Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Early medieval England's fame abroad rested upon the strength of its monastic schools and the learned missionaries who set about their work in the Low Countries and Germany ( Levison 1946 ). English authors were known abroad when writing in Latin, the language of their schools and the ecclesia , which established them for the training of its clergy. Though England produced, particularly in the late Anglo-Saxon period, a vibrant vernacular literature, such literary activity was primarily domestic. Anglo-Saxon bishops maintained a lively correspondence with church officials throughout the West (and Theodore and Hadrian came to England, via Rome, from eastern Christendom) and with former students abroad, and Alcuin of York seems to have composed most if not all of his extensive poetic output on the continent. The literary remains of Anglo-Saxon England surviving in the Latin language are far more abundant than those in the vernacular; while students of political and ecclesiastical history give these documents their due notice, Anglo-Latin texts remain underappreciated by literary historians and critics. Of the Anglo-Latin corpus from the pre-Conquest period, the greater share naturally enough is found in prose: some of it strictly for ecclesiastic business, some even more workaday, but prose of a great diversity of forms and uses. The students in Ælfric's prose Colloquium (‘Colloquy’) ... log in or subscribe to read full text