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A review by doug_whatzup
Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
3.0
I’ve never quite figured out Easter. Oh, I understand that it follows Passover because that’s why Christ rode the donkey into Jerusalem on what we now know as Palm Sunday and that He was crucified the following Friday and rose again three days later on Sunday. That part’s easy. It’s figuring out when Easter falls each year that’s confusing. Sometimes it’s in March, other times in April. Hell, it could occasionally fall in May so far as I know.
If you have the patience to wade through about 380 pages of Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People,’ Abbot Ceolfrid will explain it all to you. Well, he’s actually explaining it to some Pictish king named Nichtin, who must have been a lot smarter than I am because Nichtin understood it completely and altered his religious observances accordingly. Me, I’m as confused as I ever was.
If Bede is to be taken at his word (and why wouldn’t he be?) the correct timing of Easter was the most pressing problem of his day, as his ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ documents one instance after another of attempts to bring derelict Easter celebrants into line. Of course, the Irish were the worst offenders. Why is it always the Irish?
At any rate, between nailing down Easter and the weird propensity for the corpses of saintly clergy to be miraculously uncorrupted upon their oddly frequent exhumations, one has to wonder what kind of guy Bede really was. Two words come to my mind: obsessive and credulous.
If you’re considering reading ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ in order to further your understanding of early British history, well, this probably isn’t the way to go about it. On the other hand, if you’re trying to figure out when is the appropriate time to celebrate Easter … on second though, forget that too.
If you have the patience to wade through about 380 pages of Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People,’ Abbot Ceolfrid will explain it all to you. Well, he’s actually explaining it to some Pictish king named Nichtin, who must have been a lot smarter than I am because Nichtin understood it completely and altered his religious observances accordingly. Me, I’m as confused as I ever was.
If Bede is to be taken at his word (and why wouldn’t he be?) the correct timing of Easter was the most pressing problem of his day, as his ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ documents one instance after another of attempts to bring derelict Easter celebrants into line. Of course, the Irish were the worst offenders. Why is it always the Irish?
At any rate, between nailing down Easter and the weird propensity for the corpses of saintly clergy to be miraculously uncorrupted upon their oddly frequent exhumations, one has to wonder what kind of guy Bede really was. Two words come to my mind: obsessive and credulous.
If you’re considering reading ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ in order to further your understanding of early British history, well, this probably isn’t the way to go about it. On the other hand, if you’re trying to figure out when is the appropriate time to celebrate Easter … on second though, forget that too.