What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 1

  

What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 1

 

As readers of my long-term blog know, I rarely reference current events. I usually want my blog to feel more timeless, but there’s a hot debate in evangelical conversations right now, and that is over “biblical womanhood,” especially regarding women’s authoritative roles in the church.*

 

Saxon church at Cambridge

I’d like to consider this hot topic by looking at our primary source for the history both of Britain and of the English church in the early Middle Ages: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by Bede, a monk in the northeast of Britain, in AD 731. Bede’s text is not obscure. Portions are included in every survey of British literature textbook, such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Every fall since 2004, I have begun my British Literature Survey class with the account Bede gives of the first extant English poem by the first English Christian poet, Caedmon.

 

I love the story of Caedmon, the shy cowherd who is visited by an angel and receives a miraculous gift to sing about God and biblical truths in his native Old English language and poetic style. But my focus here isn’t on the historical account of Caedmon, it’s on the religious leader he is told to report to, who leads the council in determining whether or not Caedmon’s gift is a miracle.**

 

This leader’s name was Hilda, abbess over the double monastery of the place now called Whitby.

 

There were several of these double monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon period of England (after the gradual conversion of the island to Christianity, so from the early 600s).*** These double monasteries housed both nuns and monks (separately), and at least some (all?) were ruled over by abbesses, such as Abbess Hilda.

 

After the council determines that Caedmon indeed has been given a miraculous gift, Hilda advises him to give up his secular occupation (cowherding) and become a monk, with apparently the specific vocation of writing songs (the monastery’s own Chris Tomlin). It is Hilda who “admitted him into the Community as a brother” (that is, a monk) and “ordered him to be instructed in the events of sacred history” (Bede 4.24).

 

For all of these years, my British Literature Survey students have been subtly learning, through this story of Caedmon, about a woman who does not fit our contemporary notion of “biblical womanhood” as conceived by the Council for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.

 

This short account included at the beginning of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), which is probably the most widely-used English literature survey text in the U.S., briefly allows students at my Baptist university to see a different attitude toward Christian women’s roles.

This brings me back to the origin of my blog and its title: why it’s so important to read the old books. In his essay “On the Reading of Old Books”, C.S. Lewis writes,

 

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

 

Similarly, Lewis advises his readers in “Learning in War-Time” that we need to know the past

 

because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.****

 

In both of these quotes (and in a few more I could pull up), Lewis reminds us that reading only within our own time, keeps us from seeing how attitudes and assumptions have differed in different eras and places. We in our arrogance think that we are right in all our assumptions, but we can learn much from what was taken as true in the past. Past periods of time had their own mistakes, but they also understood truths that perhaps we’ve neglected, suggests Lewis.

 

 

I wish that the NAEL would include a lot more of Bede. Indeed, Bede devotes an entire chapter to the life of abbess Hilda (the chapter prior to the story of Caedmon). We are told that she was not just abbess over the whole monastery at what is now Whitby, but she had “founded or organized” that monastery (3.23), where “she taught the observance of righteousness, mercy, purity, and other virtues” (my italics).

 

Kings and princes (male leaders, in other words) “used to come and ask her advice in their difficulties and take it,” says Bede. “Those under her direction were required to make a thorough study of the Scriptures and occupy themselves in good works” (3.23; my italics).

 

Bede cannot seem to praise Abbess Hilda enough. She is praised as a shepherd, “instruct[ing] the flock committed to her.” Bede compares Hilda to the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, writing that “it pleased [God] to try her holy soul by a long sickness, in order that, as with the Apostle, her strength might be made perfect in weakness” (translator’s italics). Her life, says Bede, “afforded a shining example . . . to all who wished to live a good life” (4.23; my italics)—in other words, not just to other women. Bede does not use gendered statements about Hilda’s godly example.*****

 

There’s more in Bede’s account of the Abbess Hilda (d. 680), but how can/should/do modern conservative Christians respond to Hilda, this godly religious leader who happens to be a woman?

 

 

In Part 2 of my blog post, I will explore more of the exemplary women in religious leadership roles that Bede writes about in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People and compare Bede’s church history book with today’s most popular church history books in regards to their discussion of influential women in the church (based on the section “Writing Medieval Women out of Church History” from Beth Barr’s Making of Biblical Womanhood, pp. 96-99).

 

 

* cf. the “hot” books right now: Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (Zondervan, 2020) and especially Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Brazos, 2021). My journey into Bede here is especially inspired by Barr’s accounts of medieval women in her book. In looking at Bede’s “biblical women” I am adding to her examples.

 

** You can find this account of the poet Caedmon in Book 4, chapter 24, of Bede.

 

*** D.H. Farmer’s notes to my Penguin edition of Bede list “Whitby, Ely, Wimborne Minster and others” (p. 369).

 

**** These essays from C. S. Lewis are found in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, respectively.

 

***** I have been working from the Penguin editions translation by Leo Sherley-Price and revised by R.E. Latham.