Amazon.com description: Product Description: Renowned as the most learned man in eighth-century Europe and the author of the first English history to be written by an Englishman, the Venerable Bede was the personification of the golden age of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Here are specially commissioned translations from his Life of Cuthbert, his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The large-format book is lavishly illustrated with colour photographs of manuscripts, monuments and landscapes that Bede himself would have recognized, and prefaced with illuminating introductions to the man in his time.