* A collection of studies on Bede, the greatest historian of the English Middle Ages, and the early English church * Written over a 30-year period by one of the leading authorities on the subject. * Integrates the religious, intellectual, political and social history of the English in their first Christian centuries.

Foreword. Editorial Note by Stephen Baxter. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Part I An Early Christian Culture and its Critic. 1 Bede and Benedict Biscop. 2 Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo Saxon Aristocracy. 3 Bede, the Bretwaldas and the origins of the Gens Anglorum. 4 Bede and the conversion of England: the charter evidence. Part II The Impact of Bede's Critique. 5 Æthelwold and his Continental Counterparts: Contact, Comparison, Contrast. 6 Bede and the 'Church of the English'. 7 How do we know so much about Anglo Saxon Deerhurst? 8 Aristocrats as Abbots: a context for the making of Brixworth. Appendix: Hilda, Saint and Scholar (614-680). Index.

The Times of Bede Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian Patrick Wormald Edited by Stephen Baxter Written over a 30-year period by the late Patrick Wormald, one of the leading authorities on the Early Middle Ages, this book is a collection of studies on Bede and early English Christian society. Its central concern is the establishment of a Christian community within a warrior society, and the way this was charted, not always sympathetically, by Bede and other writers of his time. A subsidiary theme is the emergence of a self-consciously English Church, which was in turn the foundation of an English state. An appendix considers Bede's treatment of St. Hilda, the first great English female saint. The book will be welcomed for its systematic integration of the religious, intellectual, political and social history of the English in their first Christian centuries.

"The untimely death of Patrick Wormald in 2004 deprived the scholarly community of a brilliant historian best known for his magisterial study of the development of English law during the Anglo-Saxon period. As the volume under review here clearly shows, Worrnald was also a leading figure in revising our understanding of Bede and his early medieval English cultural milieu." (CHURCH HISTORY, March 2008) “On display throughout … is Wormald’s considerable intellect and erudition and in the earlier essays in particular an enviable familiarity with Continental scholarship. There are also occasional flashes of the theater that was a Wormald lecture.” (Catholic Historical Review, October 2008)

"This collection exemplifies the high qualities of scholarship, originality and forceful expression which characterized its lamented author. All serious work on Bede and his age has to reckon with these papers!" –James Campbell, University of Oxford "Patrick Wormald’s research, driven for over more than thirty years by the quest to understand and assess Bede, produced work of a profound coherence and consistency. Here, then, is more than a collection of classic papers. From two parts, on Bede as a thinker who didn’t so much reflect as reinflect his world, and on the afterlife of Bede’s critique in later Anglo-Saxon England, is constructed something wondrously balanced and whole: a masterpiece of a book." –Janet Nelson, Kings College London