This fairly slim volume completes the project of making available in English the Venerable Bede's three main ‘scientific’ works. This is an important enterprise, bringing to a non-Latinate audience a little-known episode in intellectual history: Bede is well known for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but less well known are his biblical commentaries, preaching materials, and didactic texts on virtually every field of learning then current. Of particular interest to the history of science are his contributions to cosmology, chronology and the computus (that uniquely medieval discipline that combined astronomy and arithmetic to enable the hugely complex calculations underlying the Christian calendar), contributions all the more remarkable for being made in eighth-century Northumbria, described by Bede himself as ‘the edge of the world’. Both translators in this volume are distinguished Bede scholars: historians of science are more likely to be familiar with Wallis's translation of his De temporum ratione (under the title The Reckoning of Time, also in TTH, 1999), with an excellent introduction to the computus, but Kendall has edited and translated Bedan texts both didactic and exegetical, including the De Genesi (On Genesis, TTH, 2008).

The De Genesi is crucial to the understanding of the two works presented here, and the relationship between them, for it is in the six days of creation that Bede's cosmography (in the De natura rerum, ‘On the nature of things’) and chronology (De temporibus, ‘On times’) have their origin. For Bede, the only reason for studying these topics was to understand God's will through his creation and its workings, just as exegesis allows us to understand it through his Word in the Bible. It is no doubt true that most of Bede's readers were interested primarily in one very specific aspect of divine intention, namely when they ought to celebrate Easter and the other moveable feasts, but for our author the universe was there to help him magnify the glory of the Lord by laying it out for his readers in all its variety and detail. This purpose is much clearer in the present two works than in the ‘Reckoning of time’, which has much more the character of an educational syllabus, albeit one that takes the reader from the rudiments of counting to the most abstruse calculations then possible (and it seems that Bede was working without the abacus, let alone Arabic numerals or a place system). Indeed, Bede compiled De temporum ratione, he tells us, because his students could not learn from De temporibus. As an educator, he learned by experience that setting complex ideas out in their pristine form is not necessarily the best way to convey them to beginners. The texts translated here, although the product of his earlier career, give us access to Bede's ideas unmediated by the need to make them accessible to monastic schoolboys. Our own needs are not neglected, however: the translators' extensive introduction, commentaries, appendices and ‘select’ bibliography make this an admirable study guide to the texts.

Although it ill befits us to be teleological or Whiggish in the history of science, it should not be thought, on the other hand, that there was no innovation in ‘scientific’ thought in the early Middle Ages (still less the ‘Dark Ages’). Although Bede had conventional (more than conventional, some would argue) medieval respect for auctoritas, and quotes extensively from, in particular, Isidore of Seville, he always deployed his sources judiciously to serve his own purpose. He was also sharp enough to realize that his sources left some questions unanswered, and was not afraid to trust his own observation, as well as his impressive arithmetical skills, in attempting to fill some of the gaps. His writings on the computus, indeed, were held to have resolved all outstanding problems until at least the twelfth century, and the huge numbers of manuscripts listed in the introductions to this volume and Wallis's Reckoning testify that his were the standard works in the Roman church right through the Middle Ages. Of less pressing import to medieval ecclesiastics, but nevertheless of interest to those in northern climes, was the question of the relationship between the moon and the tides. On this topic, Bede was in a better position, literally, in Northumbria to make observations than were his Mediterranean sources, and the results of his cogitations, always showing due pietas to the authorities, in this case mainly Pliny, can be found here in ‘On the nature of things’, Chapter 39 (and are developed further in ‘The reckoning of time’). On the technical details of Bede's calculations, and the development of his thinking on this topic, the translators have added their ‘Reflections’ as an appendix.

Latinists will no doubt quibble with details of Kendall and Wallis's translation, though they should remember that the translators took advice from such luminaries as Michael Lapidge and George H. Brown. Even Latinists (and even picky ones!) will find these translations a useful guide through Bede's sometimes difficult Latinity and ideas, but it is of course not for them that the translators laboured; it was to make these works, which give us access to the thinking of one of the most sophisticated minds of the early Middle Ages, available to scholars who have not devoted their careers to philological studies; not to turn every word into a technically correct equivalent, but to convey Bede's ideas as accurately as possible in modern English. Only scholars as thoroughly steeped in Bede's writing and thinking as these two could have done so to such good effect. If you are not already familiar with the eighth-century Northumbrian contribution to secular learning, this is your opportunity to remedy that omission. And even if you are, you will find much here that is new and interesting, to make this a valuable addition to your library.