The Venerable Bede composed On the Nature of Things and On Times at the outset of his career in AD 703, shaping a mass of difficult and sometimes dangerous material on the mathematical and physical basis of time into a lucid and well-organized account that laid the framework for much of Carolingian and Scholastic scientific thought. Available here for the first time in English-language translation for the first time, these two short works represent an attempt to show Christianity connecting coherently with natural history and vice versa. Building on insights found in Isidore of Seville’s earlier work of the same name, On the Nature of Things addresses creation and recapitulates the idea of the four elements. In On Times, Bede breaks from Seville’s structure, separating out and considering the chapters on time. This work also introduces Bede’s computus—the practical yet intensely polemical science for determining the dates of Easter. Bede’s views are bound up with the integrity of nature as God’s creation and the theological significance of Christ’s death and resurrection, and these extensively annotated translations mark an essential contribution to the ecclesiastical history that is crucial to an understanding of early medieval science.
Author
Saint Bede (672/673 - 735), referred to as Venerable Bede (Latin: Bēda Venerābilis) for over a thousand years before being canonized, was an English monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow (see Monkwearmouth-Jarrow), both in the Kingdom of Northumbria. He is well known as an author and scholar, and his most famous work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) gained him the title "The Father of English History.” In 1899, Bede was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII, a position of theological significance; he is the only native of Great Britain to achieve this designation (Anselm of Canterbury, also a Doctor of the Church, was originally from Italy). Bede was moreover a skilled linguist and translator, and his work with the Latin and Greek writings of the early Church Fathers contributed significantly to English Christianity, making the writings much more accessible to his fellow Anglo-Saxons. Bede's monastery had access to a superb library which included works by Eusebius and Orosius among many others.
