Oswiu’s Bad Luck

I've been reading Marilyn Dunn's The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and just thinking about King Oswiu's bad luck after the Synod of Whitby. He is celebrated by Bede and the Church of England ever after for choosing to accept the authority of Rome over the independent tradition of Iona, the mother house of the Irish...

St Oswald and the Sussex Plague

Modified from the vault for St Oswald's Day: Happy St. Oswald's Day! It has been a while since I wrote but I can't miss the feast of St. Oswald. What little time I have had for medieval topics this summer has been focused on the plague, so this brings to mind the unique place King...

Bishop Wilfrid and the Sussex Famine

When I was working on my Kalamazoo presentation last spring, I was looking for references to famines or malnutrition. Bede's History is pretty pitiful in this regard. He only records two famines, one before the arrival of the English and the second when Bishop Wilfrid first came to Sussex. As we will see below, this...

St Æthelthryth and the Virgin Mary Through the Ages

I'm experimenting with methods of putting up presentations. This one is put up through slideshare. Its conversion function doesn't seem to have liked all of my text as you can see from the title page. This is the presentation I gave at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 2010. If you...

Herefrith of Lindisfarne

Some of the most important additions to Bede's Prose Life of Cuthbert came from Herefrith, a former abbot of Lindisfarne. I think its worth exploring what Bede tells us about Herefrith in  the Life of Cuthbert and what we can deduce. When Bede first introduces material from Herefrith in the plague of Melrose chapter [Ch...

Benedict Biscop

I've gained a new appreciation for Benedict Biscop this week after rereading the History of the Abbots and the Life of Ceolfrith, along with Ian Woods' contribution to the new Cambridge Companion to Bede. What follows is a little musing on Biscop and questions his life open up. I used to think of Biscop as...