Alkuin (or Alcuin, circa 735-804)

by Robert Levine, Boston University and Whitney Bolton, Rutgers University

(Whitney Bolton and Robert Levine, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 148, German Writers and Works of the Early Middle Ages: 800-1170, edited by James Hardin and Will Hasty, 1994, pp. 3-7)

MAJOR WORKS: Poetry.

Manuscripts: Stuttgart G38 ninth century; Sangall. 565

First publication: Andreas Quercetanus (V. Cl. Du Chesne), Paris, 1617.

Standard Editions:

Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, ed. Ernst Dümmler, Berlin, 1881, volume one.

Versus de Patribus Regibus et Sanctis Euboricensis Ecclesiae.

Peter Godman, editor, De pontificibus et sanctis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, English and Latin, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982.

Translations:

Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited, translated, with an introduction by Peter Godman, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, pp. 118-149.

Harold Isbell, The Last Poets of Imperial Rome, translations, introductions, notes and glossary, Baltimore, Penguin, 1971.

Letters

Manuscripts: Dümmler lists six English, five French, seven German, one Swiss, and three Italian manuscripts, among which are Palat. Vindob. 795 (Salisburg. 140, formerly LXXI), from the eighth century, containing 24 letters of Alcuin and Angilbert; Palat. Vindob. 808 (Salisbury 234, formerly XXXIV), from 802-804 A.D., containing 69 letters; and Monaco 4650 (Benedictus buranus 150).

First publication: Henricus Canisius, Antiquae Lectionis, Ingelstadt, 1601-1604, I, pp. 1-123.

Standard editions:

(editors) Philipp Jaffe, Ernst Dümmler, W. Wattenbach, Monumenta Alcuiniana, Berlin, Weidmann, 1873, pp. 132-897.

ed. Ernst Dümmler, 'Alkuini Epistolae' in MGH Epistolae IV (Berlin 1895) 1-493.

Colin Chase, editor, Two Alcuin Letter-books, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975.

Translations:

Rolph Barlow Page, The Letters of Alcuin, New York, Forest Press, 1909.

Thomas G. Sturgeon, The Letters of Alcuin: Part One, the Aachen Period (762-796), Harvard University Ph.D. Thesis, 1953.

Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York: his life and letters, York, 1974.

Didactic Works

Rhetoric

Wilbur Samuel Howell, The Rhetoric of Alkuin and Charlemagne,

translation, the Latin text, and notes, New York, Russell and Russell, 1965 (1941).

C. Halm, Rhetorici Latini Minores, 1863, pp. 523-550.

De Orthographia

H. Keil, Grammatici Latini VII, 1880, pp. 295-312.

Although Alkuin's importance as a central intellectual figure in the Carolingian Renaissance has never been seriously questioned, the quality of his literary production can be considered only part of the reason for his importance. His contemporary and rival Theodulf called him nostrorum gloria vatum, "glory of our poets," but, in the twentieth century, even his admirers are defensive about his verses. On the other hand, modern scholars of liturgy are much interested in Alkuin, and his letters, admired greatly in his own time, became models of epistolary style for later writers, both in Latin and in the vernacular (the phraseology of his letters reappears in Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos).

Most of the 311 letters (304a in Dümmler's edition raises the number to 312) were written between 793-804, from the middle to the last years of his literary career, and they range from short expressions of greeting, gratitude, or requests, to complex compositions in a clear, unpretentious, yet demanding prose, modeled on Jerome, Aldhelm, and Boniface. They deal with friendship, caritas, humilitas, church politics, moral admonitions, and scientific topics; some offer advice for Charles, or discussions of political turbulence in England. Perhaps only an aristocrat would have addressed three letters to King Aethelred, upbraiding him for rusticis moribus, "uncouth behavior," and for the sins he had committed.

In addition, when used in conjunction with the early ninth-century Vita Alkuini, and some of his poetry, they provide a picture, if not an adequate biography, of a late eighth-century English aristocrat who was acquisitive, egotistic, imitative, encyclopedic, sensual, a worldly collector of information, wealth, and friends, who turned towards inwardness late in life. Born in Northumbria c. 730, he studied at York under Archbishop Egbert, then under Aelbert (Coena), with whom he traveled on the continent. In 778 he took over Aelbert's office as head of the cathedral school, also receiving his library. In 781 he was sent by King Aefwald to Rome, to get the pallium for Eanbald, Aelbert's replacement as archbishop. On the way back he met Charlemagne in Parma, where the Frankish king offered him the chance to head the Palace School that his father Pippin the Short had founded. In 782, with the permissions of his archbishop and his king, Alkuin left England to join Charlemagne, chiefly at Aachen, but also at other towns and villas in the realm.

Alkuin arrived at Charles' court in the 780's, having written few poems at York, never rising above deacon. Apparently a personable, talented teacher --- his English students, Sigvulf, Wizo, and Fridugis followed him to Charles' court, where he produced a significant number of additional famous, successful students, -- nevertheless, at the time of his arrival at Aix, his qualifications for a lofty intellectual position at court were not stunningly manifest. His qualifications for the benefices Charles granted him were also weak, since, although he had been ordained a deacon, he apparently was never ordained to the priesthood and never took monastic vows. Some argue that the Carolingian Renaissance had started a generation before Alcuin's arrival, with Charles' annexation of Northern Italy in 774, and that the Latin of the Italians was far better than that of the Franks or Angles. Paulinus and Peter of Pisa, who taught Charles grammar, were already at Aix. However, according to Einhard, the Disputationes, and Alkuin's correspondance, Charles listened to his Anglo-Saxon advisor in all matters not political; in addition, Alkuin taught the aging Charlemagne rhetoric, dialectic, and astronomy.

In 786 and again 790-793 Alkuin returned to England, but Charles denied him permission to return to York in 795, when he might have become Archbishop, instead granting him the the abbeys of Ferri<res and St. Lupus at Troyes. In 796 Charles granted him St. Martin in Tours, a monastery with 200 members, with holdings across the kingdom. Thus Alkuin remained in France from the summer of 793 until his death, May 19, 804.

In the course of his career, Alkuin composed more than 120 poems, from four to 1657 lines long, in hexameters, distichs, adonics (with alliteration similar to that of Old English vernacular verse), sapphics, and freer liturgical forms, in a range of genres that included letters, history, hagiography, epitaphs, epigraphs, manuscript inscriptions or subscriptions, riddles, carmina figurata, prayers, nature poems, liturgy, poems on literary subjects, hymns, and more. However, the De Cuculo, the "library catalogue" in the York poem, his epitaph, and his nightingale poem sometimes find their way into anthologies of medieval verse, while more than a hundred other poems have received scant attention.

What appears to be his earliest surviving work (780) is Coena's epitaph in verse, but the next is the vast poem on York, so that his first compositions include his grandest and most impressive. A letter to Aethilhard (Ep. 311) is evidence that Alkuin was still writing poetry at least as late as 802.

An occasional poem, whose occasion is an event in the life of the poet -- his leaving the cathedral where he had spent most of his first half-century -- the York poem was written 780-782, and relies heavily on material taken from Bede's History, his lives of St. Cuthbert (Alkuin refers to the verse version in Carmina X.175-178), and his hymn to Ethelthryth, of which Alcuin sent a copy to Arno along with Epistle 259. At line 1287, however, Alcuin records the death of Bede, and even though he turns to Eddius for some of his material at about the same point, he is constrained, for the final 370 lines of his poem, to be more independent. For some, these lines are the most interesting part of the poem, at least partially because in this section Alkuin speaks about himself and his activities as a teacher. He recalls his own life in York only in ll. 1525-29, where, in the course of eulogizing Aelberht (d. 766), Alkuin expresses his gratitude for the books that the archbishop gave him. The suggestive, incomplete "catalogue" of the cathedral library that Alkuin offers in this poem gives some idea of the literature available to Anglo-Saxon clerics at the end of the eighth century.

In 793 a more dire event elicited a more traditional kind of occasional poem from Alkuin, De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii, "On the destruction of the monastery of Lindisfarne." Vikings raided the monastery at Lindisfarne, destroying much and killing

many. Alkuin had already spent most of a decade with Charlemagne and made at least two return visits to Britain; the events at Lindisfarne were among those that probably contributed to his decision to make his stay on the continent a permanent one, so they had a personal impact on him even though they took place at far remove. In the course of 240 lines, beginning with the expulsion of the first parents from the unchanging joys of Paradise into the world of transience, Alkuin proceeds to find a Stoic, Boethian message in the catastrophe at Lindisfarne, urging the monks to pray for admission to that other world where all stability and certainty abide. Then he reviews the history of Lindisfarne, recalling Aidan, Eadberht, Cuthbert (whose name he links with his biographer Bede), arguing that the martyrdom suffered by many of the monks will better serve their souls than longer life on earth. Operating within, while attempting to transcend, the genre of consolation, Alcuin draws upon Roman poets, scriptural history, ancient history, and local history, simultaneously diminishing the disaster by setting it against the scale of human history, and magnifying the same disaster by making of it a new triumph in the already triumphant history of Lindsifarne.

Chief among the Roman poets to whom Alkuin constantly alludes, in the Lindisfarne-poem and elsewhere, is Virgil; on the one hand, the Roman poet's name was one to conjure with, since he had offered for 800 years the model for melodious verse. On the other hand, by his very attractiveness he symbolized all that enticed and deluded in the material world, and Alkuin consequently praises the Song of Songs as superior to the verses of falsi Maronis, "false Vergil," which he also calls mendacia, "lies." Evidence of other Classical Latin poets is ambiguous, since many of the lines he takes from their poems had become commonplaces by the late eighth century. He certainly knew Vergil well, but Ovid, Lucan, and Horace he seems to have known only second hand. Borrowings from Christian Latin poets and prose, however, specifically Prosper of Aquitaine, Bede, Aldhelm, Gildas, S. Boniface, Caelius Sedulius, Arator, Juvencus, Paulinus of Nola (entire poetic corpus), and Venantius Fortunatus, are to be found regularly in his verse.

The subject matter of Alkuin's many minor poems is various, ranging from divine matters to a latrine, and includes riddles, nature poems (LIX, LXI) that are not concerned with nature, the art of meter, commentaries on various books of the bible, his cell, and a retelling of the fable of the cock and the wolf, and his own epitaph. Among the motifs they share are a persistent concern with the perils of alcohol, and with the imminence of death.

Alkuin wrote five didactic works, all but one in the form of a dialogue, whose dramatic form illustrates clearly the fact that many of his writings are a response to the needs of his students. In a sense, all of his writing may be called educational, devoted to restoring the study of the liberal arts in Europe, but these five are generally considered to be more pedagogical in the limited sense.

The Ars grammatica consists of two parts: a conversation between Alkuin and his students; the grammar proper, in which a 14-year old Frankish pupil and a 15-year old Saxon pupil concern themselves mainly with morphology and etymology. At least eight of Alkuin's letters are also concerned with the subject of grammar (121, 145, 161-62, 172, 204, 248, 280).

De Orthographia is an alphabetical list of words, based mainly on Bede's De orthographia. The problems that Alcuin emphasizes are ones that reflect a phonetic situation in the meeting of a living Latin-based language with a living Germanic language in Charlemagne's realm, a situation that Bede did not have to face in the England of his age.

The Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus sapientissimi regis Carli et Albini magistri, "The debate of the wisest king Charles and the teacher Alkuin, about rhetoric and the virtues," a moralizing political treatise, is a dialogue between Charlemagne and Alkuin, with the fictional pretext of co-authorship, in which the speakers agree that the proper subjects of rhetoric are politics, law and morals, with a final section on the four cardinal virtues.

The sixteen chapters of dialogue between the questioner Charlemagne and the master Alcuin that compose the De dialectica, based on Cassiodorus, Boethius, Cicero, Marius Victorinus, Julius Victor, Quintillian, and Pseudo-Augustine, distinguish rhetoric as the art of disputation on practical matters, and dialectic as the art of disputation on theoretical matters, i.e., theology.

Derived from Secundus, Symphosius, and an anonymous disputatio between Hadrian and Epictetus, the Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi juvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico, "The dispute of the royal and most noble young man Pippin with the teacher Albinus," provides another pedagogical dialogue, this time with the son of Charlemagne. Of the first 110 exchanges, the first 73 involve figures of speech, some of which resemble kennings.

Alkuin's separate exegetical works are relatively few for a man of his station and century; trained in the rich exegetical tradition of Bede, he had the mission of transmitting that tradition to the continent, yet he left only five derivative

and relatively slight works on Genesis, some of the Psalms, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and some of the Pauline letters, along with one far more substantial work on the Gospel of John. A work on Proverbs mentioned in the Vita Alkuini is now lost, and several other works sometimes associated with his name are probably not his. Some further exegesis is in the letters (e.g., 136 to Charlemagne on Luke 22:36 and Matthew 26.52). Although his commentary on Genesis was used by Remigius of Auxerre and translated by Aelfric of Eynsham, the influence of his exegetical work was slight.

The theological works of Alkuin, dogmatic, liturgical, and moral, all tend toward the same end: unity. In Charlemagne he saw a source of political unity in a Christian monarch whose realms might come to embody the ideal of Christian unity and peace, given an ecclesiastical coherence that corresponded with the political. Two heresies claimed a large part of Alcuin's attention: iconoduly and Adoptionism. No work bearing his name on the subject of iconoduly survives, although he attended the Synod of Frankfurt that dealt with the problem and may have had some part in the composition of the Frankish Synodica and of the Libri Carolini which address iconoduly.

The synodal resolution against Adoptionism was primarily Alkuin's responsibility; he argued against the heresy at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, and in three apologetic treatises composed between 797 and 800.

The adversus Felicis haeresin libellus, begun after the Council of Rome in 798, contains 72 sections, assembling patristic testimony against the principal tenets of Adoptionism, which argued that Christ as divinity was the natural son of God, but Christ as human being was the adopted Son of God. It contains some of the most carefully argued theology of the Carolingian Age, but was also carelessly constructed. In his defense of Alkuin against attacks of those like Levison, who considered him merely an extractor and compiler, Blumenshine argues that it was intended as an argument for Charles as rex et sacerdos... rector populi christiani.

The Contra Felicem Urgellitanum episcopum libri VII is the written version of his oral argument against Adaptionism, given at Aachen in 800, a position he also defended in the Contra Elipandum libri IV, composed in 800, and in the De fide sanctae et individuae Trinitatis, the last, most general, most original, most nfluential and most important of his theological works, written in 802.

Alkuin's most popular moral work was the De virtutibus et vitiis liber, written after 799; 22 MSS from the 9th century survive, and it continued to be copied long afterwards. Vernacular use of it was made by writers in Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse.

Written for Gundrada, Charlemagne's cousin, the De animae ratione follows Augustine's De spiritu et anima closely, is identical with Letter 309, and concludes with Carmen LXXXV.

Alkuin wrote lives of four saints: Martin of Tours (an abrupt abbreviation of Sulpicius Severus); Vedast of Arras (a revision of an earlier life, written about 642 by Jonas of Bobbio); Richarius; and Willibrord. The first three are prose redactions of earlier work by other hands, and the fourth, an opus geminatum (prose and verse), is largely Alkuin's own work.

Alkuin's authorship of some works is difficult to establish. He almost certainly acted as "Latin secretary" to Charlemagne, writing or editing a number of works issued by the palace, but his share in such work is not clear. Some of the works, like the one on music mentioned in the list of books in chapter 21 of the Vita Alkuini, as well as works mentioned by Alcuin himself in his letters and poems, seem to have disappeared. Until an adequate, modern edition of his works is published, no canon or comprehensive chronology for them can be established.

References

Bernard Bischoff, "Aus Alkuins Erdentagen," Mittelalterliche Studien 2, Stuttgart 1967, pp. 12-19.

Gary Baker Blumenshine, "Alkuin's Liber contra haeresim Felicis and the Frankish Kingdom," Fruhmittelalterliche Studien 17 (1983), pp. 222-233.

Whitney French Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf: an eighth-century view, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1978.

Franz Brunhölzl, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, Munich, 1975.

Donald Bullough, "Alkuin and the Kingdom of Heaven," in Uta-Renate Blumental, ed., Carolingian Essays, Washington, D.C., 1983, pp. 1-69.

_____, "Alkuino e la tradizione culturale insulare,I problemi dell'Occidente nel secolo VIII", Settimanee di studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull'alto Medioveo 20, Spoleto, 1973, pp. 571-600.

Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire, Paris, 1967, pp. 29-47.

Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Alkuin, Friend of Charlemagne, New York, MacMillan, 1951.

Wolfgang Edelstein, Eruditio und Sapientia. Untersuchungen ze Alkuins Briefen, Freiburg 1965,

Gerald Ellard, Master Alkuin, Liturgist, Chicago, Loyola U. Press, 1956.

Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire, translated by Peter Munz, Oxford, 1968.

B. Fisher, Die Alkuin-Bibel, Freiburg i. Br., 1957.

A. Fiske, "Alkuin and Mystical Friendship," Studi Medievali III 2 (1961), 551-575.

Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry, Oxford, 1987.

Wilhelm Heil, Alkuinstudien, Dusseldorf, L. Schwann, 1970.

Harold Isbell, The Last Poets of Imperial Rome, translations, introductions, notes and glossary, Baltimore, Penguin, 1971

Claudio Leonardi, "Alcuino e la scuola palatina," in Nascita dell'Europa carolingia: un equazione da verificare, Settimane 27, Spoleto 1981, pp. 459-496.

Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, Oxford, 1946.

John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alkuin to the School of Auxerre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

John I. McEnerney, "Alcuin, Carmen 58," Mittelateinisches Jahrbuch 16 (1981), pp. 35-42.

____, "Alcuin, Carmen 118," Mittelateinisches Jahrbuch 19 (1984), pp. 100-103.

Jean Meyers, "Le latin carolingien," Moyen Age 96 (1990), 395-410.

D. Schaller, 'Alkuin', in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexicon, edd. K. Ruh et al., i, 1 (Berlin and New York 1978), cols. 241-53.

D. Schaller, "Die karolingischen Figurengedichte des Cod. Bern. 212," in Medium Aevum Vivum, Festschrift fur W. Bulst, ed. Schaller and Hans Robert Jauss, 1960, pp 24-47.

Peter Dale Scott, "Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in his Latin Verse," University of Toronto Quarterly XXXIII (1964), pp. 233-257.

______, "Alcuin's Versus de Cuculo: the Vision of Pastoral Friendship," in Studies in Philology 62 (1965), pp. 510-530.

R.E. Sullivan, "Carolingian Age," Speculum 64 (1989), pp. 267-306.

Liutpold Wallach, Alkuin and Charlemagne, New York, 1959.

Vita Alkuini, written in France (821-829), MGH Scriptores XV i 182-89.