"Commendatory Letters": An Archival Reading of the Venerable Bede

This essay explores the role of writing, records, and documents as depicted in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a landmark of western historiography completed by the Venerable Bede in the year 731. Bede's purpose was to narrate the early history of Christianity in Britain, but he also made numerous references to writing and the role of documents in human affairs. Because he was preparing his history at a time when writing itself was a relatively unusual phenomenon, Bede offers a singular view of such larger questions as the uses of literacy and documentation, the shifting dynamics among different forms of communication, and the larger cultural meanings in records beyond the information they contain. A study of these forces at work in Bede's time gives contemporary archivists a perspective on the revolutionary changes in the technology and the uses of records in our own age.