A Sparrow in the Temple? The Ephemeral and the Eternal in Bede’s Northumbria

Abstract

Like the brief passage of a sparrow through a winter’s hall, human life without meaning, without an idea of the everlasting, is fleeting. Seventh-century Northumbria was the stage on which a set of tensions between transient and permanent, native and Roman, particular and universal, were played out for high political and spiritual stakes. Material and ideological expressions of these tensions underpin the life and writings of the Venerable Bede, pre-eminent scholar and historian of his age. A bitter theological and liturgical conflict between the Irish and Roman churches, spectacularly resolved at the Synod of Whitby in 664, is matched by economic, social and material developments in church architecture, in the transition from oral to written history, the permanent alienation of land from the king’s fisc and the adoption of coinage. The treatment and memorialization of the dead underwent complementary evolutions. In Bede’s hands time itself was tamed, rationalised, rendered solid. In this paper the authors explore the mapping of an ideological revolution onto the material world of monastery and scriptorium, wood and stone, land and book, in Bede’s Northumbria.