medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Bede the Younger (d. later ninth century), not to be confused with the seventh-century St. Bede the Venerable, is said in his fourteenth-century Vita (BHL 1077-1079) to have been taken into Charlemagne's service as a boy after the Frankish capture and official Christianization of his North German homeland, to have been educated as a Christian, to have excelled at his studies, and to have been ordained priest, in which office he performed admirably while at court for for about fifteen years. Then, desiring to enter monastic life, he is said to have sought and received permission to leave the emperor's service and to have entered the monastery of the BVM at today's Gavello (RO) in the southern Veneto. There he is said to have stayed for some forty years as an humble penitent, living very ascetically, occasionally giving proof of his sanctity through the operation of a miracle, and dying on this day in an unspecified year.
Further miracles are said to have taken place Bede's grave. He certainly had a cult by 1233, the year in which his relics were translated from the monastery of Gavello to the also Benedictine house of St. Benignus at Genoa, which is where Bede's Vita in the form in which we now have it was later written (in the last century Bede's relics were further translated to Subiaco). In the early modern period monks of St. Benignus claimed that the relics they venerated under Bede's name were those of St. Bede the Venerable. Papebroch's attempt to explain the identity of these two saints' names involved the conjecture, accepted by Gian Domenico Gordini in his notice of today's Bede in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, that this saint came from the homeland of the early medieval Angles in Schleswig. Today is his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Best,
John Dillon
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