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octavia_cade's review
3.0
You know, I really enjoyed the first half of this. I expected to give it four stars, but it went on and on and, with the best will in the world, I do not give the tiniest shit about the various methods of dating Easter. I especially do not care when the bunfight of who is dating Easter better is elucidated, over and over again, in excruciatingly painful detail. (I can't believe people actually cared about this. No, scratch that. I absolutely can believe it, but it doesn't make me any more sympathetic. Surely the point is that they're celebrating it at all?)
Bede deserves credit as one of the great chroniclers of the time, and one who determined to do his best to make an actual rigorous history, rather than a poorly researched collection of myths. I'd say that it was hardly his fault that his history became so repetitive, but then he is deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, as well as the general focus of the Ecclesiastical History overall so he does bear some responsibility. People fight and convert and die, or fight and backslide and die, on a numbingly frequent basis, and by the end of the book I just wanted it to be over. I think it's fair to say, too, that the second half is less well put together than the first, which helped to lessen my interest I think.
Bede deserves credit as one of the great chroniclers of the time, and one who determined to do his best to make an actual rigorous history, rather than a poorly researched collection of myths. I'd say that it was hardly his fault that his history became so repetitive, but then he is deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, as well as the general focus of the Ecclesiastical History overall so he does bear some responsibility. People fight and convert and die, or fight and backslide and die, on a numbingly frequent basis, and by the end of the book I just wanted it to be over. I think it's fair to say, too, that the second half is less well put together than the first, which helped to lessen my interest I think.
psalmcat's review
3.0
Sigh. I didn't really do well in this. Skimmed it, looked at the maps, read the intro and many of the notes. But the actual text reminded me too much of Medieval History class and reading piles of primary source material till my head hurt. I wonder if one of those assignments was Bede and I've blocked it. Anyway, I only really READ up to about A.D. 750. The Angles, Jutes and Saxons had just been forcibly ejected from Britain, those horrible folks...
So now I can at least say I've read Bede.
So now I can at least say I've read Bede.
red_dog's review
3.0
A fascinating, yet deeply strange, book that proves quite how much of a foreign country the past is. And contrary to Bede's intention, it doesn't so much provide an outline of how to live a faithful life based on the example of history, rather more than how to establish an hegemonic power base with Grant Morrison's assertion that "we live in the stories that we tell ourselves" as its overriding principle.
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