THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST "Commendatory Letters": An Archival Reading of the Venerable Bede Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 James M. O'Toole Abstract This essay explores the role of writing, records, and documents as depicted in the Eccle- siastical History of the English People, a landmark of western historiography completed by the Venerable Bede in the year 731. Bede's purpose was to narrate the early history of Chris- tianity in Britain, but he also made numerous references to writing and the role of doc- uments in human affairs. Because he was preparing his history at a time when writing itself was a relatively unusual phenomenon, Bede offers a singular view of such larger questions as the uses of literacy and documentation, the shifting dynamics among different forms of communication, and the larger cultural meanings in records beyond die infor- mation they contain. A study of these forces at work in Bede's time gives contemporary archivists a perspective on the revolutionary changes in the technology and the uses of records in our own age. t was a terrifying scene. A horde of evil spirits "with horrible faces" visited a dying man, surrounding his entire house. The man, originally a soldier, Iwas a public official who had pleased the king by his devotion to duty, but morally he was rather lax. He also had a reputation for seeing visions which benefitted many people but not, the teller of his story remarked, the man himself. In this particular vision, the chief of the devils came forward to the deathbed, carrying a truly frightening object: a book, one "of enormous size and almost unbearable weight, horrible to behold." Another demon pre- sented it to the man and ordered him to read. On doing so, the visionary was shocked at what he found on its pages: "all my sins written down very clearly but in hideous handwriting: not only my sins of word and deed but This article was written as a product of the author's participation in the 1997 Research Fellowship Program for the Study of Modem Archives, administered by the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Michigan. 266 The American Archivist, Vol. 61 (Fall 1998) : 266-286 AN ARCHIVAL READING OF THE VENERABLE BEDE even my slightest thoughts." While the devils chortled over the reader's an- guish, the man saw two handsome youths standing off to one side. They too were holding a book, but this one, though beautiful, was "exceedingly small," for in it were recorded all the good deeds the man had ever done—and these were "very few and trifling." The prince of the demons demanded of the Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 two angels, "Why do you sit here since you know that this man is certainly ours?" They concurred, saying, "You speak the truth; take him away to help make up the number of the damned."1 Thereupon, the wretched man died and went off to his unhappy eternal fate. The narrator of this morality tale was the Venerable Bede, an English monk of the early eighth century, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from which the story came, has become a landmark in western histo- riography. Scholars and students have studied Bede for centuries, mining his text for information about the early Christian church and about England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. Archivists too will find in Bede much that is relevant to their professional concerns. Records, documents, books, and writing all figure prominently in his history, and his work thus presents an opportunity to reflect on the nature and purposes of the everyday stuff of archives. What might be called an archival reading of Bede shows that he was working in a time that is very much like our own. That seems a curious thing to say. The restricted physical and mental world of eighth- century Britain was very different from our own expansive global culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He was compiling and composing his history at a time when writing and recordkeeping were still relatively unusual phenomena. Literacy was not widely distributed through society, and there were few mechanisms for systematic instruction in the abilities to read and write. His world was one which still relied extensively on the oral transmission of information. His society was adapting slowly and imperfectly to a new way of capturing and using information. Today, literacy is much more widely diffused and highly valued. Even those who cannot read and write themselves—or who do so imperfectly— usually think literacy a skill they should want to master themselves and to pass on to their children. But just as Bede and his contemporaries were com- ing to terms with the new information technology that was writing, so we are trying to come to terms with new information technologies. He lived in a 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations will be from the standard modern translation of Bede's Eccle- siastical History of the English People, Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). This edition, hereafter cited as "Colgrave and Mynors," provides the Latin and English texts on facing pages. It was reprinted in 1991 to coincide with the appearance of J. M. Wallace- Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), hereafter cited as "Wallace-Hadrill." For comparative purposes, readers should also consult the older translation, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley- Price (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1955). All citations to Bede will be identified by book and chapter number, and the citation will be given in parentheses in the text. The story of the man confronted with the two books is in 5.13. 267 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST world in which animal skins and handmade inks were the latest innovations for the acquisition and transmission of information; we live in a world in which electronic hardware and software are the rising technologies. What we have in common with him is the fact of change in the means by which in- formation is captured, stored, used, and preserved. Just as the new technol- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ogies were spread unevenly through his society, so they are unevenly accessible in ours, with only about a third of American households currently owning a computer and even lower percentages elsewhere in the world. A study of the transition Bede's society was experiencing may therefore give us an important perspective on the transitions we face. With him, archivists can explore several relevant aspects of the role of writing, records, and informa- tion in human affairs. Bede's Life and Work Our knowledge of Bede is confined largely to what he wrote about him- self, and the scanty evidence suggests that he lived the uneventful life of a scholar. His birth date is generally given as 673. Perhaps orphaned as a child, he was placed at the age of seven in the monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria, where his later status as a priest entitled him to the epithet by which he is commonly known—"Venerable"—and which was accorded to churchmen generally at the time. "From then on," he wrote at the end of the Ecclesiastical History, "I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write." His work included copying a wide range of texts from the Bible and the church fathers, "for my own benefit and that of my brothers." His original compositions were no less impressive. These included works of scriptural exegesis and commentar- ies on biblical texts, together with commentaries on the commentaries of others. He also produced two books of sermons on the gospels, and he en- thusiastically contributed to that most popular of medieval literary genres, the lives of the saints. He produced poems, hymns, and epigrams, some of them in "heroic and elegiac metre," and he compiled studies of natural science and the rules of grammar. He taught other monks at Jarrow how to write, and he even participated in the scholarly disputes of his day, mention- ing in particular that he reissued "a book on the life and passion of St. Anastasius which was badly translated from the Greek by some ignorant per- son, which I have corrected as best I could." (5.24) By the time of his death in 735, he had left his mark as one of the earliest and greatest English writers.2 2 The secondary literature on Bede is, of course, enormous. For useful overviews, see Bertram Col- grave's "Historical Introduction," in Colgrave and Mynors, xvii-xxxviii; George Hardin Brown, Bede 268 AN ARCHIVAL READING OF THE VENERABLE BEDE Apparently renowned in his own day for his theological works, Bede has since been remembered primarily as a historian. His greatest achievement may be his least recognized: though the idea was not original to him, he is credited with systematizing the conflicting methods for establishing chronol- ogy into the custom of dating history from the birth of Christ, the basis for Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the current usage of the Common Era.