Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation: Being part of the Ford Lectures delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term 1980 (review)

The subtitle to this book indicates how long the scholarly world has been eagerly waiting for it. Donald Bullough had originally intended to publish his work on Alcuin in two volumes, but died in 2002 before he could complete the process of seeing this first volume through the press. Family, friends, and the publisher have joined forces to bring it out with as complete a check as was possible in the circumstances; we are all in their debt for their work. The book, moreover, can stand alongside not only a number of posthumously published papers relating to Alcuin and the royal court of Charlemagne, in Early Medieval Europe (2004) and in Joanna Story's edited volume Charlemagne (Manchester, 2005), but also the celebratory volume edited by P. Depreux and B. Judic, Alcuin de York à Tours. Écriture, pouvoir et réseaux dans l'Europe du haut moyen âge, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l'ouest, 111 (Rennes and Tours, 2004).

Alcuin (c. 740–c. 804) in modern eyes is one of the most famous of the scholars gathered at Charlemagne's court at the end of the eighth century, though his posthumous reputation, even in Francia, appears to have been far greater than contemporary appreciation of him. Apparently summoned from York, where he had already established a reputation as a scholar, to join the Frankish king, Alcuin subsequently composed a great many works relating to teaching—on orthography, rhetoric, dialectic, grammar, the virtues and vices—biblical exegesis, such as commentaries on the Apocalypse, Ecclesiastes, and St. John's Gospel, theology, with a treatise against the Adoptionist heresies propounded by Felix of Urgel, and a substantial corpus of poems and letters. Other works have been credited less securely to Alcuin, including Charlemagne's Admonitio generalis and De litteris colendis, votive Masses appended to the Hadrianum Sacramentary, and a compilation entitled De laude dei.

What can be learnt of Alcuin's earlier years at York and what was the extent of his personal influence in Francia, especially on Charlemagne himself? The ninth-century Vita Alcuini from Ferrières offers little assistance in answering these questions. The introduction to Bullough's book is designed to defend the biographical approach to a study of Alcuin primarily through the corpus of over two hundred and eighty of his letters, largely those written in the last ten to fifteen years of Alcuin's life. The survival and transmission of these letters raises many interesting questions. The major collections of Alcuin's letters are particularly problematic. Who compiled them? When? Why? For whom? Bullough is primarily concerned in the first section of his book with whether Alcuin himself or at least his pupils at Tours had a role in their selection or compilation.

There are three major collections, by and large according to recipient. The first is Vienna ÖNB 795, associated with Arn, bishop of Salzburg, which Bullough argues was written at St. Amand in 799. In this codex the twenty Alcuin letters, mostly addressed to Arn, are written in four separate blocks of text. A further Arn/Salzburg collection of sixty-two letters made in the early ninth century is Vienna ÖNB 808, but this includes letters by Alcuin to English addressees and from Charlemagne to Alcuin.

Secondly, there is the collection of seventy of Alcuin's letters described by Bullough as the expanded "basic Tours collection" (Troyes BM 1165 part 1, fols. 1–86^v) of the early ninth century, extant also in modified form in a mid-ninth-century copy from Rheims BAV reg. lat. 272. Here the letters appear to be part of Alcuin miscellanies and comprise letters written by Alcuin to Charlemagne, to recipients in England, and to a host of others including former pupils. This collection omits letters to Arn as well as most of Alcuin...