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Abstract
This dissertation examines the Old English Bede as a document of both historical and literary interest. In this late ninth century vernacular redaction of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the anonymous Anglo-Saxon translator reveals much about his own interests and opinions.
Linguists and textual scholars have studied the Old English Bede's manuscripts from philological and codicological perspectives in order to analyze their language and provenance; this dissertation studies their text from a literary and cultural perspective. Bede's translator consistently transforms his source, editing his version of the Historia Ecclesiastica in a way that has overtly political, as well as religious, overtones appropriate for the pressing dilemmas of his time. The translator's choices reflect the social and political changes that had affected England since Bede's death, most significantly the onset of the Viking invasions and King Alfred's succession to the West-Saxon throne. The Old English Bede emerges as a coherent, selectively and purposefully arranged history.
The first chapter of this thesis discusses the theoretical basis for this work and the historical background for Bede's history and his translator's adaptation. The second chapter examines the political implications of Bede's presentation of England's distant past and the Old English Bede's suppression of much of the Roman history around which Bede structures his narrative in Book I of the Historia Ecclesiastica. Subsequent chapters concentrate on the translator's reworking of various hagiographical stories and his treatment of the lives of the Northumbrian kings Oswald and Oswiu. The translator shapes his hagiographical texts to demonstrate that it is the Church which provides the strongest common bond for all of Christian England; his adaptation of the kings' lives suggest that he is as much concerned with royal morality as with historical accuracy.
The Old English Bede highlights Christianity as the unifying factor for all the people of Britain, indirectly appropriating its authority for Alfred's political purposes. The translator incorporates this theme in his remaking of Bede's models of national identity, sanctity, and royal veneration, and in the rhetoric he uses to express his opinions about the role of holiness in his own historical moment.