ALCUIN

(Albinus Alcuinus; ca. 735-804). Born in Northumbria, Alcuin became the primary teacher of Charlemagne’s palace school. Alcuin was educated under Bishop Egbert of York and saw himself in the intellectual tradition of the Venerable Bede. He met Charlemagne in Italy in 771 and represented him on a mission to Offa of Mercia in 790 and at the councils of Frankfurt (794) and Aachen (799). Ordained deacon but never priest, Alcuin was abbot of several French monasteries and made the abbey of Saint-Martin of Tours an important center of Carolingian learning. His writings include biblical commentaries (on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, some New Testament epistles, and the Gospel of John), liturgical treatises, hagiography, poems, many letters, tractates against the Spanish Adoptionists, a treatise on the phases of the moon, and school texts. These last, covering the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), are in the form of dialogues between Alcuin and his pupils, including “a Saxon,” “a Frank,” and Charlemagne. At court, Alcuin was called “Flaccus” after the Roman poet Horace. His greatest legacy to medieval France was a tradition of school learning continued by his students Louis the Pious and Rabanus Maurus. He died at the monastery of Saint-Martin.

E. Ann Matter

[See also:  ANTICHRIST; CHARLEMAGNE; LOUIS I THE PIOUS;

PHILOSOPHY; RABANUS MAURUS]

Alcuin. Opera. PL 100-01; MGHPLAC II, pp. 160-351; MGHEp. IV.

Cavadini, John. The Last Christology in the West: Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul 785-820.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

Duckett, Eleanor Shipley. Alcuin, Friend of Charlemagne: His World and His Work. New York:

Macmillan, 1951.

Wallach, Luitpold. Alcuin and Charlemagne: Studies in Carolingian History and Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959.