In addition to his powerful articulation of salvation history, discussed in Chapter 4, Bede's authoritative narrative and his explicitly Roman agenda have received much scholarly attention. As scholars such as Janet Nelson, Nicholas Howe and Walter Goffart have established, Rome is the cultural center of Bede's world. In Bede's account, it is Augustine of Canterbury's mission from Rome in 597 that introduces Christianity and literacy to Æthelbert's court in Kent. He includes a series of fifteen letters from Pope Gregory and his successors encouraging and admonishing kings, queens and bishops. Eight of these appear in Book I; they form one of the strongest textual foundations on which Bede asserts the authority of Rome in the Historia Ecclesiastica. Curiously, the OEHE omits or summarizes all but one of these letters. These omissions have typically been read as signs of the inferiority of the translation.

This chapter challenges that idea. Building on my discussion of the editing of Bede's account of the Pelagian heresy and Easter controversy, this chapter re-examines and considers the omission of the letters in relation to scenes of translation and conversion, and in light of the larger purposes pursued by Bede and by his anonymous translators in their differing historical contexts. The next chapter looks at the omission of the letters from Book II, as well as the repositioning of Gregory's Libellus Responsionum, the one papal letter Bede's main Old English translator includes in its entirety, at the end of Book III.