History

For the June Love Blippin’ Books prompt (#LBB18) we were invited to ‘Catch-up.’ 

Having been a late arrival at the #LBB party I did think about responding to #LBB1 or #LBB2, but in the end I just decided to tackle Donna Tartt’s ‘Secret History’ (1992) in part because it’s been sat in a storage box for at least ten years waiting to be read, and also because it illustrates how far off the pace I am regarding literary phenomena and best-sellers. It also works for the second prompt, for Pride month, as it features LGBTQ+ characters.

I did find it a clever and engaging book. It is not a spoiler to reveal that right at the beginning the reader is made aware that most of the protagonists, who are all classics students at a small, elite New England college, conspire to murder one of the other protagonists. Roughly half of the book explores the conditions that led up to the murder, and half with the consequences. At 628 pages it’s a bit of a commitment, but  I comfortably managed it in two weeks. 

In moving from one book to another, I often follow some thread. As ‘The Secret History’ features a lot of the Greek classics I was drawn to the ‘Penguin Classics’ section of my shelves, but found myself diverted to the Middle Ages and the world of the Venerable Bede. So my second ‘catch-up’ is with his ‘A History of the English Church and People’ and my determination to read this at some point was confirmed when I found I had two copies!

A curiosity about Bede was sown when I lived and worked in the North-east. I can recall when I first moved to Sunderland joining in with the induction tours of the area that we put on for our students and one of my colleagues talking about Bede as the ‘first British Geographer’ when we passed St. Peter’s at Monkwearmouth. This is the site of the Saxon monastery and church, founded in 634 and origin of the term ‘monk’.  Bede was born and lived here, moving to the nearby monastery at Jarrow aged seven. I will have walked past and through that site scores of times during my time in that city. Then there was Bede’s World, a heritage and educational attraction in Jarrow, which I never visited but which my students went on placements to. Later, when I worked up river in Durham, I was based in the School of Education which was attached to the College of St Hild and St Bede, and Bede’s tomb can be seen in Durham Cathedral.The North-east has not forgotten Bede. Bede’s World is now Jarrow Hall and I’ll try to fit in a visit on one of my next trips to that part of the world. 

His ‘History…’, written around 731 CE, is seen as one of the first works of English history, particularly  in the way Bede acknowledges and treats his source material. While it does start in pre-Roman times, it is mostly concerned with the establishment of Christianity in Britain, Ireland and western Europe in the early Middle Ages, with most attention given to the varied English kingdoms of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes after the Romans had left (and before the Vikings and Normans arrived). The Britons are very much the heathen baddies of Bede’s world view. I’m not religious, but am interested in history and the story of the land I inhabit, and indeed in anything esoteric, so there was plenty of fascinating detail here. And as someone who has visited places like Iona and Lindisfarne, it certainly helped revive my understanding of how all these places developed and are connected. It is the sort of book that I doubt many read from cover to cover these days, but once committed I like to see a task through, but in the end I did struggle to keep up with the never ending parade of popes, kings, bishops, miracles and visions, but there would always be some little nugget that would catch my attention. And I learned things and gained new perspectives on things and in that sense grew as a person, which to me is the sign of a good book.

Thanks as always to @squatbetty for the prompt. Keep your eyes peeled for LBB19.