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.Taken out of its particular philosophicalcontext the consequences of Collingwood s view are ultimately toreduce history to the operation of impersonal forces, with no placefor human dignity, sanctity (in the widest sense) or the elusive innerjourney that nourishes both.A more serious objection is that theMiddle Ages are a portrait-less millenium (this particular phrase istaken from Professor Tellenbach but the notion is widely familiar)55and that purported biographies of most pre-1400 figures simplyconfirm this.Any claim that we can approach Alcuin more nearlythan any of his contemporaries or than any one in the next threecenturies (and perhaps longer) must be justified by more than assertion.The late Sir Richard Southern s consistent reading of Eadmer sVita Anselmi was as a personal and intimate view, which only thosewho lived in the friendship of Anselm could experience and whosereporting of his spoken words in a vivid and natural way conveyssomething of the individual personality behind them.It allowed himto claim that the author is the first medieval writer whose aware-ness of his subject s inner motivations makes his account a genuine biography.56 There is no sense in which the early-ninth-century?Ferrières author of the Vita Alcuini anticipates his twelfth-centuryCanterbury successor.He is no more attempting portraiture thanhe has achieved a distinguished example of the genre hagiography.But it may be that it is because the few readers of the Vita Alcuinihave approached the text with too limited a notion of the genre andwith the wrong expectations that they have failed to consider whatit does record and why.Several decades ago it was suggested that a new and distinctivestrand began in early-eighth-century Northumbria with Stephen of55For some of the implications for post-1945 Personenforschung see e.g.KarlSchmid, Gebetsgedenken u.adliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter: Ausgewählte Beiträge(Sigmaringen, 1983), esp.pt.III and the extensive literature cited there.56R.W.Southern, St.Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963), pp.314 16,331 3; Southern, St.Anselm: a Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), pp.384 5,422 6 and passim. bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 2626 in defence of the biographical approach.the sourcesRipon s Life of Wilfrid and the anonymous Life of Abbot Ceolfrith;taken to the Continent by English missionaries, it coloured to agreater or lesser degree the Vitae written to commemorate them andtheir followers in the evangelisation of the still-pagan regions of west-ern Europe.Their authors are unusually concerned with the external,worldly, activity of their subjects, to which they give a recognisablechronological framework, and with the particular contexts in whichthose men and women functioned as channels of Divine grace; unlikethe hagiographers of late-Roman and Frankish Gaul they have lit-tle to say about the miracle-working powers of their heroes in theirlifetime, or immediately after their death.57 The ?Ferrières Vita ofthe English-born Alcuin can be viewed as a not-entirely typical exam-ple of that strand in early-medieval hagiographic composition.58It would now be agreed that the supposed distinction seriouslyover-simplifies the diverse forms that the vitae of the period mighttake and of the (in our terms) historical and biographical informa-tion which they include or exclude.59 Merovingian Lives are indeedgenerally indifferent to chronology, and sparing in their referencesto independently-documented events; but they are often rich in per-57Th.Schieffer, Winfrid-Bonifatius u.die christliche Grundlegung Europas (Freiburg,1954; repr.1980), pp.104 ff., 147 ff., 273 f.; F.Lotter, Die «Vita Brunonis» des Ruotger(Bonner Hist.Forsch., 9; 1958), pp.9 12; also (with a different emphasis) Bullough, Hagiography as patriotism , Etudes Augustiniennes (Paris, 1981), pp.340 45.58I originally suggested this approach to the Vita Alcuini in my 1972 Spoleto lec-ture, Alcuino e la tradizione culturale insulare , I Problemi dell Occidente nel secolo VIII,XXa Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano sull Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1973),here pp.577 80.In what follows, it will be clear that although still holding to it inpart I have subsequently changed my views at several points.A very different inter-pretation was proposed by Lutz E.von Padberg, Heilige und Familie.Studien zurBedeutung familiengebundener Aspekte in den Viten des Verwandten- u.Schülerkreises um Willibord,Bonifatius u.Liudger (Diss.phil.Münster, 1980), pp.27 9, without reference to myown treatment of the subject; for the most part it fails to convince me, except in itsstress on the exemplary character of the text; and the inferences from, e.g., the sup-posed ending of the Vita with the full text of Alcuin s epitaph are necessarily false.59A.T.Thacker, The Social and Continental Background to early Anglo-Saxon Hagiography(Oxford D.Phil.thesis, 1976) already argued that the Continental background tothe first English Vitae has been seriously underplayed; and he makes a strong casefor Northumbrian familiarity with Jonas s Vita Columbani.There is now an enor-mous and growing literature on the interpretation of early- and high-medieval vitae:representative examples are F.Lotter, Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischerErkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen , HZ.229 (1979), 298 356; D.von derNahmer, Die lateinische Heiligenvita.Eine Einführung in die lateinische Hagiographie (Darmstadt,1994), esp.pp.11 ff.; the references conveniently assembled in M.Stumpf, ZumQuellenwert von Thangmars Vita Bernwardi , DA 53 (1997), at 479 81 nn.79 82. bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 27in defence of the biographical approach.the sources 27sonal and political detail ; and collectively and individually evidencefor a landed aristocracy which linked its social dominance with lead-ership in the Church.The missionary Lives are predominantly ofmen and women who never forgot their monastic training and voca-tion and whose attitude (or whose biographers attitude) to the estab-lished authorities is often either ambivalent or concealed.60 Whatthey, and Carolingian and post-Carolingian Lives, have in commonis that they document and illustrate the elements in their heroesearthly careers that are seen as exemplary.The Vita Alcuini is distinctive both in the aspects that are singledout and emphasised by its ?Ferrières author, and in the sources ofhis knowledge of them.No fewer than five of the sixteen pages in themodern folio edition are concerned with Alcuin the pupil and teacherin the school of York [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.Taken out of its particular philosophicalcontext the consequences of Collingwood s view are ultimately toreduce history to the operation of impersonal forces, with no placefor human dignity, sanctity (in the widest sense) or the elusive innerjourney that nourishes both.A more serious objection is that theMiddle Ages are a portrait-less millenium (this particular phrase istaken from Professor Tellenbach but the notion is widely familiar)55and that purported biographies of most pre-1400 figures simplyconfirm this.Any claim that we can approach Alcuin more nearlythan any of his contemporaries or than any one in the next threecenturies (and perhaps longer) must be justified by more than assertion.The late Sir Richard Southern s consistent reading of Eadmer sVita Anselmi was as a personal and intimate view, which only thosewho lived in the friendship of Anselm could experience and whosereporting of his spoken words in a vivid and natural way conveyssomething of the individual personality behind them.It allowed himto claim that the author is the first medieval writer whose aware-ness of his subject s inner motivations makes his account a genuine biography.56 There is no sense in which the early-ninth-century?Ferrières author of the Vita Alcuini anticipates his twelfth-centuryCanterbury successor.He is no more attempting portraiture thanhe has achieved a distinguished example of the genre hagiography.But it may be that it is because the few readers of the Vita Alcuinihave approached the text with too limited a notion of the genre andwith the wrong expectations that they have failed to consider whatit does record and why.Several decades ago it was suggested that a new and distinctivestrand began in early-eighth-century Northumbria with Stephen of55For some of the implications for post-1945 Personenforschung see e.g.KarlSchmid, Gebetsgedenken u.adliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter: Ausgewählte Beiträge(Sigmaringen, 1983), esp.pt.III and the extensive literature cited there.56R.W.Southern, St.Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963), pp.314 16,331 3; Southern, St.Anselm: a Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), pp.384 5,422 6 and passim. bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 2626 in defence of the biographical approach.the sourcesRipon s Life of Wilfrid and the anonymous Life of Abbot Ceolfrith;taken to the Continent by English missionaries, it coloured to agreater or lesser degree the Vitae written to commemorate them andtheir followers in the evangelisation of the still-pagan regions of west-ern Europe.Their authors are unusually concerned with the external,worldly, activity of their subjects, to which they give a recognisablechronological framework, and with the particular contexts in whichthose men and women functioned as channels of Divine grace; unlikethe hagiographers of late-Roman and Frankish Gaul they have lit-tle to say about the miracle-working powers of their heroes in theirlifetime, or immediately after their death.57 The ?Ferrières Vita ofthe English-born Alcuin can be viewed as a not-entirely typical exam-ple of that strand in early-medieval hagiographic composition.58It would now be agreed that the supposed distinction seriouslyover-simplifies the diverse forms that the vitae of the period mighttake and of the (in our terms) historical and biographical informa-tion which they include or exclude.59 Merovingian Lives are indeedgenerally indifferent to chronology, and sparing in their referencesto independently-documented events; but they are often rich in per-57Th.Schieffer, Winfrid-Bonifatius u.die christliche Grundlegung Europas (Freiburg,1954; repr.1980), pp.104 ff., 147 ff., 273 f.; F.Lotter, Die «Vita Brunonis» des Ruotger(Bonner Hist.Forsch., 9; 1958), pp.9 12; also (with a different emphasis) Bullough, Hagiography as patriotism , Etudes Augustiniennes (Paris, 1981), pp.340 45.58I originally suggested this approach to the Vita Alcuini in my 1972 Spoleto lec-ture, Alcuino e la tradizione culturale insulare , I Problemi dell Occidente nel secolo VIII,XXa Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano sull Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1973),here pp.577 80.In what follows, it will be clear that although still holding to it inpart I have subsequently changed my views at several points.A very different inter-pretation was proposed by Lutz E.von Padberg, Heilige und Familie.Studien zurBedeutung familiengebundener Aspekte in den Viten des Verwandten- u.Schülerkreises um Willibord,Bonifatius u.Liudger (Diss.phil.Münster, 1980), pp.27 9, without reference to myown treatment of the subject; for the most part it fails to convince me, except in itsstress on the exemplary character of the text; and the inferences from, e.g., the sup-posed ending of the Vita with the full text of Alcuin s epitaph are necessarily false.59A.T.Thacker, The Social and Continental Background to early Anglo-Saxon Hagiography(Oxford D.Phil.thesis, 1976) already argued that the Continental background tothe first English Vitae has been seriously underplayed; and he makes a strong casefor Northumbrian familiarity with Jonas s Vita Columbani.There is now an enor-mous and growing literature on the interpretation of early- and high-medieval vitae:representative examples are F.Lotter, Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischerErkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen , HZ.229 (1979), 298 356; D.von derNahmer, Die lateinische Heiligenvita.Eine Einführung in die lateinische Hagiographie (Darmstadt,1994), esp.pp.11 ff.; the references conveniently assembled in M.Stumpf, ZumQuellenwert von Thangmars Vita Bernwardi , DA 53 (1997), at 479 81 nn.79 82. bullough/f2/1-124 8/27/03 9:17 AM Page 27in defence of the biographical approach.the sources 27sonal and political detail ; and collectively and individually evidencefor a landed aristocracy which linked its social dominance with lead-ership in the Church.The missionary Lives are predominantly ofmen and women who never forgot their monastic training and voca-tion and whose attitude (or whose biographers attitude) to the estab-lished authorities is often either ambivalent or concealed.60 Whatthey, and Carolingian and post-Carolingian Lives, have in commonis that they document and illustrate the elements in their heroesearthly careers that are seen as exemplary.The Vita Alcuini is distinctive both in the aspects that are singledout and emphasised by its ?Ferrières author, and in the sources ofhis knowledge of them.No fewer than five of the sixteen pages in themodern folio edition are concerned with Alcuin the pupil and teacherin the school of York [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]