This book honours the scholarship of English historian Dr. Alan Thacker by exploring the insular, the European and, more broadly, the Mediterranean connections and contexts of the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England in the age of Bede, and beyond. It brings together original contributions by leading European and North American scholars of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages working across a range of disciplines: history, theology, epigraphy, and art history. Moving from the Irish Sea to the Bosporus, this collection presents a linked world in which saints, scholars, and the city of Rome all played powerful connective roles, creating communities, generating relationships, linking east to west, north to south, and present to past.

As in Thacker’s own work, Bede’s life and thought is a central presence. Bede’s attitudes to historical and contemporaneous conceptions of heresy, to the Irish church, and the evidence for his often complex relationships with his Northumbrian contemporaries all come under scrutiny, together with groundbreaking studies of his exegesis, christology, and historical method. Many of the contributions offer original insights into figures and phenomena that have been the focus of Dr. Thacker’s highly influential scholarship.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Alan T. Thacker, an Appreciation — PAUL KERSHAW

Gildebertus rex fr[ancorum]: The Least–Famous Epitaph of a Merovingian King and the Cult of a Spanish Martyr in Sixth–Century Paris — MARK A. HANDLEY

The ‘Political’ Use of the Cult of Saints in Early Medieval Ravenna — TOM BROWN

The Impact of the Lateran Council of 649 in Francia: the Martyrdom of Pope Martin and the Life of St Eligius — CATHERINE CUBITT

Bede and Monothelitism — JENNIFER O’REILLY

Rectores at Risk: Erudition and Heresy in Bede’s Commentary on Proverbs — FAITH WALLIS

Heresy and Authority in Bede’s Letter to Plegwine — PETER DARBY

Bede and Bishop Acca — CLARE STANCLIFFE

King Ceadwalla and Bishop Wilfrid — RICHARD SHARPE

Bede’s Preferential Treatment of the Irish — BARBARA YORKE

Bede’s Mid–Life Crisis: The Commentary on First Samuel — SCOTT DEGREGORIO

Bede’s perfecti, the Vision of God, and the Foretaste of Heaven — ARTHUR HOLDER

Bede’s Wise and Foolish Virgins: Streanæshealh and Coldingham — JULIA BARROW

Risano Revisited: A　Step Too Far for Charlemagne? — PAUL FOURACRE

Hincmar of Reims meets Bede — JINTY NELSON

The English Presence in Rome in the Later Anglo-Saxon Period: Change or Continuity? — FRANCESCA TINTI

A Renaissance Synthesis of Ancient Christian Themes: Architecture, Altarpieces and Imagined Spaces in San Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice, 1495–1520 — ÉAMONN Ó CARRAGÁIN

Index