Significance
Stephen’s Life of Saint Wilfrid was one of the first Anglo-Saxon histories, and the earliest to survive. Bede evidently used it as a source for sections of his Historia Ecclesiastica, although he did not acknowledge it.
The Life of Saint Wilfrid is also significant in that it provides a contemporary perspective on events which transpired during Wilfrid’s lifetime. For instance, the Life gives an account of the Synod of Whitby which differs from Bede’s. While Stephen's writing has come under more criticism than Bede’s, the account found in the Life of Wilfrid reveals political factors that may have affected the Synod alongside the religious controversies described by Bede.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Of Ripon
Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)