Aldhelm
- d. 709
- Sherborne, Malmesbury
abbot of Malmesbury and later, bishop of Sherborne; known as an author of a number of elaborate Latin tracts in prose and in verse
See also: Cellán of PéronneCellán of Péronne
(d. 706)
Cellanus of Péronne
Irish churchman, fourth abbot of St Fursa’s foundation in Péronne, Neustria, in what became Picardy, France. From William of Malmesbury, he is known to have corresponded with Aldhelm. He has been identified as the author of a number of Latin poems. The Lorsch annals give his obit under 706.
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(d. 706)
Cellanus of Péronne
Irish churchman, fourth abbot of St Fursa’s foundation in Péronne, Neustria, in what became Picardy, France. From William of Malmesbury, he is known to have corresponded with Aldhelm. He has been identified as the author of a number of Latin poems. The Lorsch annals give his obit under 706.
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See also references for related subjects.
Ireland, Colin A., “Where was King Aldfrith of Northumbria educated? An exploration of seventh-century Insular learning”, Traditio 70 (2015): 29–73.
abstract:
The superior learning of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–704) was acknowledged in both Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic contemporary sources by such renowned scholars as Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, Adomnán of Iona, Stephen of Ripon, and Alcuin of York. Both Aldhelm and Adomnán knew him personally, and texts composed by these two scholars and presented to Aldfrith help delineate the breadth of his educational background. He was educated among the Gaels, and their records described him as sapiens. By examining texts of other seventh-century Gaelic sapientes, and the comments of Aldhelm and Bede about Gaelic intellectual life and educational opportunities, we can expand our purview of the scope of his education. The nature of seventh-century schooling was peripatetic, and Aldfrith's dual heritage requires a broad search for locations. Many scholars accept Iona as the likely source of his learned background, but this essay will argue that, among other likely locations in Britain and Ireland, Bangor in Northern Ireland is best supported by surviving evidence. His benign reign is placed at the end of the first century of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, but his education benefited the kingdom of Northumbria through generations of Gaelic scholarship, as exemplified by peregrini such as Columba and Columbanus, and sapientes like Laidcenn mac Baíth, Cummíne of Clonfert, Ailerán of Clonard, Cenn Fáelad mac Ailello, and Banbán of Kildare. Aldfrith's rule ushered in a period of cultural florescence in Northumbria that saw the first hagiography and earliest illuminated manuscripts produced in Anglo-Saxon England and that culminated in the extensive library authored by Bede (d. 735).
Barker, Katherine, and Nicholas Brooks (eds), Aldhelm and Sherborne: essays to celebrate the founding of the bishopric, Oxford: Oxbow, 2010.
Probert, Duncan, “New light on Aldhelm’s letter to King Gerent of Dumnonia”, in: Katherine Barker, and Nicholas Brooks (eds), Aldhelm and Sherborne: essays to celebrate the founding of the bishopric, Oxford: Oxbow, 2010. 110–128.
Yorke, Barbara, “Aldhelm’s Irish and British connections”, in: Katherine Barker, and Nicholas Brooks (eds), Aldhelm and Sherborne: essays to celebrate the founding of the bishopric, Oxford: Oxbow, 2010. 164–180.
Dempsey, G. T., “Aldhelm of Malmesbury and high ecclesiasticism in a barbarian kingdom”, Traditio 63 (2008): 47–88.
Thomson, R. M., William of Malmesbury, rev. ed., Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2003.
Contents: Front matter; Part I: Context, character and achievement: 1. William of Malmesbury and his environment; 2. William as historian and man of letters; 3. William’s reading; 4. William’s ‘scriptorium’; 5. The earliest books from the library of Malmesbury Abbey; Part II: Studies of the writer at work: 6. William’s edition of the Liber Pontificalis; 7. William’s Carolingian sources; 8. William and the letters of Alcuin; 9. William and some other western writers on Islam; 10. William as historian of crusade; 11. William and the Noctes Atticae; Appendix I: The date of William’s birth; Appendix II: List of works known to William at first hand; III. Contents and significant readings of the Gellius florilegium; Back matter.
abstract:
William of Malmesbury (c.1090-c.1143) was England's greatest historian after Bede. Although best known in his own time, as now, for his historical writings (his famous Deeds of the Bishops and Deeds of the Kings of Britain), William was also a biblical commentator, hagiographer and classicist, and acted as his own librarian, bibliographer, scribe and editor of texts. He was probably the best-read of all twelfth-century men of learning. This is a comprehensive study and interpretation of William's intellectual achievement, looking at the man and his times and his work as man of letters, and considering the earliest books from Malmesbury Abbey library, William's reading, and his "scriptorium". Important in its own right, William's achievement is also set in the wider context of Benedictine learning and the writing of history in the twelfth century, and on England's contribution to the "twelfth-century renaissance". In this new edition, the text has been thoroughly revised, and the bibliography updated to reflect new research; there is also a new chapter on William as historian of the First Crusade.
Dempsey, G. T., “Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s social theology: the barbaric heroic ideal christianised”, Peritia 15 (2001): 58–80.
abstract:
Aldhelm’s De virginitate was the major product of his scholarly energies. In it Aldhelm, in a fixation on virginity as the means of living on earth the angelic life, moved beyond simple sexual rigorism to a radical exaltation of the preservation of physical virginity through the advocacy of both castration and suicide. It is further argued that the prime motivating factor in Aldhelm’s doing so was his desire to establish, for his Anglo-Saxon audience, a new paradigm of a christianised heroic ideal for both male and female, a way of living a truly christian life in terms commensurate with the violent norms of the barbaric heroic code.
Dempsey, G. T., “Aldhelm of Malmesbury and the Irish”, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 99 C (1999): 1–22.
abstract:
The relative scale of Aldhelm of Malmesbury's indebtedness to Irish, as opposed to Continental, intellectual influences has long been a vexed question. Dismissed by the previous generation of Anglo-Saxon scholars as hopelessly 'Hisperic' and obscurantist, Aldhelm has been reclaimed by this generation as 'the first English man-of-letters'. An untoward consequence of this restoration of Aldhelm's native standing, however, has been a Hiberno-sceptical depreciation, amounting to a denial, of any Irish influence on Aldhelm. This study, primarily through a close reading of writings by or associated with Aldhelm, redresses the balance. The tradition of Aldhelm's early schooling under Irish tutelage is substantiated. This educational grounding was apparently so thorough that it produced in Aldhelm-once he had been exposed, as a mature student, to the intellectual riches of the school at Canterbury of Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian-a nativist backlash that emerged in the abusive allusions directed at Irish scholars and scholarship that pepper virtually all of his writings.
OʼSullivan, Sinéad, “Aldhelm’s De virginitate—patristic pastiche or innovative exposition?”, Peritia 12 (1998): 271–295.
Wright, Neil, “[XIV] Aldhelm, Gildas, and Acircius”, in: Neil Wright, History and literature in late antiquity and the early medieval West: studies in intertextuality, 503, Aldershot, Brookfield: Variorum, 1995. 1–28.
Law, Vivien, “The study of Latin grammar in eighth-century Southumbria”, Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983): 43–71.
Winterbottom, Michael, “Aldhelm’s prose style and its origins”, Anglo-Saxon England 6 (1977): 39–76.
argues against the supposed Irish origins of Aldhelm’s style of prose writing
Grosjean, Paul, “Notes d’hagiographie celtique, no. 35: Le De excidio à Malmesbury à la fin du VIIe siècle”, Analecta Bollandiana 75 (1957): 212–221.
Manitius, Max, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, 3 vols, vol. 1: Von Justinian bis zur Mitte des zehnten Jahrhunderts, Munich: Beck, 1911.
Digital.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de: <link> Digital.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de: View in Mirador
134 [14] “Aldhelm von Malmesbury. Aethilwald”
