Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages (review)

This volume contains the first series of papers produced by the "Storehouses of Wholesome Learning" project, a five-year colloquium on the role of encyclopedic and miscellaneous manuscripts in early medieval learning and culture. These papers fall into two categories: in one group, each essay focuses on an individual text or a narrow subgenre and its Anglo-Saxon transmission history; a second group consists of case studies of specific textual and material artifacts that contribute to broader theories of cultural transmission, educational practice, and the use of manuscripts. The objective unifying all these essays is the reconsideration of the typology and practical use of classbooks, encyclopedias, and miscellanies.

The essays of the first group include Claudia Di Sciacca, "The Manuscript Tradition, Presentation and Glossing of Isidore's Synonymain Anglo-Saxon England: The Case of CCCC 448, Harley 110 and Cotton Tiberius A.iii"; Filippa Alcamesi, "The Sibylline Acrosticin Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: The Augustinian Text and the Other Versions"; Patrizia Lendinara, "The Versus de die iudicii: Its Circulation and Use as a School Text in Late Anglo-Saxon England"; Concetta Giliberto, "Stone Lore in Miscellany Manuscripts: The Old English Lapidary"; Kees Dekker, "Anglo-Saxon Encyclopaedic Notes: Tradition and Function"; László Sándor Chardonnens, "Context, Language, Date and Origin of Anglo-Saxon Prognostics"; and Loredana Teresi, "Anglo-Saxon and Early Anglo-Norman Mappaemundi." Each essay introduces the reader to the contents of the pertinent texts, catalogues their Anglo-Saxon manuscript witnesses, analyzes the relationships between these texts and their sources, and provides a thorough summary of previous scholarship. Where applicable, each essay additionally surveys the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of the pertinent text or subgenre (Alcamesi, Lendinara, Giliberto, and Teresi) and includes an edition of the text(s) under consideration (Alcamesi and Dekker; Teresi includes ten color plates of maps).

The essays of this first group tend to devote more attention to description than to analysis, but they are nonetheless extremely valuable and timely. For the last several decades of the twentieth century, many scholars used patristic theology as the backdrop against which to interpret all Anglo-Saxon literature, regardless of language, date, or genre. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the manuscript evidence simply does not support the notion that the works of Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome constituted the intellectual heritage shared by most Anglo-Saxon poets and hagiographers. The essays in this group bring to light texts which, though rather neglected by literary historians, were enthusiastically copied, redacted, glossed, or translated by the Anglo-Saxons. These studies provide the foundation for a thorough reconsideration of the common intellectual heritage of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon authors whose knowledge of patristic theology was nowhere near as comprehensive as that of Bede or Ælfric.

Among the second group of studies, Rosamond McKitterick's essay entitled "The Migration of Ideas in the Early Middle Ages: Ways and Means" is broadest in scope. The author compiles concrete illustrations of how artifacts (including but not limited to books) and ideas migrated into and throughout the medieval West, emphasizing the unexpected variety of routes and the lengthy distances traveled by such objects as ivories, musical instruments, and even the live elephant given to Charlemagne by the Caliph of Baghdad in 802. Rolf Bremmer's contribution, "The Anglo-Saxon Continental Mission and the Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge," is also far-reaching in scope: he proposes a reconstruction of the contents of books brought to the continent by Anglo-Saxon missionaries of the seventh and eighth centuries. Bremmer's survey of early Anglo-Saxon manuscripts preserved in continental centers parallels Michael Lapidge's treatment of the same topic in The Anglo-Saxon Library(2006), which was published too recently for Bremmer to take account of it in this essay. However, where Lapidge rounds out his discussion of this material with a comprehensive examination of eighth-century...