Explores the insular, the European and, more broadly, the Mediterranean connections and contexts of the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England.
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
A Bibliography of the Publications of Alan T. Thacker, 1979–2019
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 Monotheletism
Jennifer O’Reilly
Rectores
at Risk: Erudition and Heresy in Bede’s
Commentary on ProverbsFaith 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 Midlife 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: Streanæshalch 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
“Der Band, dessen Aufsätze jeweils einen direkten Bezug zum Geehrten herstellen, sind durchgehend gut geschrieben und von hoher wissenschaftlicher Qualität. Sie bieten einen wertvollen Beitrag zu den genannten Themen.” (Laury Sarti, in Historische Zeitschrift, 313, 2021, p. 769)
“The quality of these chapters is uniformly excellent.” (Raymond Van Dam, in The Medieval Review, 22.01.17)