Saint of the Day, May 25

Saint Bede (c. 673–735), monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, never traveled far from his cloister but became, through the library that the abbots Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid built around him, the most learned man of the early Middle Ages. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the foundation document of English national identity and the first work to date events anno Domini. He wrote scriptural commentaries, scientific works on time and the calendar, and saints' lives, and was the only Englishman whom Dante placed in the Heaven of the Sun. He died on the eve of the Ascension, dictating the last sentence of a translation of John's Gospel.