The late Twentieth Century witnessed a watershed in approaches to Bede's writings. Whilst previous generations of commentators had focused on his straightforward style and sincere truthfulness, theorists of late and post Modernity challenged scholars to scrutinize such assumptions. In the 1980s historians on both sides of the Atlantic reconsidered Bede's historiae from a more cynical perspective. The comfort with which one might have read Bede's historiographical writings as those of a consummate and fastidious, if at times quaint, Anglo-Saxon historian was effectively stripped away. Walter Goffart, particularly, left us with evidence of a hidden agenda and a distinctly uncomfortable feeling that Bede was more of a historical manipulator than we wished to see. Subsequent attempts have been made to challenge parts of Goffart's hypothesis, but the overall assumption of innocence with which we might have approached and appreciated Bede's works has been all but lost. The important contributions of James Campbell, Henry Mayr-Harting and Patrick Wormald are products of a learning environment quite different from the post-modern, sceptical university of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in which Goffart's thesis seems so credible.

Correspondingly the 1980s also witnessed a surge in publications examining aspects of the cult of saints as portrayed in early medieval texts in general and in Bede's writings specifically. If 1988 brought a fundamental reconsideration of Bede that effectively transformed the way that subsequent generations would read his historiae, then the year 1981 marked an equally important transformation in the study of the cult of saints.