This book grew out of a project that I began during a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at the Parker Library, Cambridge, in 1997, directed by Paul E. Szarmach and Timothy Graham. As I researched what I thought would be a chapter on the Old English version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum to add to my dissertation on ‘Reading Miracles in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica’, I realized not only how rich the manuscripts are, but also the extent to which study of the translation has been overshadowed by study of its source, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica. So this became a project of its own. Because editions have minimized the differences between the Old English and the Latin, scholars have treated the Old English version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica as if it were somehow still identical to the Latin. By returning to the material texts to study translation as transformation, and to examine the cultural and historical implications of the differences between the two texts, this study fills a substantial gap in our understanding of the transmission and reception of both Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica and the OEHE. Combining an examination of the manuscript texts with a theoretically informed sense of their historical, literary and cultural contexts, this study not only analyzes traditional textual questions of variance, transmission and transformation, but also seeks to explore larger questions about the sociology of the text, the role and function of translation, and the uses of the vernacular in medieval English culture.