles from his abbey, he had an impressive array of authors available to him:Pliny, Augustine, Isidore, Pseudo-Isidore, Ambrose, Vergil, Dionysius Exiguus,Junilius. Bede''s use of these sources was not always critical, sometimes repeating claims he knew to be false. As was typical in the Middle Ages, credit was rarely given to the sources used, but the editors provide a complete set of notes tracking the sources.Consistent with virtually all of the natural philosophers since Aristotle, Bede states that the earth is a sphere (46). What is significant is the casual way that he describes the proof for this assertion: as one travels north and south, different star patterns are visible. For example, in Egypt the constellations of the Great and Little Bear cannot be seen. The claim that Columbus'' sailors were afraid of falling off a flat earth is a modern legend (J. Russell: Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians).Considering that Bede was writing nine centuries before the invention of the telescope, he has an impressive knowledge of astronomy-retrograde motion of the planets, the speed of the movement of the sun and the moon through the Zodiac. Of course Bede''s interest in these two phenomena is connected with the need to determine the date of Easter, which always occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This date had to be predicted well ahead of its occurrence to allow time for the season of Lent and its antecedents.The science dealing with these calculations has been called computus, and Bede''s contributions to it exceed all previous works. As is seen in On Times, dealing with phenomena that are not strictly periodic can be challenging. He notes (ch. 10) that the date of the spring equinox arrives earlier and earlier each year and if an extra day is not added every fourth year, after 365 years the spring equinox would occur on December 20! Actually, since adding this day did not prevent the "creeping" of the date of the spring equinox backward in time, another modification was made by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, when he declared that Thursday, October 4, be followed by Friday, October 15.Bede only deals briefly with tides in On the Nature of Things (39), writing a more extensive work on this subject later. Here he ascribes the tides to a breathing action of the moon (ch. 39). I would translate the first sentence as: "When the moon inhales, the ocean is drawn back, and when it exhales, the ocean recedes."Although the Latin text is difficult, the authors have done a creditable job of translating. However, in chapter 45, it might be important to retain the plural form of ignibus and aquis, because Bede might have wanted to show that he was aware of different kinds of these elements. Also, since some historians have assumed that Copernicus denigrated the earth by taking it out of the center, it is good to remember that the center was the most degraded [humillimumJ position of all. In the same chapter, perhaps in creaturis ought to be rendered among creatures rather than in creation.
The volume meets the generally high standards of the series to which it belongs. The interlinear references to the page numbers of the Latin edition, that of Charles W. Jones from Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, cxxiii, are very helpful in works such as this (though on p. 109 the reference to /588/ in the Latin seems to have disappeared; it should appear just after the first semicolon in ch. 5). Much work has been expended on these seemingly slight texts and it is to be appreciated.
1. This is the first English translation of Bede's On the Nature of Things and On Times.2. The translators have provided a thorough introduction to the basic principles and aims of Bede's computus ---- the science of time-reckoning necessary for determining the dates of Easter.3. The translators have also provided extensive annotations and commentaries on the technical aspects of the various chapters of the two works.