The centrality of the repatriation in Ezra–Nehemiah resulted in a rich reception history, as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had to confront questions regarding religious identity within the orbit of social displacement.

Bede’s great Ecclesiastical history of the English people is probably the most famous Latin work of the early Middle Ages in Britain. It covers the history from the Roman period, through the withdrawal of the Romans, the reintroduction of Christianity with Augustine of Canterbury, and the lives of saints and kings in different parts of Britain until the beginning of the eighth century. Here are excerpts recounting Gregory the Great’s mission and the spread of Christianity through England, the end of paganism under king Edwin and the story of Cædmon of Whitby and his Old English poems.

Bede in his letter to Bishop Ecgberht of York expresses his worries over the greed and lack of Latin learning among the clergy, and over lay control in certain monasteries. He stresses the need for the basic texts of the Christian faith to be translated into English. Here he shows that it was not the case that all the clergy were competent in Latin.

Bede worte a number of educational writings, on grammar and literary skills, as well as history and science. Here excerpts are taken from handbooks on spelling, on rhetorical figures and on the subject of the measuring of time, including the names of the months in different languages including Old English and facts about the tides in the sea around Britain.

Adomnán had come from Ireland to settle on Iona off the west coast of Scotland where he was abbot for many years. He wrote a biography of St. Columba, and the work excerpted here, namely a book about the Holy Places in and around Jerusalem, for which his source was the account given to him by Arculf who visited him on Iona. Bede wrote a version of this work, and a short passage is included here for the purpose of comparison.

Here excerpts are given from an Anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, and from the Life of Cuthbert written by Bede, both in verse and prose. Two stories are chosen, one about Cuthbert meeting the otters on the beach, and the other about him foreseeing the death of a worker on the monastic estate.A brief excerpt from Alcuin’s poem on the bishops and saints of York shows how he condenses into two hexameters one of the stories recorded by Anonymous and Bede.

The third chapter is divided into two sections – Frechulf of Lisieux’s Histories and Ado of Vienne’s Chronicon. Both men composed ambitious works, in which Frankish history played an ancillary role. In Frechulf, the Franks make a fleeting appearance in the final chapters of his Histories, which cut off unexpectedly in the seventh century. The motivations for this choice seemingly have more to do with Frechulf’s overarching structure of Christian history than with any judgement of the Merovingians. Frechulf was reticent on the subject of the Franks, to which he devoted less space than to other early medieval gentes. This is surprising, considering that Frechulf chose to end his Histories with the displacement of Romans and Goths by Franks and Lombards, signifying that they were important elements of his authorial program. The second section of the chapter focuses on Ado of Vienne’s Chronicon, arguing that Ado highlighted the discordant aspects of Merovingian history in the period 511–638. By doing so, Ado a presented a pessimistic appraisal of the entirety of the dynasty’s tenure, not only its so-called rois fainéants.

The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

This essay explores the specific relevance of hagiography for female readers engaged with the ideals and circumstances of pious lay life. Whitehead demonstrates that the accounts of Hilda, Æthelburga, and Æthelthryth in Bedeߣs Historia are strikingly supplemented by the depictions of female sanctity and powerful female agency in works connected with the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic peoples, while sophisticated literary skill is demonstrated by Hrotsvitha, canoness of Gandersheim. The essay demonstrates the long textual life of Bedeߣs abbesses, along with more recent examples of sanctity. Whitehead explores secular and religious contexts, contrasting the Vie seint Audrée, probably written for a courtly audience, with the writings of the anonymous ߢNunߣ and Clemence of Barking and the early Middle English Lives of the virgin martyrs in the Katherine Group, designed for a well-born group of anchoresses in the west Midlands. The essay shows that the lives of women saints continued to be popular reading in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in both lay and religious contexts, including in Benedictine compilations.

Chapter 2 explores the reshaping of English history by Latin historiographers writing in the wake of the Norman Conquest. These historians sought to incorporate the Conquest’s political rupture into seamless histories that intimated a longstanding English nation. At the forefront of this movement was William of Malmesbury. In his writing, William, however, must confront the regionalism or “northern-ness” of his chief source and inspiration, Bede, the venerable “Father of English History.” This chapter analyses how William labors to deaden Bede’s northern-ness and, further, how William engages the ruinous North of England, still smouldering from King William I’s “Harrying of the North” in 1069–70. In this destruction of the North, born of its rebelliousness, William of Malmesbury finds a startling microcosm for England. William recalls the North’s glorious Roman past, evident in the wrecked buildings of Roman vintage, that darkly forecast for the Wiltshire monk the potential failures of the larger English nation, such that it will become a ruin itself much like the city of Rome in Hildebert of Lavardin’s poem “par tibi Roma nihil,” which William quotes extensively in his work.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Four focuses on intermarriage and incest, first tracing medieval understanding of these concepts in biblical tradition before examining contemporary evidence for intermarriage and incest in early medieval legal and historical texts. Origin legends expanded further to envision what might have happened after a foundational ancestor who emigrated alone or with a small band of followers arrived to the insular region. Women were necessary in order to preserve the population, and there were really only two solutions to the problem: intermarriage or incest. This chapter examines each of these motifs in turn, studying how they were introduced into insular origin legends and expanded to create different narrative possibilities for political commentary as the corpus grew.

A key argument of this book is that it is impossible to separate the growth of any insular origin narrative from that of the larger corpus of historical writing which contained them. Chapter One presents the evidence for the textual connections between these works, while the chapters to follow analyse the implications of these connections. This chapter outlines the sources and later reuses of each major work under consideration. Specialists on individual texts and manuscripts will already be aware of many of these connections, yet broader scholarship on the early medieval period still treats so-called ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Scottish’ literary and historical traditions as disparate. This chapter thus provides the ‘hard evidence’ for the extent to which the corpus of texts containing origin narratives influenced one another during the early medieval period. Early medieval authors were interested not solely in writing the story of their own people, but rather, in collecting the histories of the peoples of Britain and Ireland together. Chapter One overturns the common perception that the authors of these texts were working in proto-national isolation, instead revealing the textual connections that shaped the intellectual landscape of the early medieval insular region.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Three focuses on kin-slaying, first tracing the influence of the biblical legend of Cain and the classical legend of Romulus and Remus on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for kin-slaying in early medieval legal and historical texts. As insular origin narratives expanded, their authors recognised the narrative need to explain ancestral exile. The idea that a foundational ancestor had committed the crime of kin-slaying was introduced via the Brutus story in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and proved subsequently popular, as exile was theoretically the legal sentence for this crime. As a narrative motif, kin-slaying allowed a people to retain the prestige of ties to ancient dynasties while embracing political independence in the present moment.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Two focuses on exile, first tracing the influence of the biblical myth of Exodus and the classical legend of the Aeneid on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for exile in early medieval legal and historical texts. The chapter argues that as the corpus of insular works containing origin narratives grew and developed over time, the concept of exile took on central importance. Arising from Gildas’s foundational description of Britain as an island on the outermost fringes of the known world, the centrality of exile to insular origin stories grew after the ninth-century Historia Brittonum introduced the influential legend that Britain’s founding ancestor was Brutus, an exile from Troy. From there, the concept of exile gained increasing thematic importance within insular origin narratives.

When writing their own histories and those of their neighbours, early medieval insular peoples sought to provide answers to some obvious questions. Who were their ancestors? Where did they come from? And why did they leave their homelands? Over the course of the early medieval period, a discourse of origin narratives developed within the insular region. By the time of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, an expansive origin legend had become attached to each of the four peoples who inhabited Britain and Ireland. This book explores the development of these stories in the early medieval period from (roughly) the departure of the Romans to the arrival of the Normans before turning to an examination of how they were treated by early modern chroniclers writing histories with a more nationalist bent. In the early medieval period, the corpus of insular origin legends evolved together to flesh out the history of the region. Individual origin narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other works. Together, these legends were constructed not to form four distinct ‘national’ histories but rather to fill in the blanks of prehistory for the region as a whole.

This chapter sets the early vitae of Cuthbert in their historical and compositional contexts, and focuses upon his eremitic construction within them. It unpicks their Irish and Gregorian sources, demonstrating the importance of Gregory’s life of St Benedict, but argues that whereas the Anonymous Vita promotes a more heroic and individualistic understanding of Cuthbert’s asceticism, Bede uses Cuthbert’s Farne years to demonstrate the close links between the solitary vocation and the coenobium, and to illustrate monastic ideals of stability, pastoral edification and labour. Turning to Cuthbert’s depiction in the Historia ecclesiastica, it argues that Cuthbert’s eremiticism is placed centre stage there, and used to negotiate Northumbria’s relation with other polities and ecclesiastical rivals, suggesting that Bede’s ambitions for Cuthbert as a saint for the gens Angli are specifically eremitic ones.

This chapter presents a survey of both Latin and Old English visions of heaven and hell in Anglo-Saxon England from Boniface to Aelfric. The Anglo-Saxons were not content with reading about visions of foreigners, such as the Vita Fursei, the Visio Pauli, or pope Gregory’s Dialogi, but were eager to find native Anglo-Saxons who experienced visions themselves. With the account of the monk of Wenlock, Boniface presents the first native Anglo-Saxon’s vision, but the desire to Anglicise visions becomes most apparent in Bede who first – and incorrectly – transposes the vision of the Irishman Fursey to England, and then narrates the vision of the native Anglo-Saxon Dryhthelm. Aelfric silently corrects this ‘pious fraud’, but by his time Anglo-Saxons such as the monk of Wenlock, Dryhthelm, Guthlac, and Merchdeof had already experienced visions, and England had therefore joined the other nations in meriting this special grace.

This chapter examines three early twelfth-century texts produced at Durham: an ecclesiastical history, a short vernacular poem and a Cuthbertine miracle collection, that propose a new phase in the history of Cuthbert’s cult. These texts applaud the restoration of monastic attendance at the shrine, and interpret Cuthbert’s ceremonial translation into the new cathedral as a replay of his late seventh-century translation on Lindisfarne. Bede’s sanctity is given a prominent role alongside Cuthbert’s as the textual driver behind northern church reform. These Cuthbertine texts emerge as sites of forceful criticism, both towards Anglo-Saxon and Norman secular elites who attempt to coerce the cult, and also, more surprisingly, towards some of the bishops of Durham. Cuthbert’s interest in defining and monitoring jurisdictional spaces is carried over from the Historia, but rendered with greater ambition. On the one hand, the saint devotes much of his power to promoting the diocese as his independent lordship, free from financial and judicial incursion; on the other, he uses retributive miracles to define a distinctively masculine monastic jurisdiction debarred to women.