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Bede and His World. With a preface by Michael Lapidge. Volume I: The Jarrow Lectures,1958-1978; Volume II: The Jarrow Lectures,1979-1993. (Brookfield, Vermont:Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Company. 1994. Pp. xvi, 999. $245.00.)
A reviewer might wonder how to encompass the diversity of the thirty-six lectures collected in these two volumes, but Michael Lapidge's preface solves the problem. Lapidge borrows the categories employed by the first Jarrow lecturer, Bertram Colgrave, to outline Bede's achievement, and uses them to summarize the concerns of the lectures themselves: "Bede's life and writings; the historical and cultural milieux in which he worked, including not merely the immediate Northumbrian context, but also the wider English and European arenas which shaped his perceptions; Northumbrian manuscripts; Northumbrian art; and Northumbrian architecture" (I, ix). Nearly one-third of the lectures fall into each of the first two categories; the more specialized subjects are treated in four or five lectures each.
The lectures have been given every year since 1958 in Bede's own church, St. Paul's, which Colgrave rightly called "perhaps the most historic parish church in England" (1, 3). The forum of the lectures is peculiarly British; they are learned talks not just for a general public but even for a local one, including the English motorist, hurrying north along Al on his way to Scotland" (so pictured in the introduction to Colgrave's lecture, I, 1). The first Jarrow lecture was held on the 1273rd anniversary of the dedication of the church, an event Colgrave sketches memorably. It was attended by Bede, then age 12, and probably also by King Ecgfrith, whose mind, Colgrave imagines,...