Life
Very little is known about his life. The author of the Vita Sancti Wilfrithi identifies himself as “Stephen, a priest”. Bede mentions that Wilfrid brought a singing master from Kent, Ædde Stephanus, to Ripon in 669 to teach chant, and he has traditionally been thought to be the same person as the “Stephen” mentioned. However, there is no more solid evidence that the two names describe the same person. If the two were in fact the same, Stephen would have been at least twenty years old when he came north, placing him in his sixties or older at Wilfrid’s death in 709.
Regardless of whether or not Stephen the priest was Wilfrid’s singing master from Kent, he appears to have been a follower of Wilfrid and was able to consult individuals who had known Wilfrid closely as sources for the Life of Wilfrid. He wrote for the monks in Ripon, many of whom had known Wilfrid.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Of Ripon
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Not too many years ago, a child’s experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries that parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child’s life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.”
—Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)