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ÆLFRIC and the LIMITS of 'BENEDICTINE REFORM'* Christopher A. Jones Introduction Ælfric Invited Audiences to View Him As T

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ÆLFRIC and the LIMITS of 'BENEDICTINE REFORM'* Christopher A. Jones Introduction Ælfric Invited Audiences to View Him As T CHAPTER THREE ÆLFRIC AND THE LIMITS OF ‘BENEDICTINE REFORM’* Christopher A. Jones Introduction Ælfric invited audiences to view him as the product of a monastic tradition both ancient and bracingly new to tenth-century England. His writings repeatedly mention that he trained at Winchester under St Æthelwold, a leader of the rising spiritual elite, and refer longingly to earlier successes of the movement now known as ‘Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform’.1 Modern scholarship has obligingly read reformed ideals into many features of Ælfric’s work and has not stopped with him: by now, a great many surviving artefacts of late Anglo-Saxon cul- ture have been made to speak with or against the ‘almost deafeningly articulate’ voices of monastic reform.2 Th e binary of ‘reformed’ and ‘unreformed’ persists despite long awareness that diversity character- ized the Benedictine party from its beginnings and only increased in a second generation that produced, alongside Ælfric, authors as var- ied as Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Wulfstan Cantor of Winchester, Ælfric Bata and perhaps Wulfstan of York.3 Even as diff erences within the * Both my title and its implied reservations about ‘reform’ as a category are broadly indebted to Nelson, ‘On the Limits of the Carolingian Renaissance’, and J. Leclercq, ‘Mérites d’un réformateur et limites d’une réforme’. For helpful comments on earlier draft s, I am grateful to Leslie Lockett and to the editors of this volume. Th anks also to Rebecca Stephenson for allowing me to read her essay ‘Ælfric of Eynsham and Hermeneutic Latin’ in advance of its publication. 1 For Winchester and Æthelwold, see the Latin preface to CH I, line 3 (p. 173); the Vita S. Æthelwoldi 1, lines 1–2; the Latin preface to the Grammar, p. 1, lines 16–17; and the LME 1, lines 4–10. On Ælfric’s Winchester ties, see also the chapters by J. Hill and Gretsch in this volume. 2 Th e phrase is Cubitt’s, ‘Virginity and Misogyny’, p. 2; cf. similar language by J. Blair, Th e Church, p. 346. 3 On diff erences among the leaders of the movement, see the essay collections by Ramsay et al., ed., Saint Dunstan; Yorke, ed., Bishop Æthelwold; Brooks and Cubitt, ed., St Oswald of Worcester; Barker et al., ed., St Wulfsige and Sherborne. On Byrht- ferth, see the overview in Baker and Lapidge, ed. and trans., Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, pp. xxiv–xxxv; Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth and Oswald’. On Wulfstan Cantor of Winchester, 68 christopher a. jones movement have appeared more pronounced, boundaries between it and the more populous secular church have increasingly blurred.4 Th e current view of Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform is, in sum, of a more limited, worldly and internally diverse movement than the reformers themselves or their later apologists convey.5 Th is more nuanced ‘reform’ has already aff ected studies of Ælfric through rising suspicions that his doctrinal and moral standards did not belong to all his monastic colleagues. Th us his writings, always crucial to our perceptions of the Benedictines’ core values, now contribute as oft en to discussions of reform’s outer limits, with the result that Ælfric’s place between the centre and margins of his party has become harder to describe.6 As these questions adhere nevertheless to a clear distinction of ‘reformed’ from ‘unreformed’, they still render only crudely the cat- egories of actual tenth-century theory and practice. For his part, Ælfric does not even use the Old English equivalents for Latin reformatio or reformare in senses that approximate our catch-all ‘reform’.7 Rather, like authors associated with a comparable movement in Carolingian Francia, he mainly stresses ‘correction’ of doctrine, morals, institutions and language.8 So pervasively do themes of correctio run through his work, in fact, that we easily mistake them for Ælfric’s ‘reform’ in totality. Correctio represents only a symptom, not the substance, of an ideology broadly concerned with redefi ning essential categories or, in Mayke see Lapidge and Winterbottom, ed. and trans., Life of St Æthelwold, pp. xiii-cxii; and Lapidge, ed., Th e Cult of St Swithun, pp. 335–64. On Bata, see Gwara and Porter, ed. and trans., Anglo-Saxon Conversations, pp. 1–15; Jones, ‘Th e Irregular Life’. On Arch- bishop Wulfstan and the reform, see my conclusion, below. 4 Many studies have noted and tried to remedy the monastic bias; recent examples include Barrow, ‘English Cathedral Communities’; J. Blair, Th e Church; Tinti, ed., Pastoral Care; Giandrea, Episcopal Culture. 5 See recent bibliographical reviews by Cubitt, ‘Th e Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform’; Robertson, ‘Th e Benedictine Reform’. 6 See below and works cited at n. 101. 7 When Ælfric uses Old English terms for ‘renewal’, ‘rebirth’, ‘reform’, ‘reestablish- ment’ etc., the reference is not to institutions, though rarely he does mention renewal of Christianity (geedniwan Cristendom) or of praises to God (geedniwan Godes lof ). On the vocabulary of reform in medieval religious life, see Constable, ‘Renewal and Reform’, p. 39; on the broader tradition, see Ladner, ‘Terms and Ideas of Renewal’, and Ladner, Th e Idea of Reform, esp. pp. 9–48. 8 For Carolingian reform as correctio, see Reuter, ‘ “Kirchenreform” ’, pp. 39–42; J. M. H. Smith, ‘Emending Evil Ways’, pp. 189–92; Barrow, ‘Chrodegang’, p. 208. For this aspect of Ælfric’s work, see, e.g., J. Hill, ‘Reform and Resistance’, pp. 24–5 and 30–2; J. Hill, ‘Th e Benedictine Reform’, pp. 157–62..
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