De natura rerum et ratione temporum duos quondam stricto sermone libellos discentibus ut rebar necessarios composui. Quos, cum fratribus quibusdam dare atque exponere coepissem, dicebant eos breuius multo digestos esse quam uellent, maxime ille de temporibus cuius propter rationem paschae potius uidebatur usus indigere; suadebantque mihi latius aliqua de temporum statu, cursu, ac fine disserere.
Some time ago I wrote two short books in a summary style which were, I judged, necessary for my students; these concerned the nature of things and the reckoning of time. When I undertook to present and explain them to some of my brethren, they said that they were much more concise than they would have wished, especially the book on time, which was, it seems, rather more in demand because of the calculation of Easter. So they persuaded me to discuss certain matters concerning the nature, course and end of time at greater length.4
De temporum ratione also contained a chronicle of world history, in Chapter 66, which was followed by five chapters on eschatology (cc. 67–71); this discussion of the ‘end of time at greater length’ was a significant addition to De temporibus.5 This chapter examines the contents of and context for De temporibus. It considers its transmission history, contextualises the work in relation to Insular computistica from the seventh and early eighth centuries and systematically compares Bede with his key sources, the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville and Irish computus texts. Finally, it investigates why Bede wrote a textbook on time in 703.
Bede’s first work on time has rarely been studied on its own merits, as it is usually subsumed into an examination of De temporum ratione, if any attention at all is paid to it. However, it is worthy of attention for three principal reasons: (1) Bede wrote De temporibus at a relatively early age, such that it can serve as a starting point for tracing developments in his thought over the course of his more than 30-year career, especially when compared with his later and more advanced works; (2) Bede’s textbooks appear to have been written, at least primarily, for his students, which gives us an insight into the educational environment and curriculum of Wearmouth-Jarrow during his time and may be helpful for considering monastic schools more broadly in Northumbria; and (3) most importantly, the context for De temporibus is significantly different to that for De temporum ratione because De temporibus was produced when the date of Easter was still a damagingly divisive issue in Britain and Ireland.
The monastery of Iona, which was responsible for evangelising much of North-umbria and influenced – even dominated – the Northumbrian church in the middle decades of the seventh century, did not accept the Easter tables of Dionysius Exiguus until 716, 13 years after Bede wrote De temporibus. It is widely accepted that the Easter Controversy was one of Bede’s major preoccupations, and several years after Iona conformed to the Dionysian Easter, he produced De temporum ratione and presented the ‘conversion’ of Iona as the climax of his Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum (5:22), which he completed in 731. Iona’s opposition to the Dionysian Easter, and the community’s continued support for the latercus, an 84-year Easter reckoning, was only one aspect of the Easter Controversy in the Insular World, however, as a contemporary debate ensued between proponents of the Easter tables of Dionysius and Victorius of Aquitaine who had produced his Easter cycle in 457.6 This was clearly a live issue in Ireland up to the late seventh century, and possibly into the eighth century, and Irish computus texts in support of Victorius were known in Northumbria in Bede’s time.7 Bede’s historical interest in the Easter Controversy, particularly in the HE, is often dismissed as his obsession,8 but such a view overlooks the fact that this debate was a very real concern for much of Bede’s adult life. De temporibus is one of only two Bedan texts directly concerned with time that were written while Iona persevered with the latercus reckoning – the other is the Letter to Plegwin9 – and as such it is a witness to the Easter Controversy as a real, rather than historical, concern. It is also one of several computus textbooks that were produced in the Insular World between the mid-seventh century and the first decades of the eighth century and is therefore important for understanding the development of computus in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England.
Transmission and terminology of Bede's works on time
De temporum ratione was one of Bede’s most influential and important works and, as a consequence, has received far more attention than his first work on time, in both manuscript transmission and Bedan scholarship.10 Despite the importance of De temporum ratione, however, the manuscript evidence reveals that De temporibus remained popular over the centuries after its composition. Calvin Kendall and Faith Wallis, in their recent translation of De temporibus, have identified 112 manuscripts dating from the late eighth to fifteenth centuries containing all or part of this work.11 In certain of these, the chronicle (beginning in either Chapter 16 or 17 and extending to Chapter 22) has been preserved on its own.12 Compared to the manuscripts of DTR, which will be discussed later, the copies of DT appear to have been little used and were rarely glossed, leading to Charles Jones designating the work, ‘the neglected child of the computists’.13 This may have been so little used because it is such a succinct text and those who required more explanation, like Bede’s students, turned to longer treatments of time reckoning.
The relationship between De temporibus and De natura rerum as companion pieces is reflected in the manuscript transmission. Although there are more identified manuscripts of De natura rerum – 143 dating from the late eighth to sixteenth centuries have been catalogued by Kendall and Wallis – these texts were frequently transmitted together.14 Following Kendall and Wallis’s catalogue, approximately 70 manuscripts contain all or parts of both DNR and DT, often presented adjacent to each other; this is over half of the surviving manuscripts of DT. The argument that DT and DNR were a combined enterprise is supported by the verse epigraph treated as the preface for DNR in all the printed editions of the text, and generally regarded as authentic.15 The poem reads:
Naturas rerum uarias labentis et aeui
Perstrinxi titulis, tempora lata citis,
Beda Dei famulus. Tu fixa obsecro perennem
Qui legis astra, super mente tuere diem
In brief chapters, I, Bede, the servant of God,
Have ...
