The Early Medieval Era · 597-793 · England
Anglo-Saxon Christianity
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About This Movement
Christianity reached the English twice over and from two directions — from Rome in 597, when Augustine landed in Kent, and from Ireland by way of Iona, whose monks founded Lindisfarne and evangelised Northumbria. And at the Synod of Whitby in 664 the two traditions had to settle publicly which calendar and which customs the English church would keep. What grew out of that settlement was a church with an extraordinary appetite for learning. Bede, writing at Jarrow, finished in 731 the history that is still the main source for the whole period, and monasteries like Whitby, under the abbess Hild, trained bishops. Within a century of being a mission field, England was sending missionaries of its own back across the Channel — Willibrord to Frisia, Boniface into Germany, and with them women such as the abbess Leoba, whose one surviving letter comes down under her own name. The window closes on 8 June 793, when Viking raiders sacked Lindisfarne and a different age began.
Sources
- Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969; Penguin trans. also in print) (primary) — The single richest narrative source of the era in the West; standard edition, cheap translations everywhere.
- The Letters of St Boniface (trans. Ephraim Emerton, 1940; repr. Columbia, 2000 with introduction by T. F. X. Noble) (primary) — The Boniface circle's correspondence, including the women's letters (Leoba to Boniface).
- C. H. Talbot, The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (1954): Lives of Willibrord, Boniface, Sturm, Leoba, Lebuin + the Hodoeporicon of Willibald (primary) — English translations of the mission-circle hagiography, including Rudolf of Fulda's Life of Leoba - the fullest portrait of an Anglo-Saxon woman religious; on archive.org.
- Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed. 1991) (secondary) — The classic synthesis of the conversion and the converging Roman/Irish streams.
- John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005) (secondary) — The modern ground-level account (minsters, landscape, ordinary practice) - counterweight to great-men narrative.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 5: 'Germanic Christianities, 600-1100' (Lesley Abrams) (reference) — From the vol. 3 TOC; covers the Anglo-Saxon world.