Saint Bede the Venerable

"The Venerable Bede's Art of Poetry and Rhetoric is a milestone in the transmission and adaptation of the classical principles of poetry and rhetoric to the changing needs of the medieval world. Bede...wrote the work as a textbook for use in his monastic school at Jarrow....It is in two parts. 'The Art of Poetry' is a guide to the most important meters of Latin poetry and offers practical instruction in the composition of Latin verse. 'The Figures of Rhetoric' defines some of the principal devices of rhetoric known to the Greco-Roman tradition and illustrates their usage with examples drawn from the Bible."--P. of cover.

The Commentary on Revelation is Bede's first venture into Biblical exegesis - an ambitious choice for a young monastic scholar in a newly Christianized land. Its subject matter - the climax of the great story of creation and redemption, of history and of time itself - adds to the Commentary's intrinsic importance, for these themes lie at the heart of Bede's concerns and of his achievement as a historian, exegete, scholar, and preacher. But Bede was also a man of his age. When he penned the Commentary around 703, speculation and anxiety about the end of the world was in the air. According to conventional chronology, almost 6,000 years had passed since creation. If for God 'one day ... is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Peter 3:8), the world was destined to last six millennia, corresponding to the six days of creation. The end, then, was close. Bede vigorously opposed the temptation to calculate the time of the end. The Commentary argues that Revelation is not a literal prophecy, but a symbolic reflection on the perennial struggle of the Church in this world. At the same time, the young Bede is starting to shape his own account of how the end-times would unfold. This translation, prefaced by a substantial Introduction, will be of interest to students of medieval religious and cultural history, of Anglo-Saxon England, and of the history of Biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages."--Jacket.