Un futuro innombrable: la cronología de Beda frente al augurio anglosajón de Gildas
[EN] The demise of Roman rule in Britain seems to have been followed by a quick collapse of large-scale political articulation and the outburst of a number of native politities, of which very little is known. Between the mid and late fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons took over the east of southern Bri...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2007 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/29220 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/29220 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Early Middle Age Britain Political articulation Prophecy Venerable Beda Chronology Alta Edad Media Britania Discurso político Profecía Beda el Venerable Cronología Medieval history |
| Sumario: | [EN] The demise of Roman rule in Britain seems to have been followed by a quick collapse of large-scale political articulation and the outburst of a number of native politities, of which very little is known. Between the mid and late fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons took over the east of southern Britain, absorbing the native population into a new ethnic, religious and political identity. BY the early sixth-century, though, such and expansion had come to a halt, and the Celtic-speaking, Christian inhabitants of southwestern Britain remained beyond Anglo-Saxon control, although that did not make their political organization less fragmented. Sometime between the very late fifth century and the mid-sixth century, a British cleric named Gildas wrote down a text (De excidio Britanniae) in which he exhorted the religious and secular rulers of the British polities to take action. Gildas’s argument was that, for all the peace and calm the present generation enjoyed, the troubles of the past were not gone for ever. The enemy was still there and hardship would return. The kings and priests who –like a new Israel– had given up to leisure and forgot about God’s precepts were castigated by Gildas and prompted to return to put down their sinful ways and prepare to face the fights to come with God on their side.In order to reinforce this argument, Gildas inserted in his narration of the Saxon invasion of Britain a quick reference to an omen which predicted that the new settlers would inhabit the island for three hundred years, and for half of this period (i.e.: one hundred and fifty years) they would repeatedly devastate it. This is a most enigmatic passage which has raised all sorts of opinions among historians, from those who consider it mere fabrication or interpolation to those who judge it as a colourful, exotic touch, whether due to Gildas’s imagination and scriptural learning or to his knowledge of a real tradition about a real omen of Saxon provenance. However, given the political relevance of a forecast about the ending of the Saxons in Britain, it is striking that it has left nearly no trace of its existence. Later texts which sometimes replicate Gildas’s passage about the Saxon invasion, systematically wrote out the Saxon omen, which has provided grounds for the views that it was an interpolation which did not originally feature in De excidio. |
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