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This chapter argues that the early history of purgatory must be discussed on its own terms and not as a precursor to later medieval Catholic doctrine. It explains the use of the term “purgatory.” It identifies major modern scholarly contributions to the field and the historical and interpretive issues raised by sixteenth-century reformers. The chapter explores Bede’s historical status as an author of purgatory.

This chapter identifies some of the earliest Christian texts to describe purgation as part of the Christian afterlife and examines the interpretation placed on them by patristic authors from Origen to Augustine. Bede’s definition of purgatory is presented. The chapter discusses traditional “proof texts” for purgatory including 2 Maccabees, 1 Corinthians 3:11–15, and the fate of Dinocrates in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. It discusses purgatorial fire, universal salvation, and how ideas about original sin intersected with an economy of pain that was thought to cross the barrier of death.

This chapter challenges a school of thought that proposes that purgatory emerged in the seventh century as a result of the contact of Mediterranean Christianity with Irish religious culture. It gives special attention to the Vision of Fursey as evidence for postmortem purgation and questions the argument that penitential tariffing had a direct influence on evolving conceptions of purgatory. The chapter also examines Bede’s epitome of the Vision of Fursey, the Fragmentary Vision of 757, Vision of Paul, Redaction 6, and the Bigotian Penitential.

This chapter examines how purgatory was described and understood in the works of Bede and Boniface. Particular attention is given to Bede as the author of works in which purgatory was given theological context and legitimation as orthodox belief. The chapter examines the role of friendship ties and gift-giving in Anglo-Saxon society and in the intercessory practices of Bede’s time. The chapter also considers the cultural and religious influences that informed Anglo-Saxon Christianity and explores the potential importance of Anglo-Saxon England’s close ties with eastern Christianity. Key texts discussed include Boniface’s Vision of the Monk of Wenlock and the works of Bede: the Vision of Drythelm, Homily for Advent, Commentary on Isaiah, and Commentary on Proverbs.

This chapter returns to the critical importance of Bede’s approach to purgatorial thinking and his willingness to confront Origen’s heretical views on the subject, as representing a formative and lasting contribution to purgatory’s early development, and as a critical juncture in the acceptance of the doctrine of purgatory as Catholic belief in the middle ages and beyond.

This chapter is primarily concerned with Anglo-Latin prose: that is to say, Latin prose composed in Anglo-Saxon England between roughly 650 and 1050. It poses the question of the extent to which Anglo-Latin authors were aware of different stylistic registers, and how well they understood what diction was appropriate to either prose or verse. Using the example of Bede as a starting point, the chapter provides a list of those features of poetic diction that are found, in varying degrees, in the authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The seven criteria presented provide a crude measuring-stick against which to assess the poeticism of the principal authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The study of poeticism in Anglo-Latin prose, and in medieval Latin literature in general, is a subject that awaits exploration.

Bede’s reputation has never stood higher than today. The range of his writings is considerable. Bede composed Latin verse, the climax of secondary school education. His language has been little discussed but often praised. A recent discussion of Bede’s prose takes a statistical approach to five sample passages taken from the Historia ecclesiastica and from two of the homilies; not a single Latin sentence is quoted, and no distinctions are made between the language of the different works. Real analysis of his prose concentrates on the biblical works, which vary substantially from one another. There are two distinct agendas for study here, one focusing on the language of biblical exegesis in Latin, particularly in late antiquity, the other concerning the development of Bede’s own work in this genre. The chapter then reviews the preliminary problems that help to explain why reading the more complex of Bede’s exegetical works is so much more difficult than reading his historical prose.

This chapter considers the evidence for rural wealth in the seventh and eighth centuries in the country which was to become England. It demonstrates that the expansion of international trade and the proliferation of coinage created the conditions for a shift in balance, and for the first time the means became available to turn rural surpluses into something like treasure. The movement of two separate economies towards convergence increased the potentiality of kingship.

‘The lost British lamb’: Religion and National Identity among English, Welsh, and Scottish Catholics carries the argument beyond the fashioning of English Catholic identity in response to Protestant ideology, by probing its formation in relation to competing Catholic identities and traditions from other parts of the British Isles. In exile across Europe, English Catholics found themselves in close proximity to their fellow-Catholics from Wales and Scotland but also in competition with them for the attention and resources of princes and popes. The shared experience of exile, far from producing a pan-British Catholic solidarity, tended instead to exacerbate deep-seated tensions among the different peoples of the Atlantic Archipelago. Thomas Stapleton's translation of the Venerable Bede's The history of the church of Englandeis central to understanding the attitudes and prejudices of English Catholics towards their Celtic co-religionists. The chapter concludes with an examination of divided English Catholic responses to the accession of a Scotsman, James I, to the English throne.

Chapters 4 and 5 constitute another pair of chapters, but this time the argument is that critics have been premature in finding evidence of same‐sex activity. Chapter 4 begins with a review of the biblical and patristic allusions to Sodom as a context for its study of medieval Continental and Anglo‐Latin interpretations of the narrative, discussing Bede, Aldhelm, Boniface, Alcuin, and Ælfric. It shows that religious writers in Latin associate Sodom with a range of sins, and not just same‐sex acts.

This chapter traces the development of the doctrine of purgatory from biblical and Patristic sources, through the present. It gives special attention to the medieval period, when the doctrine was arguably born and achieved its first formal affirmations and doctrinal definition. It shows that the story of purgatory embraces social and cultural dimensions as well as theological ones. Indeed, the cultural power of the doctrine has often been due as much or more to its promulgation in works of art, both popular and classic, as to works of formal theology.

Rees Davies was a Welsh historian who wrote about, among other subjects, the English; Bede, an English historian who wrote about, among other subjects, the Welsh — or rather, in both cases, not the Welsh (a Germanic term for ‘foreign’) but the Brytaniaid (Britons). This chapter shows that Bede's references to the Brytaniaid betray a racial animus, an animus distinct enough to have ensured that, if written today, his book would be banned in state schools, and one not to be explained away by the justifications he offers for it. Bede compares unfavourably in this respect with Rees, who wrote evenhandedly about all the hybrids of our happily united kingdom.

This chapter examines the early insular history of Bede's Chronica Maiora in a universal context. It considers Bede's treatment of salvation history in the Chronica Maiora's account of the archipelago in the era of the Roman conquest and the barbarian invasions, viewed within the context of contemporary world history. The chapter explains that the Chronica Maiora is located in Bede's magisterial survey of divine and human time and traces the providential unfolding of universal history through the six ages of this world.

This chapter examines the doubtful issues in Bede's account of the pre-Viking history of Britain and Ireland in his Historia Ecclesiastica (HE). It focuses on the section of the HE where Bede attributed the conversion of the Picts to the work of Columba and the Christianisation of the southern Picts to one Nynia episcopo reuerentissimo et sanctissimo uiro de natione Brettonum. The chapter explores the origins of the cult of Saint Martin of Tours and considers what evidence it might offer about the nexus of influences operating upon Bede's account of the conversion.

This chapter discusses the historical accounts of Viking raids in Ireland and Britain during the last years of the eighth century or the early years of the ninth. It compares the accounts of Bede and Alcuin of York and the historical relevance of the role of the Mayo monastery, Bishop Colmán, and Gerald of Mayo. The chapter provides background information on the lives of both Colmán and Gerald.