Content area
Abstract
The Venerable Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (HE) was completed in 731, and in the ninth century, an Old English translation (now lost) was produced, of which five manuscript copies, produced between the first half of the tenth century and the second half of the eleventh century, are the earliest substantial survivors. My thesis is a reception history of these manuscripts - a diachronic survey of their reception from the time of their production in Anglo-Saxon England, to their first appearance in print in the seventeenth century.
Chapter one of my thesis looks at the Latin manuscript traditions of the HE, and at the background to the production of the original Old English Bede in the ninth century. Chapter two looks closely at and compares the two modern English versions of the HE and the Old English Bede manuscripts, as they appear in the editions of Colgrave and Mynors and Thomas Miller respectively, to indicate how the respective Anglo-Saxon audiences for the HE and the surviving Old English Bede manuscripts may have differed from one another.
My third chapter is a survey of the evidence for the reception of the manuscripts in the post-Conquest and later medieval periods, as found in the annotations carried out in each of the individual manuscripts during this time.
Chapter four is an account of some of the people involved in the reception of the manuscripts in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, leading to their first appearance in print in Wheloc's edition of 1643, followed by a cultural overview of events in England during this period, which led to continued interest in the manuscripts.
I conclude my thesis by suggesting possible future areas for work in this topic, so that the reception history of the Old English Bede manuscripts might be brought up to date and completed.
