Introduction

Computus was the medieval science of time reckoning and calendar construction concerned primarily with calculating the date of Easter. Many of the events of the Insular Easter Controversy are contemporary with Venerable Bede's lifetime and provide an important backdrop to his works on computus and chronology, as will be further discussed in Chapter One. The principal advocate for the 'Roman' practise at Whitby was Wilfrid, later bishop of York, and returned from Rome, where he appears to have learned the rules of the Dionysiac computus. Despite the breadth of medieval monastic education, modern scholarship has tended to separate Bede's scholarship into different strands with his writings on computus frequently treated separately from his other works. In contrast, scholars of computus have arrived at somewhat different conclusions about Bede the computist. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.