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Downloaded from Brill.Com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM Via Free Access 2 Stephanie Hollis Secular Learning in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Chardonnens and Carella Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 69 (2012), 1–43 ANGLO-SAXON SECULAR LEARNING AND THE VERNACULAR: AN OVERVIEW Stephanie Hollis For some Anglo-Saxonists, Old English literature is one of the finest achievements of the pre-conquest period. For others, particularly some Anglo-Latinists, it is evidence of a deplorable ignorance of Latin, which isolated England from the West European intellectual main- stream and the cultural heritage of the ancient world until the Nor- mans arrived. In this overview, I am therefore surveying the use of the vernacular for ‘scientific’ or ‘secular’ subjects (primarily computus and medicine) within the context of Latin literacy and learning, in the hope of modifying the view that use of the vernacular and ignorance of Latin inevitably went hand in hand. Although the attention given here to the Age of Bede may seem disproportionate, my intention is to emphasize that this was indeed a time of Latin literacy and scientific advance, for despite Christopher Hohler’s claim that if Augustine of Canterbury was ‘under any illusions about the Englishman’s natural aptitude for foreign languages’, he must ‘soon have lost them’,1 An- glo-Saxons were not racially destined to monolingualism (although as insular speakers of a Germanic language they were at a disadvantage in learning Latin). At the same time, however, I want to suggest that the lack of evidence of vernacular prose and a vernacular teaching tradition in the Age of Bede might be an artefact of the low survival of manuscripts from that period. In considering the origins of vernacular medical literature (which appear to have predated the decline of Latin learning in the ninth century), I argue that practical usefulness to spe- cialist physicians rather than ignorance of Latin was the motivating force. In examining the two vernacular computus texts of the Benedic- tine Reform period (Ælfric’s De temporibus anni and Byrhtferth’s 1 C. E. Hohler, ‘Some Service-Books in the Later Saxon Church’, Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis concordia, ed. D. Parsons (London, Chichester, 1975), 60–93, at 61. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 2 Stephanie Hollis Enchiridion), I am particularly concerned to argue that these works are in the vernacular because they were intended for the edification of parish priests, and that they tell us nothing about the Latin literacy and learning of their authors or the general standard of Latin literacy and learning in Anglo-Saxon monasteries. I also suggest alternative ways of identifying the milieu of Benedictine Reform manuscripts that have been regarded as evidence of a low level of Latin literacy even among monks at reformed monasteries. Finally, I survey the unexpected per- sistence and vitality of the vernacular medical tradition, particularly arguing against the claim that it was only with the introduction of Lat- in manuscripts by Normans in the eleventh century that English medi- cine rejoined the European mainstream. The Age of Bede and Alfred’s Educational Reform In the Preface to his translation of Cura Pastoralis (c. 890), King Alf- red lamented the decline of Latin literacy and learning throughout England – both among the religious orders and among those in the secular life – that had followed in the wake of the first Viking inva- sion. Wanting to restore learning throughout his kingdom, and also the prosperity and peace which, he believed, was its concomitant, Alfred called on his bishops to assist him in implementing an educational programme that was, for its time, remarkably inclusive. He called for the teaching of vernacular literacy to all young persons (sio gioguð) of the freeborn classes, and the subsequent teaching of Latin to the more promising of them (or perhaps he meant those who were intended for religious orders).2 And, in the seeming absence of existing vernacular literature, Alfred urged his bishops to join him in translating ‘sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, … on ðæt geðiode … ðe we ealle gecnawan mægen’.3 Since the days when Alfred was reverently dubbed ‘the father of English prose’, scholars have cautioned against taking his Preface at face value. In giving the impression that the development of a vernac- ular literary tradition, far from being a cause for nationalist celebra- 2 ‘[L]ære mon siððan furðor on Lædengeðiode ða ðe mon furðor læren wille & to hieran hade don wille’: King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, EETS os 45 (London, 1871), 7/13–5. ‘One may then instruct in Latin those whom one wishes to teach further and promote to a higher rank’. 3 Ibid. 7/6–8. ‘Certain books which are the most necessary for all to know … into the language … that we can all understand’. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 3 tion, was the best that could be done to compensate for an almost complete ignorance of Latin, Alfred’s Preface is in marked contrast to the self-confident pride of Ireland’s traditional learned classes (filid) in their indigenous culture, which is expressed in an eighth-century origin legend that places the Irish language above Isidore’s tres lin- guae sacrae (Hebrew, Greek and Latin).4 The absence of a positive contemporary rationale for the cultivation of a vernacular literary cul- ture in England is also a notable feature of the Benedictine Reform period. Perhaps, ultimately, the real reason for the precocity and profusion of English vernacular literature is simply that Anglo-Saxons preferred the comfortable familiarity of their own language, as is reflected in Bede’s account of the falling out between Coenwalh of Wessex and Agilbert of Gaul. Initially impressed by Agilbert’s learning and enthu- siasm, Coenwalh made him a bishop: ‘Tandem rex, qui Saxonum tan- tum linguam nouerat, pertaesus barbarae loquellae, subintroduxit in prouinciam alium suae linguae episcopum’.5 Coenwalh’s replacement of Agilbert with a bishop who spoke the same language as he himself did might merely seem to bear out Christopher Hohler’s disparaging opinion of ‘the Englishman’s natural aptitude for foreign languages’. But Anglo-Saxons’ pride in their own language is occasionally ex- pressed in oblique forms (particularly in the cultivation of Old English poetry by scholars like Bede and Aldhelm), and when Alfred points out towards the end of his Preface that Latin scriptures are themselves derived from a Greek translation of a Hebrew original and that ‘ealla oðræ Cristnæ ðioda summe dæl hiora on hiora agen geðiode wen- don’,6 his readers were surely meant to understand that English trans- lation of the scriptures would mark England as a full recipient of Romano-Christian culture. 4 D. Edel, ‘The Status and Development of the Vernacular in Early Medieval Ire- land’, The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in Western Europe, ed. M. Goyens and W. Verbeke, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 33 (Leuven, 2003), 351–77, at 361. 5 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica III.7 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Med. Texts (Ox- ford, 1969), 234). ‘Later, however, the king, who understood only Saxon, grew tired of the bishop’s foreign speech, and invited to the province a bishop of his own tongue’. 6 King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, 7/4– 5. ‘All the other Christian peoples turned some part of them into their own lan- guage’. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 4 Stephanie Hollis That so few of the manuscripts known to have been in England in the seventh and eighth centuries have survived leaves no doubt that the pervasive destruction of monastic libraries evoked by Alfred did take place. Yet there is a certain amount of pardonable exaggeration in his assessment of the state of learning when he first came to power. England was not entirely destitute of Latin scholars south of the Hum- ber,7 but by the ninth century, even before the Viking raids, there had inevitably been a falling away from the heights that had been attained during the first flush of the conversion, in the arts as well as in schol- arship, and above all in Northumbria, where the meeting together of Romano-Christian, Germanic and Celtic religious traditions and cul- tural influences proved particularly fruitful. Throughout the seventh century, Christian converts from England and Gaul travelled to Ireland in search of learning, and Irish mission- aries in England played a formative part in the development of tradi- tions of scholarship in the north and west of the country. The establishment of monastic schools in England by Theodore and Hadri- an, however, following their arrival in 669 as leaders of the second mission from Rome, was regarded by both Bede and Aldhelm as the beginning of a new era of scholarship that far outshone the achieve- ments of the Irish Church. Bede describes Theodore and Hadrian as extremely learned in sacred and secular literature, and fluent in Latin and Greek. In addition to teaching interpretation of the scriptures, they taught astronomy and ‘arithmeticae ecclesiasticae disciplinam’ (later known as computus), as well as the art of (classical) metre.8 According to Bede: Indicio est quod usque hodie supersunt de eorum discipulis, qui Latinam Graecamque linguam aeque ut propriam in qua nati sunt norunt. Neque um- quam prorsus, ex quo Brittaniam petierunt Angli, feliciora fuere tempora, … et omnium uota ad nuper audita caelestis regni gaudia penderent, et qui- cumque lectionibus sacris cuperent erudiri, haberent in promtu magistros qui docerent.9 7 E.g., Alfred found four Mercians to assist with his educational reforms.
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