7 - Biblical study

Summary

For the Anglo-Saxons the study of the bible was the fundamental literary activity. Aldhelm's letter to an unknown woman called Sigegyth ‘begging that you do not cease to occupy your mind with close contemplation of the Scriptures’ is typical of many such exhortations. In the monastic tradition reading and meditation on Scripture were well established sources of gnosts or, in the Latin terminology popularized by Cassian, spiritalis scientia, ‘spiritual knowledge’. The monasteries of the Hwicce and Magonsætan would have tried to continue this tradition; a monk of Wenlock told Boniface thap among the personified sins that had confronted him in a vision, one cried out ‘I am sloth and sluggishness in neglecting holy reading’, while another shouted ‘I am the negligence and carelessness through which you have been held back from and careless about studying divine reading’.

It is unlikely that such a monk would study the bible unaided. One obvious aid was a patristic commentary, ‘because the spiritual treatise is the recognized teacher of those who read the sacred words', as Boniface observed, writing to England from Germany for commentaries in 735. Another was a good teacher, learned in the patristic tradition; here one may instance Boniface himself, whose teaching activities before he left Wessex for his continental missions are described by his biographer Willibald:

His fame reached many in monasteries both of men and of women, far and wide. Many of these of the stronger sex, impelled by an urgent desire to study, flocked to him to drink the wholesome spring of knowledge and read through many volumes of the Scriptures.