By the early eighth century, the vanguard of Christian Latin scholarship had moved far from the Mediterranean heartland of the old empire. As North Africa and Hispania were subsumed into the brighter cultural spectrum of Islam, and Frankia witnessed the birthing pangs of the Carolingian ‘renaissance’, it was Northumbria and the regions surrounding the Irish Sea – the liminal regions between Germanic and ‘Celtic’ Britain – which carried the torch of Christian Latin learning. Here the splendid ambition of Rome, brought to the island by Pope Gregory I and Augustine of Canterbury, met the quiet evangelism of the Hibernian Church and combined to form an extraordinarily vibrant Christian culture. It was within this context and in celebration of this very triumph that the Venerable Bede composed his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.

In the brief autobiographical passage that closes the Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede declares that the simple pleasures of teaching, prayer and community had been the mainstay of his life. This concern with instruction and the abiding love for the foundation in which he lived are easily traced within the writer's works, yet the sheer volume of Bede's bibliography betrays the true breadth of his spiritual and intellectual interest. Bede was both a voracious reader and a prolific writer. Alongside a considerable body of formal exegesis, Bede devoted books to individual scriptural problems, from the precise allegorical significance of the Temple and Tabernacle to the physical description of the Holy Land.