HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

34 MICHAEL I. ALLENeffort, Bede meant to end lingering uncertainty about the computus,or rules for Easter-reckoning, needed to translate the high feast’slunar dating, from the Hebrew calendar, into its complex yet predictableannual shifts in the solar calendarical system inherited byChristians from Rome. Isidore’s Etymologies passed along confusedinformation on the relevant lunar and solar cycles and helped toprotract upset about a key matter of Christian time-keeping. Bedereworked the entire field in two discussions, his On Times of A.D. 703and his Reckoning of Time of A.D. 725, which respectively concludewith his Lesser and Greater Chronicle. 57 The redating of the Incarnation,based on Jerome’s Vulgate Latin translation of Scripture, occurredfirst in the earlier work and merited Bede an ill-considered chargeof heresy. This prompted a pointed reply that showed the teacher’sindignant irritation at millennial questioning and spurred studiesthat culminated in the highly sophisticated later monograph. 58 Bedethere set the standards for medieval Easter-reckoning, and the associatedGreater Chronicle, with its revised dates, became a norm in itsown right.Bede’s mature discussion bound universal history into a whole thatreflected the unity of the physical, spiritual, and moral worlds. Hisuse of the Ages articulated history so as to seal the preceding theoreticaldiscussions of times and their markers with positive particularinformation: the Greater Chronicle thus affirmed, for instance, thepractitioners of correct Easter-reckoning, just as it recounted the triumphsof the saints in times of persecution; its revised datings andapplications of the Ages ploughed away the potential for millennialunclarity left by Isidore; and Bede’s own discussion of continuingearthly time emphatically asserted its unknown and unknowable duration.Once again, Bede reconfigured and extended the basic data ofEusebius-Jerome and kept universal history, for the changes of contextand content, keenly relevant to contemporary theological reflectionand practical questions. The success of his computistical solutions57The complete texts with the included chronicles (as edited by T. Mommsen)have been published by C. W. Jones, in CCSL 123B (1977), pp. 263–544 (= Detemporum ratione, with the Chronica maiora in chapters 66–67, pp. 463–537), and CCSL123C, pp. 585–611 (= De temporibus, with the Chronica minora in chapters 17–22, pp.601–11). For Bede’s deployment of the Ages, see especially De temporum ratione 10(De hebdomada aetatum saeculi); 66.1–9, 20, 38, 81, 143, 268 (the earthly Ages in theChronicle); 67 (De reliquis sextae aetatis); 68–71 (on the final Ages).58Jones (1943), 120–21, 131–35.