Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1946. / "Select bibliography": p. 260-264.

No description available.

Texte remanié de: Doct. diss.--New York, 1985. / Bibliogr. p. 234-251.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Virginia. / Life. Bibliography: p. [3]-5.

This dissertation examines the methods and sources employed by Bede in the construction of his account of the Gregorian mission, thereby providing an insight into how an early medieval historian worked. In Chapter 1, I begin by setting out the context for this study, through a discussion of previous compositional analyses of Bede’s works and the resulting interpretations of the nature and purpose of his library. Chapters 2-4 analyze the sources of the narrative of the Gregorian mission in the Historia ecclesiastica. Each of Bede’s statements is interrogated and its basis established, while the ways in which he used his material to frame the story in the light of his preconceptions and agendas are examined. Chapter 5 collects all the sources identified in the earlier Chapters and organizes them thematically, providing a clearer view of the material Bede was working from. This assessment is then extended in Chapter 6, where I reconstruct, where possible, those ‘lost’ sources used by Bede and consider how the information he used reached him. In this Chapter, I also examine the implications of Bede’s possession of certain ‘archival’ sources for our understanding of early Anglo-Saxon libraries, suggesting more pragmatic purposes for them, beyond those they have usually been credited with. The Chapter ends with an assessment of Bede’s primary sources for the account of the Gregorian mission and an examination of the reasons he possessed so few. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss those passages of Bede’s account of the ‘mission fathers’, whose origins were not able to be established in Chapters 2-4. Bede’s use of a set of proto-homiletic sources of a hagiographic nature, dedicated to the early bishops of Canterbury and the mission, emerges. The basic outlines of this collection are set out and the context for their composition described. Throughout, the dissertation is intended not only as end in itself, but as the basis for further investigation both of Bede’s methods and sources, and those of others. In particular, the provision of a more comprehensive awareness of Bede’s resources enables future work to dispense with the narrative Bede has superimposed on his evidence. This thus lays the foundations for re-writing, and not merely re-interpreting, the history of early Christian Kent on a firmer evidential basis than previously possible.

This dissertation examines the methods and sources employed by Bede in the construction of his account of the Gregorian mission, thereby providing an insight into how an early medieval historian worked. In Chapter 1, I begin by setting out the context for this study, through a discussion of previous compositional analyses of Bede’s works and the resulting interpretations of the nature and purpose of his library. Chapters 2-4 analyze the sources of the narrative of the Gregorian mission in the Historia ecclesiastica. Each of Bede’s statements is interrogated and its basis established, while the ways in which he used his material to frame the story in the light of his preconceptions and agendas are examined. Chapter 5 collects all the sources identified in the earlier Chapters and organizes them thematically, providing a clearer view of the material Bede was working from. This assessment is then extended in Chapter 6, where I reconstruct, where possible, those ‘lost’ sources used by Bede and consider how the information he used reached him. In this Chapter, I also examine the implications of Bede’s possession of certain ‘archival’ sources for our understanding of early Anglo-Saxon libraries, suggesting more pragmatic purposes for them, beyond those they have usually been credited with. The Chapter ends with an assessment of Bede’s primary sources for the account of the Gregorian mission and an examination of the reasons he possessed so few. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss those passages of Bede’s account of the ‘mission fathers’, whose origins were not able to be established in Chapters 2-4. Bede’s use of a set of proto-homiletic sources of a hagiographic nature, dedicated to the early bishops of Canterbury and the mission, emerges. The basic outlines of this collection are set out and the context for their composition described. Throughout, the dissertation is intended not only as end in itself, but as the basis for further investigation both of Bede’s methods and sources, and those of others. In particular, the provision of a more comprehensive awareness of Bede’s resources enables future work to dispense with the narrative Bede has superimposed on his evidence. This thus lays the foundations for re-writing, and not merely re-interpreting, the history of early Christian Kent on a firmer evidential basis than previously possible.

Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Hohen Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Rostock.

Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Hohen Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Rostock.

Inaug.-Diss.--Berlin. / Lebenslauf.

Thesis advisor: Robin Fleming / Early medieval readers read texts differently than their modern scholarly counterparts. Their expectations were different, but so, too, were their perceptions of the purpose and function of the text. Early medieval historians have long thought that because they were reading the same words as their early medieval subjects they were sharing in the same knowledge. But it is the contention of my thesis that until historians learn to read as early medieval people read, the meanings texts held for their original readers will remain unknown. Early medieval readers maintained that important texts functioned on many levels, with deeper levels possessing more layers of meaning for the reader equipped to grasp them. A good text was able, with the use of a phrase or an image, to trigger the recall of other seemingly distant, yet related, knowledge which would elucidate the final spiritual message of the story. For an early medieval reader, the ultimate example of the multi-layered text was the Bible. But less exalted texts also aspired to this ideal, and the source of the trigger phrases and images most often used to achieve this was the Bible itself, a text that became both the early medieval writer’s model and reserve of references. For an early medieval reader, who would have been a monk or a nun, the Bible was more than a document of faith. In the closed and often isolated world of an early medieval monastery, the words of the Bible would have constantly been in the minds of monastic readers, and also would have been the entryway into the world of eternal truth, with each phrase or image in itself a key to the meaning of sacred history. In the intellectual climate of this world, a monk named Bede, living in a remote monastery in northern England, wrote what is arguably the most important text of the early Middle Ages. This text, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) (hereafter HE), traces English history from the period of the Roman invasion through the creation of a handful of united, Christian, English kingdoms. Yet this text is in no way a chronicle. Instead it is the story of kings and saints; of the pious and their rewards and the impious and their punishment. For Bede this was a deeply Christian story in which a pagan land was given the gift of faith and of good missionaries ready to establish what became a thriving, living Church. For many historians, Bede’s HE first and foremost is studied as an early text of history: a description of “what happened” and little else. Medieval exegetes, though, like Bede and his contemporaries, thought this first layer of literal meaning was followed by three others: the moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels. To access these levels we must read as Bede did, with the Bible in mind and with an awareness of the presence of many levels of meaning at almost every point in the text. When read this way, the HE is a minefield of biblical allusions that conflate Bede’s story of kings and saints with the story of Creation and Judgment. When we view the HE through the filter of Bede’s biblical allusions, we can see the English become the new Chosen People of God, and England emerge as the new Holy Land. It is in this reading that I have discovered Bede’s Apocalypticism and his explanations for the way events of his own world were connected to the world to come. Bede wrote the HE, so I argue, to make such a reading possible, and yet modern scholars, despite their knowledge of the power and prevalence of early medieval reading culture, have failed to read it in this way—a way that recasts the early medieval intellectual world as a highly mature and literate culture. It is reading Bede as an exegete would, as Bede himself would, that allows us to reconstruct the rarified and sophisticated religious, cultural, and intellectual worlds of early medieval monasteries. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.