List of works by Bede
His list follows, with an English translation given; the title used to describe the work in this article is also given, for easier reference.
[11] Bede dedicated the work to "his dearly beloved sister and virgin of Christ", but gives no further clues to the dedicatee's identity.
[21] Commentary on Tobit Laistner suggests that this may have been written at about the same time as De templo Salmonis, since in both Bede stresses allegorical interpretation; however, he comments that there is no textual evidence to support this.
As with the commentary on Habakkuk, Bede draws on the work of Jerome and on Augustine's City of God.
[25] It is in part based on an earlier life of St Cuthbert, anonymous but probably written by a monk of Lindisfarne.
Thirty-four of them were included in a widely disseminated anthology of readings put together in Charlemagne's reign by Paul the Deacon.
[41] Letter to Albinus Bede wrote this short letter to Albinus, the abbot of the monastery of St Peter and St Paul in Canterbury, to thank him for providing documents to Bede to assist him in writing the Ecclesiastical History.
The letter was sent to Albinus in the hands of Nothhelm, a London priest who subsequently became Archbishop of Canterbury.
[35] Bede completed the letter on 5 November 734, not long before his death on 26 May 735; in it he explains that he is unable to visit Egbert, as he had the previous year, and so is writing to him instead.
[46] The letter contains Bede's complaints about what he saw as the errors of the ecclesiastics of his day, including monasteries that were religious in name only, ignorant and careless clergy, and a lack of monastic discipline.
[citation needed] The letter was first published in Dublin in 1664 by Sir James Ware, using Harley 4688, a manuscript now in the British Museum.
[50] Liber epigrammatum Bede refers to a book of epigrams; the work is not entirely lost but has survived only in fragments.
[64] It is a treatise covering the basics of the computus, the medieval study of calculating the correct dates for the Christian calendar.
Bede's treatment of the topic was widely and rapidly disseminated during the Middle Ages; over one hundred manuscripts have survived to the present day, almost half of which were copied within a century of the work's composition.
[67] This may be because Charlemagne instituted educational reforms that included making computus part of the curriculum.
The idea that Bede wrote a penitential has been accepted as uncontroversial by both medieval and modern scholars, including Hermann Wasserschleben, Bruno Albers and J.T.
Laistner, have challenged the attribution of this work to Bede on the grounds that Bede (they say) was too high-minded and too talented a Latinist to have composed a work of such stylistic simplicity treating such vulgar subjects as drinking, physical violence and sexual deviance.
Frantzen has adopted an agnostic attitude, acknowledging several arguments for and against Bedan authorship that taken together seem to leave the matter presently unanswerable.
[73] The most recent and detailed study of the text was carried out by Reinhold Haggenmüller, who pronounced definitively against Bedan authorship; however, Haggenmüller's argument against Bedan authorship is hardly persuasive (it amounts merely to noticing that the oldest manuscript dates to about 60 years after Bede's death).
[74] In fact no scholar has yet been able to adduce concrete evidence that either confirms or denies Bedan authorship of the Paenitentiale Bedae.
McNeill and Gamer's summary of the problem is still perhaps the most fair and concise:[75] The fact that no penitential is included by Bede among the works he lists at the end of his Ecclesiastical History ... as of the years 702–31 can hardly be admitted as a conclusive argument against his having written one, in view of the omission from this list of a number of his other known works.
In his Preface Ad Lectorem Hervagius credits Jacobus Pamelius with the assembly of texts and a significant role in their editing.
[90] The entire edition was dedicated to Marquard, Freiherr von Hattstein, Prince-Bishop of Speyer (1560-1581) and provost of the collegiate church of Weissenburg, Alsace.
The Epistola Nuncupatoria remarks that Hervagius had met the cost of the edition more for religious reasons than from expectations of financial return: the pure and uncorrupt doctrines of Bede offered the most useful and weighty answers to the explanation of controversies flourishing in their own times.
[91] Hervagius's edition, in eight folio volumes, was incomplete in some respects and included works that were later determined to be spuriously assigned to Bede.
Casimir Oudin's commentary on the authenticity of the textual attributions to Bede in these editions was published in 1722,[94] and was reproduced by Migne.
