Editing Bede (section)

==== Assessment ====
The ''Historia Ecclesiastica'' was copied often in the Middle Ages, and about 160 manuscripts containing it survive. About half of those are located on the European continent, rather than in the British Isles.<ref name="Companion4" /> Most of the 8th- and 9th-century texts of Bede's ''Historia'' come from the northern parts of the [[Carolingian Empire]].<ref name="Reread21">{{harvnb|Higham|2006|p=21}}</ref> This total does not include manuscripts with only a part of the work, of which another 100 or so survive. It was printed for the first time between 1474 and 1482, probably at [[Strasbourg]].<ref name="Companion4">{{harvnb|Wright|2008|pp=4–5}}</ref>

Modern historians have studied the ''Historia'' extensively, and several editions have been produced.<ref name="Nar236" /> For many years, early Anglo-Saxon history was essentially a retelling of the ''Historia'', but recent scholarship has focused as much on what Bede did not write as what he did. The belief that the ''Historia'' was the culmination of Bede's works, the aim of all his scholarship, was a belief common among historians in the past but is no longer accepted by most scholars.<ref name="Nar238">{{harvnb|Goffart |1988|pp= 238–239}}</ref>

Modern historians and editors of Bede have been lavish in their praise of his achievement in the ''Historia Ecclesiastica''. Stenton regards it as one of the "small class of books which transcend all but the most fundamental conditions of time and place", and regards its quality as dependent on Bede's "astonishing power of co-ordinating the fragments of information which came to him through tradition, the relation of friends, or documentary evidence&nbsp;... In an age where little was attempted beyond the registration of fact, he had reached the conception of history."<ref name="Stenton_187">{{harvnb|Stenton|1971|p=187}}</ref> [[Patrick Wormald]] describes him as "the first and greatest of England's historians".<ref name="Worm29">{{harvnb|Wormald|1999|p= 29}}</ref>

The ''Historia Ecclesiastica'' has given Bede a high reputation, but his concerns were different from those of a modern writer of history.<ref name="ODNB" /> His focus on the history of the organisation of the English church, and on heresies and the efforts made to root them out, led him to exclude the secular history of kings and kingdoms except where a moral lesson could be drawn or where they illuminated events in the church.<ref name="ODNB" /> Besides the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'', the medieval writers [[William of Malmesbury]], [[Henry of Huntingdon]] and [[Geoffrey of Monmouth]] used his works as sources and inspirations.<ref name="Reread27">{{harvnb|Higham|2006|p=27}}</ref> Early modern writers, such as [[Polydore Vergil]] and [[Matthew Parker]], the Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, also utilised the ''Historia'', and his works were used by both Protestant and Catholic sides in the [[European wars of religion|wars of religion]].<ref name="Reread33">{{harvnb|Higham|2006|p=33}}</ref>

Some historians have questioned the reliability of some of Bede's accounts. One historian, Charlotte Behr, thinks that the ''Historia's'' account of the arrival of the Germanic invaders in Kent should not be considered to relate what actually happened, but rather relates myths that were current in Kent during Bede's time.<ref name="Behr">{{harvnb|Behr|2000|pp=25–52}}</ref>

It is likely that Bede's work, because it was so widely copied, discouraged others from writing histories and may even have led to the disappearance of manuscripts containing older historical works.<ref name="Plummer_I_xlvii">Plummer, ''Bedae Opera Historica'', vol. I, p.&nbsp;xlvii and note.</ref>