Talk:Aidan of Lindisfarne

message: All of the following links show the name spelling as Aidan rather than Aiden, and the date of death as 651:
*The Catholic Encyclopedia
*Irelandseye.com
*Early British Kingdoms
*Lindisfarne's own website
Please provide several good references before changing the spelling and name in the article again. -- Roleplayer 23:32, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spelling and date of death 

message: I just thought I'd let people know that I tweaked some of the phrasing in this article. Before it gave the impression that Christianity had some sort of history with the Northumbrians. 
It said "due to the fall of the Roman Empire Anglo-Saxon Paganism was seeing a resurgence". This is misleading. Anglo-Saxon Paganism was not seeing a resurgence, it was simply the dominant religion and had been since the Anglo-Saxon conquest. It hadn't existed at some previous point and then gone away. 
It also said Aiden "restored" Christianity to the Northumbrian communites. Yes King Edwin had accepted baptism in 627, but that was only 6 years before Osric and Eanfrith returned. So it seems more likely that the general public of Northumbria had simply remained Pagan for those 6 years, rather than a mass conversion to Christianity sometime after 627 and then a mass return to Paganism in 633. Æscing (talk) 16:18, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Aiden was not "restoring" Christianity"

message: To say "Bishop Lightfoot, whose diocese included Lindisfarne ..." may not be misleading, but it is less than fully informative.  Bishop Lightfoot was Bishop of Durham, and the diocese of Durham is actually the same as the diocese of Lindisfarne.  It was moved from the west of Scotland to the east and then renamed "Durham" for its new location.  Durham Cathedral is the location of the remains of St. Cuthbert (pronounced "Cubbert"), Bishop of Lindisfarne, which were moved in honor of the relocation of his diocese.  -- Bob (Bob99 (talk) 22:31, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "... whose diocese included Lindisfarne" 

message: There are problems with the historical perspective in the Background section, especially in the statement, "... Christianity, which had been propagated throughout Britain but not Ireland by the Roman Empire, was being largely displaced by Anglo-Saxon paganism. Though it seemed a foregone conclusion that the region was returning to its indigenous religion ..."
First, Anglo-Saxon paganism was not the indigenous religion, because it had been brought there by the Anglo-Saxons, who had come from Jutland.
In addition, the ebbs and flows of Christianity in the British Isles from the Roman Empire to the time of St. Aidan are complex. Roman Britain became Christian with the rest of the Roman Empire. There is no evidence that earlier religions survived, notwithstanding the modern Romantic notion to the contrary. The final departure of the Roman legions from Britain prompted slave raiding from pagan Ireland. Paradoxically, those raids led to the capture of then-16-year-old Patrick (later Saint), who subsequently escaped, became a bishop and returned to Christianize Ireland. Meanwhile, the Christian British invited non-Christian Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to Britain to provide defense. But the barbarians decided to help themselves to most of the island, resulting in the introduction of Anglo-Saxon paganism as the dominant religion in "England." This happened while civilization in the Western Roman Empire was collapsing. As a result, Ireland was the place in Western Europe where one could find much of the old learning preserved (in monasteries). The Irish Dal Riata tribe spread from northern Ireland to the highlands of Scotland, bringing their brand of Christianity with them and establishing the monastic center on the island of Iona (which this article associates with Aidan's youth) among other monasteries. ("Scotti" was the Latin term for Irishmen.) From there, missionaries went among the Anglo-Saxons of England later to Continental Europe. These were events before the Carolingian Renaissance, but they are related to the Carolingian Renaissance. For example, Charlemagne put the Northumbrian monk Alcuin in charge of his palace school, and the well-known Carolingian miniscule form of letters was developed by Alcuin as the standard for scribes in Charlemagne's empire, based primarily on the Insular form of letters used by Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks. -- Bob (Bob99 (talk) 16:56, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems with historical perspective 

message: Saint Aidan is often the portrayed holding a broken plate. There is no mention of this in the article. I would love to see it mentioned, with an explanation of what it meant.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.191.40.244 (talk) 07:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Broken Plate