Personal names in the composition and transmission of Bede's prose Vita S. Cuthberti

Abstract

While writing his prose Vita S. Cuthberti, Bede appears to have made deliberate choices as to which personal names to spell out. Some of those which he omitted, however, can be found in the marginal annotations of three later manuscripts of the work. A number of these names are also mentioned in the earlier Lindisfarne Vita, but some others have only been preserved through those marginalia. The article examines the monastic milieu within which efforts were made throughout several centuries to remember and transmit the names of the people who had witnessed Cuthbert's sanctity without interfering with Bede's text.