The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Wilfrid Bonser
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Apart from this, Bede’s work on the face of it bears the stamp of truth as far as it was known to him. If one compares his account of the miracles of healing performed by St. Cuthbert, for instance, with the accounts by later writers such as Simeon and Reginald of Durham, it is at once obvious that many of these miracles as related by Bede are less inconsistent with what could have been accomplished by a man of saintly character, working at the time of a period of religious enthusiasm, than are the crude and extra vagant accounts of the two later writers. Besides, Simeon and Reginald impute to Cuthbert motives for his miracles, especially posthumous ones, which are as inconsistent with his saintly character as are the acts of petty spite imputed to Christ in the apocryphal gospels. Reference will also be made to Bede’s three ‘scientific’ treatises known since the introduction of printing as De temporum ratione (written in 725), De temporibus, and De natura rerum (both written about the year 703). 1 The question of the authorship of the smaller works that bear Bede’s name is a very vexed one. Charles W. Jones, in the latest treatise on this subject, says: No writer has had more different works unknowingly attributed to him than Bede: yet most of the confusion ... is the result of errors of renais sance printers instead of mediaeval scribes. Bede, by the nature of his writings, was bound to attract anonymous works to his name, but with the possible exception of the editor of the 1563 edition of his works [at Basle] we never meet conscious fraud. . . . Because his works were short, several were written in one codex, and extra leaves were filled with other short material. Eventually all the anonymous material in the volume might take the name of Bede. 2 The work De minutione sanguinis has been ascribed to Bede, and was included by Giles in the collected edition of his works, but it is not claimed by Bede himself, in the list at the end of the Eccle siastical History , as his own work. Plummer considers that it possibly may be by Bede, especially as the latter shows an acquaint ance with the subject in Book V, chapter 3 of his Ecclesiastical History. For the sake of convenience it will be quoted here as Bede’s work. Jones, however, is very sceptical concerning Plum- 1 For Professor Whiting’s discussion of the date of De temporibus , see Bede, Twelfth-centenary Essays, edited by A. Hamilton Thompson, Oxford, 1935, pp. 15-16. 2 Charles W. Jones, Bedae pseudepigraphia: Scientific Writings falsely attri buted to Bede, Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1939, pp. 1-2.