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Translated with introduction, notes and commentary by Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis.
The Venerable Bede composed "On the Nature of Things" ("De natura rerum") and "On Times" ("De temporibus") at the outset of his career, about AD 703. Bede fashioned himself as a teacher to his people and his age, and these two short works show him selecting, editing, and clarifying a mass of difficult and sometimes dangerous material. He insisted that his reader understand the mathematical and physical basis of time, and though he was dependent on his textual sources, he also included observations of his own. But Bede was also a Christian exegete who thought deeply and earnestly about how salvation-history connected to natural history and the history of the peoples of the earth. To comprehend his religious mentality, we have to take on board his views on science - and vice versa.
"On the Nature of Things" is a survey of cosmology. Starting with Creation and the universe as a whole, Bede reads the cosmos downwards from the heavens, through the atmosphere, to the oceans and rivers of earth. This order (recapitulating the four elements or fire, air, water and earth) was derived from his main source, Isidore of Seville's "On the Nature of Things". However, Bede separated out Isidore's chapters on time, and dealt with them in "On Times".
"On Times", like its second, revised and enlarged edition "The Reckoning of Time" ("De temporum ratione"), works upwards from the smallest units of time, through the day and night, the week, month and year, to the world-ages. Bede's innovation is to introduce a practical manual of Easter reckoning, or computus, into this survey. Hidden beneath the matter-of-fact surface of the work is an intense polemic about the correct principles for determining the date of Easter - principles which in Bede's view are bound up with both the integrity of nature as God's creation, and the theological significance of Christ's death and resurrection. In these works Bede re-united cosmology and time-reckoning to form a unified science of computus that would become the framework for Carolingian and Scholastic basic scientific education.
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Translated Texts for Historians 300–800 AD is the time of late antiquity and the early middle ages: the transformation of the classical world, the beginnings of Europe and of Islam, and the evolution of Byzantium. TTH makes available sources translated from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Georgian, Gothic and Armenian. Each volume provides an expert scholarly translation, with an introduction setting texts and authors in context, and with notes on content, interpretation and debates. Editorial Committee Sebastian Brock, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford Averil Cameron, Keble College, Oxford Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool Mary Cunningham, University of Nottingham Carlotta Dionisotti, King’s College, London Peter Heather, King’s College, London Robert Hoyland, University of St Andrews William E. Klingshirn, The Catholic University of America Michael Lapidge, Clare College, Cambridge John Matthews, Yale University Neil McLynn, Corpus Christi College, Oxford Richard Price, Heythrop College, University of London Claudia Rapp, University of California, Los Angeles Raymond Van Dam, University of Michigan Michael Whitby, University of Warwick Ian Wood, University of Leeds General Editors Gillian Clark, University of Bristol Mark Humphries, Swansea University Mary Whitby, University of Oxford
A full list of published titles in the Translated Texts for Historians series is available on request. The most recently published are shown below. Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah Translated with an introduction and notes by SCOTT DEGREGORIO Volume 47: 304pp, 2006, ISBN 978-1-84631-001-0
Bede: On Genesis Translated with introduction and notes