Summary This book honours the scholarship of English historian Dr. Alan Thacker by exploring the insular, the European and, more broadly, the Mediterranean connections and contexts of the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England in the age of Bede, and beyond. It brings together original contributions by leading European and North American scholars of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages working across a range of disciplines: history, theology, epigraphy, and art history. Moving from the Irish Sea to the Bosporus, this collection presents a linked world in which saints, scholars, and the city of Rome all played powerful connective roles, creating communities, generating relationships, linking east to west, north to south, and present to past. As in Thacker's own work, Bede's life and thought is a central presence. Bede's attitudes to historical and contemporaneous conceptions of heresy, to the Irish church, and the evidence for his often complex relationships with his Northumbrian contemporaries all come under scrutiny, together with groundbreaking studies of his exegesis, christology, and historical method. Many of the contributions offer original insights into figures and phenomena that have been the focus of Dr. Thacker's highly influential scholarship. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements Introduction: Alan T. Thacker, an Appreciation Paul Kershaw A Bibliography of the Publications of Alan T. Thacker, 1979-2019 Paul Kershaw Gildebertus rex fr[ancorum]: The Least-Famous Epitaph of a Merovingian King and the Cult of a Spanish Martyr in Sixth-Century Paris Mark A. Handley The 'Political' Use of the Cult of Saints in Early Medieval Ravenna Tom Brown The Impact of the Lateran Council of 649 in Francia: The Martyrdom of Pope Martin and the Life of St Eligius Catherine Cubitt Bede and Monotheletism Jennifer O'Reilly Rectores at Risk: Erudition and Heresy in Bede's Commentary on Proverbs Faith Wallis Heresy and Authority in Bede's Letter to Plegwine Peter Darby Bede and Bishop Acca Clare Stancliffe King Ceadwalla and Bishop Wilfrid Richard Sharpe Bede's Preferential Treatment of the Irish Barbara Yorke Bede's Midlife Crisis: The Commentary on First Samuel Scott DeGregorio Bede's perfecti, the Vision of God, and the Foretaste of Heaven Arthur Holder Bede's Wise and Foolish Virgins: Streanæshalch and Coldingham Julia Barrow Risano Revisited: A Step Too Far for Charlemagne? Paul Fouracre Hincmar of Reims meets Bede Jinty Nelson The English Presence in Rome in the Later Anglo-Saxon Period: Change or Continuity? Francesca Tinti A Renaissance Synthesis of Ancient Christian Themes: Architecture, Altarpieces, and Imagined Spaces in San Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice, 1495-1520 Éamonn Ó Carragáin Index