دانلود کتاب بید، محاسبه زمان -ویرایش دوم، اصلاح‌شده

At the close of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede (ca. 673–735) appended a short autobiography. He identified himself as a monk of ‘St Peter and St Paul which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow’ who had been born on the lands of ‘this monastery’ and offered as an oblate at the age of seven. Educated under Abbot Benedict Biscop, the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and Biscop’s successor Ceolfrith, Bede was ordained deacon and then priest by Bishop John of Hexham. That ordination was the last ‘event’ in his life. Thenceforth, Bede’s existence, by his own account, was one of sacred sameness, ruled not by change and chance but by the stable rhythms of monastic time: From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the choir, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write. Bede defines his principal activity as the study of Scripture, so, when he lists his writings, he begins with his biblical exegesis and his collected letters. In their wake are the lives of saints Felix, Anastasius, and Cuthbert, followed by the biographies of the abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow and the Ecclesiastical History. Then comes his liturgical productions – a martyrology and hymns – and, after that, poetry on sacred themes. Bringing up the rear are books on the secular subjects of grammar and rhetoric: one on orthography, another on poetic metres, and a third on schemes and tropes. Between the poetry and the grammatica Bede lists ‘[t]wo books, one on the nature of things and the other on chronology (de temporibus): also a longer book on chronology (item de temporibus librum unum maior)’. This volume is a translation of that ‘longer book on chronology’, which in a more lyric vein Bede also called his ‘little book about the fleeting and wave-tossed course of time’. It was composed in 725, which is identified as ‘the present year’ in some of the worked examples Bede used to demonstrate formulae. Medieval readers knew it as De temporibus (On Times) or De temporibus liber secundus (The Second Book on Times), to distinguish it from Bede’s earlier, briefer treatment of time-reckoning, also entitled De temporibus. Its conventional later medieval and modern title De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time) is apparently derived from the opening words of the book’s preface, De natura rerum et ratione temporum duos quondam stricto sermone libellos discentibus ut rebar necessarios composui. (‘Some time ago I wrote two short books in a summary style which were, I judged, necessary for my students; these concerned the nature of things and the reckoning of time’), as well as those of chapter 1: De temporum ratione, domino iuuante, dicturi … (‘Before discussing the reckoning of time … ’). The ‘two short books’ mentioned by Bede were an introduction to cosmology entitled De natura rerum (The Nature of Things) and De temporibus (On Times); both were composed around 703. The preface of The Reckoning of Time frames this new book in relation not only to On Times but to its companion treatise, The Nature of Things. Bede intimates that he intends to combine these two earlier works into The Reckoning of Time. In so doing, he would reverse his earlier writing process, whereby he extracted the material on cosmology from Isidore of Seville’s The Nature of Things to create his own treatise of the same name, while incorporating Isidore’s chapters on the units of time into On Times. But Bede always considered The Nature of Things and On Times as conjoined works; they even shared a poetic epigraph: ‘In brief chapters, I, Bede, the servant of God, / Have lightly touched on the varied natures of things / And on the broad ages of fleeting time … ’. In other words, Bede envisioned from early in his career a conceptual parallel between the nature (natura) of things and the reckoning (ratio) of time; this pairing of cosmos and time will underpin his innovative framing of time-reckoning within ‘nature’ in The Reckoning of Time.