ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Venerable Bede who as a seventh-century Christian historian developed a remarkable technique for reading sources. His purpose was better to understand chronology in order that the End of Days might be calculated according to prophecy. Christian eschatology in the Middle Ages, however, looked not only to the past but to the future and so connected both the past and the future through the processes of historical change. Veracity in history is at least to some extent of itself an historical construct, a creature of the time in which a standard of truth is held and the history researched and written. This could also be said about the plausibility of any account set in the past. Bede was especially adept at constructing periods, particularly in his attempt to date the religious calendar from historical records. The evocation of memory played a crucial role in Islamic traditions but in different guises from that of Judaism or Christianity.
