Bede the Venerable

Bede sat in a monastery in Northumbria and wrote the history of how Christianity reached England — his Ecclesiastical History of the English People is still the founding text of English historiography. He invented the convention of dating by Anno Domini. He preserved Latin learning at a time when most of the West had forgotten how to read it. He is the only Englishman in Dante's Paradiso. Patristic learning didn't die in 600 — it was carried on by people like Bede, in cold monasteries on the edge of the world.