1 - Aldhelm's life and verse

Summary

Aldhelm has been described as ‘the first English man of letters’. He was born at a time when Wessex had been converted to Christianity for perhaps less than a decade, and died a bishop in a newly created diocese spreading westwards into areas still inhabited by Britons. Preceding by a generation the Northumbrian Bede, Aldhelm could rival the learning of the younger man in most areas, and in some, notably verse, surpass him. Aldhelm stood sponsor when King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–705) was baptized, and dedicated works to both Aldfrith and Cuthburg, his sometime queen, herself the sister of King Ine of Wessex (c. 688–c. 726). Aldhelm was at the centre of the political and ecclesiastical life of his day, and appears to have formed personal ties with both Theodore of Canterbury and his opponent Wilfrid of Hexham, the enfant terrible of the early English church. He lived long – perhaps seventy years – but the duration of his literary legacy was longer still, and his works were still being read, studied and remembered into the tenth century. The influence of Aldhelm's prose style on later Anglo-Latin is profound and unsurpassed, while in the field of verse his influence is still more extensive, and it would be fair to say that almost every Anglo-Latin poet owes Aldhelm some debt. And there are traces of his influence in the vernacular literature too.

Since he wrote at the very beginning of recorded English history and yet maintained an active influence almost to the time of the Conquest, Aldhelm is perhaps the most important figure in the history of Anglo-Latin, indeed of Anglo-Saxon, literature.