Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence (review)

Most of these nineteen essays on aspects of "secular learning" began at a conference of the same title held at the University of Udine in April 2006. Many of the contributors are important authorities in their areas who as a rule publish in Italian and so are not as well known among their English-speaking colleagues as they deserve to be. As a whole the collection is detailed and varied, coherently centering on and returning to certain grammatical, pedagogical, and medical texts and their manuscripts, viewed from different perspectives. The essays are also valuable precisely because they tend to be descriptive and detailed consolidations of information that is to be found scattered in many sources. The book is worth its price just for the rich up-to-date bibliographical information concentrated usefully in the right places. As the arrangement of the book, with sections on "Manuscripts," "Texts and Glosses," and "Texts and Contexts," does not, it seems to me, do justice to the striking thematic coherence of this book, my discussion follows a different order (and I abbreviate the titles).

Patrizia Lendinara tackles head-on the issue of the title, "Form and Content of Instruction" (pp. 59–113). Her masterly and learned summary of all that is known of the contents and possible uses of the Anglo-Saxon non-Biblical, non-liturgical curriculum encounters considerable difficulty getting a handle on the difference between "teaching" and "study" as activities, "elementary" and "advanced" learning, and "presentational" and "reference" manuscripts; Lendinara points out that the Anglo-Saxon book, unlike those of earlier or later centuries, tends to be not a single work, but a "library without a library," portable miscellanies of necessary texts, though they had their generic rules (computus, homiliaries, curriculum authors, etc.). These texts might be compiled by a master with advanced teaching in mind, but they might also be for advanced learners or "an elite of secular readers." The presence of glosses might denote a teaching purpose or it might not. Grammatical collections would seem to be the most well-adapted to teaching, particularly with the advent of elementary grammars in the post-Carolingian period, but they might have been to teach the masters, rather than directly serving pupils. Computus manuscripts might also have served advanced teaching or they might have been for practical consultation, and the same may go for materia medica. She goes on usefully to discuss teaching in the twelfth century, when a more organized and recognizable brand of schooling emerged. An appendix, selected from Gneuss's Handlist, gives "manuscripts (up to 1100) containing works with a possible instructional use" including those with curriculum authors, grammatica, glossaries, trivium and quadrivium subjects, computistica, and materia medica. In effect, all other articles in this book are an extended discussion of the items on this list.

Lendinara's comments on the instructional uses of medical manuscripts conflict sharply with some other essays in the book, which see a more professional craft of "medics" who would not be too eager to share their learning widely. Amalia D'Aronco in "The Transmission of Medical Knowledge" (pp. 35–58) studies the filiation of the four copies of the Old English Herbarium and sees them going back to a single late tenth-century exemplar carried out by someone "well-versed in medical learning" in one of the reformed Benedictine monasteries in Winchester, and that the later extant copies were heavily used and underwent various practical changes; the use of the vernacular does not necessarily imply contempt for practitioners, but rather an attempt to disseminate "field knowledge" as widely as possible. Isabella Andorlini, "Teaching Medicine in Late Antiquity" (pp. 401–14), reviews medical training and methodology in the Alexandrian and Byzantine traditions, but does not connect this...