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Updated: May 22, 2025
And, of all kinds of help-bringers, we owe much to the monks, and chiefly the great Benedictine order. King Alfred had to do his work at a time when things were at a low ebb in the English monasteries. You will remember how he bewailed the poor state of learning in England, and the ignorance of the clergy; a state very different indeed from that of the old days of St Bede and Alcuin.
This and the romances which followed it show the powerful influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader. The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48.
While he was reading law he constantly exercised his pen in the composition of essays, some of which were published under the title of the "Rhapsodist;" but it was not until 1797 that his career as an author began, by the publication of "Alcuin: a Dialogue on the Rights of Women."
'Here you may trace the footsteps of the Fathers; here you meet the clear-souled Aristotle and Tully of the mighty tongue; here Basil and Fulgentius shine, and Cassiodorus and John of the Golden Mouth. As Alcuin was returning from book-buying at Rome he met Charles the Great at Parma.
But the most magnificent of all mediaeval scripts was the Irish, which exercised a profound influence on the later alphabets of Europe. From a combination of the Roman and Irish arose the Anglo-Saxon script, the precursor of that which was developed in the ninth century by Alcuin of York, the friend and preceptor of Charlemagne.
During the first part of the ninth century the region of the Scheldt and the Meuse became a beehive of activity. From every part of the world, merchants, theologians, artists and musicians crowded towards the new economic and intellectual centre of Europe. Arnon, a pupil of Alcuin, came to Elnone, the Irish Sedulius to Liége, the Italian Georgius to Valenciennes, while the schools of St.
Riquier or Corbie, archbishops of Lyons, and bishops of Orleans. They had all assumed, in the school itself, names illustrious in pagan antiquity: Alcuin called himself Flaccus; Angilbert, Homer; Theodulph, Pindar.
Alcuin's answer is more subtle than satisfactory. At the meals of Charlemagne some person always read to him. His example was followed by many of his successors, particularly by Francis I. of France, who, in an happier era for learning, imitated with happier effects, the example of the Emperor. Alcuin was general director of all the literary schemes of Charlemagne.
Nothing that could be effected by a prince thus gifted and disposed, was left untried by Charlemagne. He drew to him the celebrated Alcuin, Peter of Pisa, Paul Warnefrid, and many other distinguished literary characters: he heaped favours upon them; and a marked distinction was always shewn them at his court. He formed them into a literary society, which had frequent meetings.
These latter were no longer the gross and coarse songs of the earlier mountebank age, which Alcuin characterised as turpissima and vanissima, but the grave and artificially wrought stanzas of the troubadour chanso. Secondly, it has been felt that some explanation is required to account for the extreme complexity and artificiality of troubadour poetry in its most highly developed stage.
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