Historical Re-Collections: Rewriting the World Chronicle in Bede’s De temporum ratione

Found in 245 manuscripts, Bede’s De temporum ratione (725 A.D.) was the most widely circulated of his scientific texts. In this article, the author considers this text in order to understand its popularity among Bede’s contemporaries and their continental successors. Bede locates the experience of his fellow Northumbrians at the center of the Christian historical narrative and, in so doing, provides other marginal peoples with a model for understanding their own place in Western Christianity. In particular, Bede introduces a new vocabulary of computus based on the language theory articulated by Augustine in De doctrina Christiana. Reading De temporum ratione in this way helps to explain its wide popularity, while providing further insight into Bede’s notions of English and Christian history. Ultimately, the text functions less as an exercise in objective or scientific history than as an attempt to introduce uniquely English concerns into the previously closed narrative of Western Christian history.