by D. A. Bullough
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Alcuin [Albinus, Flaccus] (c.740-804), abbot of St Martin's, Tours, and royal adviser, was a major figure in the revival of learning and letters under the Frankish king and emperor, Charlemagne (r. 768-814).
Childhood and youth
The approximate year of Alcuin's birth depends entirely on his retrospective allusions to episodes in his early life and on reported reminiscences included in a life written in the 820s, for which a favourite disciple, Sigwulf, seems to be the principal intermediate source; a modern attempt to arrive at a more precise date in the late 740s is based on a demonstrably mistaken interpretation of one of the retrospective references. Nothing is known of Alcuin's parents or close kin. Modern literature generally speaks of him as 'noble-born'; his own references to collateral relatives (and notably to Wilgils, father of the missionary Willibrord whose life he wrote about 796) indicate that his family (paterfamilias is his word) was ceorlisc, that is, free but often subordinated to others of higher standing, and had a modest landholding, almost certainly in the Northumbrian south-east (south-east Yorkshire). From Wilgils and unnamed younger kin Alcuin inherited an oratory and well-endowed 'monastery' near the Humber estuary, founded early in the century; other and more distant relatives such as Beornred, who became abbot of Echternach and bishop (later archbishop) of Sens, had established themselves in Francia before Alcuin left Northumbria. As a very small child, he was handed over to the cathedral church of York and its clerical, non-monastic, community under Archbishop Ecgberht; stories in the life purport to show his mastery of the Psalms by the age of eleven, a precocious interest in Virgil, and an emotional response to part of St John's gospel in, perhaps, his late teens. Alcuin was to remain there for more than forty years, at first with the simple clerical tonsure which was remembered as having been imposed on 2 February in an unspecified year, and eventually--but only from c.770--as a deacon; he never proceeded to higher orders.
The greatest single influence from these years was evidently the daily liturgy of the cathedral, in which Alcuin participated from early boyhood. Some characteristic features of this can be reconstructed, both from a four-book florilegium De laude Dei (preserved in two continental manuscripts and only partly published), which also provides evidence of his early reading in the fathers (theology, history, and poetry) and other Christian texts, and also from the letters and other writings of his continental years. In all his works Alcuin reveals his reverence for 'Bede the teacher', whom he knew only at second hand, in his books and through Ecgberht; he also makes clear the enduring influence of ®lberht, magister (teacher) in York in the late 750s and early 760s and subsequently bishop. Alcuin's long poem on York, its place in the history of the Northumbrian kingdom and its saints, written probably in the early or mid-780s (although a later date is not absolutely excluded), includes an unusually full account of ®lberht's teaching programme, presented in terms of the seven liberal arts as defined by sixth-century scholars. The same poem devotes many lines to the Christian and pagan authors represented in the book collection ®lberht had assembled at York, of which Alcuin always regarded himself as the legitimate heir. In the early 760s he travelled with ®lberht to Rome, on a journey that also took them to Murbach Abbey (Alsace) and to the Lombard 'capital' at Pavia. While they were there a debate took place between a Jewish scholar and the Italian Pietro da Pisa, whom Alcuin was to re-encounter later at the Frankish royal court; but he does not claim that he was present, and he certainly learned nothing from it.
Early adulthood at York
Alcuin's third and fourth decades were ones in which the kingship of Northumbria was violently contested by claimants from several different family lines, who typically behaved ruthlessly to defeated opponents and their magnate supporters; later evidence suggests that Alcuin, and perhaps the kindred to which he belonged, had connections with the line that attained the throne for the first time in 759, in the person of ®thelwald Moll, and again, after a break, in 774 (®thelred I). But from the late 760s Alcuin was himself earning a reputation as a teacher of adolescents: among these was Liudger, future founder of Werden and first bishop of Münster (Westfalen), where a memory of Alcuin's teaching at York was still alive in the 840s.
The first didactic text attributable to Alcuin, a short computistic one with concluding verses, comes from the 770s. Plausibly, too, he was also helping his bishop to compose admonitory letters to the leading figures in the Northumbrian kingdom. In the last years of ®lberht's pontificate, Alcuin was (it was later reported) sent on a mission, of unknown purpose, to the Frankish king Charlemagne. This is the most likely, although not the certain, background of a lively letter-poem which was dispatched after his return home to some of the prominent clerics and royal courtiers whom he had met while travelling up the Rhine and at the court, including Pietro da Pisa and the arch-chaplain Fulrad. Alcuin was also working with his fellow cleric Eanbald (I) (who was elected as ®lberht's successor before the latter's death) in the construction of a splendid new church in York, on an unknown site; its highly unusual dedication to Alma Sophia (beneficent wisdom) suggests that it was in some way connected with the cathedral scola, the community of tonsured boys and young clerics. In 780 or 781 Alcuin again journeyed to Rome, to obtain the archiepiscopal pallium for Eanbald but possibly also taking with him to Italy a sister (perhaps stepsister) of the recently deposed king ®thelred. The life of Alcuin records that it was at Parma during the return journey that Alcuin again met the Frankish king (perhaps in March 781) and was invited to join his court.
It has always been assumed that Alcuin left Northumbria for Francia almost immediately and most accounts of Carolingian court culture and of Alcuin's contributions to it are posited on that assumption. In fact, there are strong arguments for believing that Alcuin's earliest surviving letters (in which he already used the Latin name-form Albinus, although not yet his unexplained nickname Flaccus) were written at York c.784, and that he was still there when a papal legate arrived in 786. The decrees of the legatine synod were subsequently promulgated again in the Mercian kingdom, to which Alcuin and another York deacon had accompanied the legate, and where an English-language version (of which nothing survives) was additionally read out. It is not unlikely that Alcuin was responsible for the content and phraseology of those decrees that dealt with specifically English issues and perhaps of some others; if so, they provide some further indications of the older writings (of the fathers, and so on) with which he was familiar before he left his homeland. Later, mostly indirect, evidence suggests that Alcuin had also compiled other compendia from the (for its time) extensive range of books available to him at York and perhaps elsewhere in Northumbria; among them was one on computus, which, with other books, he evidently included in his baggage when he travelled to Charlemagne's court in summer or autumn 786, although whether it can be approximately reconstructed from items included in later compilations on the continent is disputed.
At the Frankish royal court
Alcuin's first period of association with the court, which when he joined it was still itinerant and from which several of the first generation of resident foreign scholars had already departed, lasted three and a half years. For most of that time there is no direct and contemporary evidence of what he contributed, and it is unlikely that he was in any sense head of a palace school, as has commonly been supposed. Clearly, however, he shared literary and intellectual exchanges with men close to him in age, to some of whom (notably Arno, bishop and, from 798, archbishop of Salzburg and abbot of St Amand) he formed a lifelong attachment; he seems also to have enjoyed a close association with women in the royal family, although not with the queen, Fastrada (d. 794). He began to seek out and circulate short, predominantly late antique, works that had been neglected for centuries but had potential value as text books. Among these was the influential pseudo-Augustinian De categoriis decem; another was probably the even more enduring De imagine Dei, an exposition of the nature of man in terms of a simplified Augustinian psychology, which has sometimes been credited to Alcuin himself or to Alcuin and a pupil.
Almost certainly it was in this period that Alcuin, with others, composed a sequence of virtuosic figured poems and his own first extant work of exegesis, Interrogationes et Responsiones in Genesin ('Questions and answers on Genesis'), which concisely presented largely inherited wisdom, with emphasis on a literal interpretation but also exploiting number symbolism. His imprint on the Frankish king's great capitulary or 'general admonition' of March 789, a programme for the reform and better ordering of both the Frankish church and secular society, is apparent in some of the content and language. The first royal grants of religious houses to Alcuin as sources of income seem to belong to these years: he is subsequently documented, mostly in his own letters, as rector (abbot) of an unlocated monastery dedicated to St John the Baptist, and of Ferrières, St Josse-sur-Mer, St Lupus's at Troyes, St Servatius's at Maastricht, and, perhaps, of Flavigny, as well as of St Martin's at Tours (from 796) and its dependencies. There is evidence also that before 790 he had aroused jealousy or irritation at the court, whether among lowly chaplains or established councillors.
Return to Northumbria and letter collection
Early in 790 Alcuin returned to York. He had expected (he claims) that he would be sent to Britain to resolve a dispute between the Frankish king and King Offa of Mercia; but its resolution was almost certainly the work of others. It was at York that, highly unusually, he or anonymous amanuenses now began to keep texts of outgoing letters, which together with the small number retained and copies by their recipients (almost exclusively at Salzburg) ensured the preservation of around 275 from the last fourteen years of Alcuin's life. A very few of those written from Tours are strictly business or administrative letters, evidently representative of many others in that category which were not copied. Letters to English kings, bishops, abbots, and occasionally laymen are overwhelmingly admonitory; letters to the Frankish king (later emperor), to Arno, archbishop of Salzburg, and to a few others are sometimes of considerable length, dealing with a topic or, more often, with a number of topics of current interest or concern. The repeated commonplaces and stylistic pretensions of many of them, particularly in the later 790s, do not exclude adaptation to the occasion and to the recipient. Their not infrequent autobiographical references, paralleled in a small number of Alcuin's poems (which circulated less widely), reveal him as uncertain of himself even when he was being most authoritative and assertive, sensitive to slights--real or imagined--and to betrayal, especially by one-time pupils on whom he had lavished care and attention; they also reveal him as not merely acquisitive but, in the opinion of contemporaries, unacceptably avaricious, an accusation that he was always eager to rebut!
During his three-year return visit to Northumbria (790-93) Alcuin evidently had little or no success in checking the chronic violence associated with the exercise of royal power there. Nevertheless, his advice was sought by both the Mercian and the Frankish kings. In response to the latter, as revealed by a passage for which he may have been personally responsible in the contemporary Northumbrian (perhaps York) annals preserved in the Historia regum wrongly credited to Symeon of Durham, he contributed to the Frankish court text (the so-called Libri Carolini) designed to rebut the Greek position on the worship of images, probably on the topic of synodal authority. Before he departed from Northumbria, for the last time, in early summer 793, it is likely that Alcuin was already assembling a collection of patristic texts that demonstrated the falsity of the understanding of Christ's relationship with God the Father (Adoptionism) currently professed by Spanish and Pyrenean bishops. It is not improbable that the first of two versions of a work on spelling (De orthographia), which made extensive use of Bede's work of the same name and was perhaps intended to replace it, also belongs to these years.
Teaching and writing at the court of Charlemagne
Alcuin was back in Francia when vikings sacked Lindisfarne on 8 June 793. The event, which is not recorded in any Frankish annalistic or other text, provoked him to a series of letters over the period of at least a year, in which he criticized the Northumbrian king and people, as well as bishops and other clerics in both southern and northern England, for the faithlessness and gross misconduct which had brought down the wrath of God; it also inspired a major verse lament addressed to the Lindisfarne community, in which the note of pessimism is particularly strong. Having finally rejoined the Carolingian court at or on its way to Frankfurt, Alcuin made a significant contribution to the proceedings of the synod assembled there early in 794. Stylistic and other features indicate that he was the principal author of two letters addressed to the Spanish bishops, respectively in the king's name and in that of the Frankish bishops. In the second of these Alcuin challenged their Adoptionist views with a long sequence of citations (not always apposite) from the fathers and from the liturgy, and seems to have been convinced that he had provided a definitive rebuttal. His reward was formal admission, although he was still only a deacon, to the bishop's consortium and confraternity of prayer.
When the Frankish court finally established itself at the new palace at Aachen, Alcuin was one of its resident members. Unlike others among the royal counsellors, loyal servants, and scholar-poets, vividly characterized in verse exchanges (for reading aloud) to which Alcuin was a party, he remained there for only two years; and for many months in those years Charlemagne himself was absent on military campaigns, from which Alcuin then and later excused himself. The king's biographer Einhard, at this time a boy, later briefly recalled Alcuin's presence and activity at the Aachen court; and there is a single contemporary reference to him in a fellow resident's poem. All the other evidence is in his own writings, directly in his letters (but written for the most part after he had left) and poems, indirectly in his pedagogic works. It nevertheless substantially justifies the modern image of a teacher, both of the king and some members of his family, and of adolescents at the court, lay and clerical. While he was there a beginning was made to the production of definitive written versions of his hitherto oral teaching in the areas of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and perhaps also of music and arithmetic. An introduction to the first of these (and by extension to the whole group), titled in later copies De vera philosophia ('Of true knowledge') and which draws heavily on the sixth-century Boethius's Consolatio philosophiae, links them with the understanding of scripture and the Christian's ascent to heaven. The other writings show a familiarity (perhaps owed to the court library) with several substantial works from pre-Christian and late antiquity, including Cicero's De inventione, Priscian's Institutio grammatica (of which also he made an excerpt which had only a limited circulation), the rare Ars rhetorica of Julius Victor, and an interpolated version of Cassiodorus's Institutiones with diagrams which he later imitated in his own teaching. Later letters to the king indicate that a knowledge and imitation of the Christian and pre-Christian poets whose works were available at the court were an integral part of grammatical studies there. A very active royal interest was in astronomy and calendar calculation, which prompted several queries to an absent Alcuin, and complaints from him about other scholars' misunderstandings, in future years. Alcuin's verses while he was at the court include a long epitaph for the recently deceased Pope Hadrian I (d. 795), incised (perhaps at Aachen) on a decorated marble slab still extant at St Peter's in Rome.
Letters written by Alcuin in 795 or 796 imply that he was still hoping, even intending, to return to York. He may have been led to believe that he was a possible successor to the first Archbishop Eanbald when he resigned or died; if so he was disappointed, even perhaps acknowledging that he was debarred by some past misconduct (sexual or other), as letters intended for Pope Hadrian and sent to Pope Leo III suggest. In April 796, when the Northumbrian king ®thelred, to whom he had once given adherence, was murdered (which, according to Alcuin, aroused the Frankish king to great anger), he finally acknowledged that return was impossible. Nor do his letters of this period to addressees in Mercia suggest that he saw that kingdom as a possible alternative home. Reluctantly, in the summer of 796, he accepted the abbacy of St Martin's at Tours, which had not in recent years been a religious community closely associated with the Frankish royal court or family, although he himself had written letters both to its community (on the subject of true confession) and to its abbot.
Last years at St Martin's, Tours
The greatest number of Alcuin's extant letters and most of his major writings other than the earliest pedagogic ones belong to his final eight years. Early letters show a particular concern with the establishment of the Christian faith among the recently conquered Avars, on Francia's south-eastern border, and the missionary responsibility of his two friends, Arno, archbishop of Salzburg, and Paulinus, patriarch of Aquileia. He was concerned that what he regarded as the mistakes made in the (questionably effective) conversion of the Saxons a decade previously should not be repeated: admission to the Christian community in the ceremonies of baptism was of major importance, and he wrote on the subject more than once, adapting or incorporating older texts on the subject; but adult converts must be persuaded of the truths of the faith by good teaching. 'What avails baptism without faith?'; 'a man can be forced into baptism but not into belief' (Alcuin, Epistolae, 164).
During the next twelve months, to autumn 797, Alcuin seems to have had surprisingly little contact with the court; and his sadness at having left it is expressed in poems intended for another friend, Angilbert, abbot of St Riquier. Letters to England, however, were frequent and equally critical of the king and former kings of Northumbria, of the deceased Offa and his reigning son, and of ®thelheard, archbishop of Canterbury, who had abandoned his see following a Kentish repudiation of Mercian rule. After a first burst of enthusiasm, he was also critical of the behaviour of the new archbishop of York, his one-time pupil Eanbald (II). His other preoccupations were, first, raising the community of St Martin's (and probably other clergy and monks in the Tours region) from what he perceived to be their 'rusticity'. In fact, quite quickly he developed a substantially reconstructable advanced teaching programme based on his own and older didactic texts, although the main beneficiaries seem to have been adolescents attracted or sent from elsewhere, to the annoyance of the established residents. Second, he took in hand the organization and exploitation of the monastery's very extensive estates, without much sympathy for tenants and dependants.
Nothing engaged Alcuin more, however,than the Spanish Christological heresy, which he may for a time have believed to have been finally dealt with at Frankfurt, but which since then had apparently extended its infection (he made much use over the years of medical metaphors) to the south-western regions of the Frankish dominions. To combat it and to refute the counter-arguments of its two major exponents, Archbishop Elipand of Toledo and Bishop Felix of Urgel, Alcuin first wrote personal letters--in very different tone and form--during 797; and he followed these up in 798-800 with a succession of three substantial treatises, directed to one or other of his opponents and their counter-arguments but intended for wider circulation, which was never really achieved. In each of his treatises (for only the first of which is there a good modern edition) Alcuin supported the orthodox position with substantial patristic and liturgical testimony that he was progressively adding to with the help of his Tours disciples. The most accomplished and convincing was the second, Libri septem contra Felicem ('Seven books against Felix'). Augustine is used with discrimination, perhaps because Alcuin felt that in that father's major statement of Trinitarian doctrine he might seem to overstress Christ's humanity; and in several passages, as in other writings, Alcuin takes a firm stand on Mary's motherhood of the Son of God. Yet as letters make clear, he never got the backing from the king which he felt should have been forthcoming. In (probably) May or June 799, however, Alcuin was again at the Aachen court to dispute the controversial doctrines with Felix in the king's presence and he believed he had secured his opponent's admission of error and adherence to the teaching of the universal church.
Alcuin was subsequently to complain that he had not had sufficient opportunity to discuss 'other matters' with the king, who, by this time, like Alcuin himself, had other preoccupations. The pope, Leo III, had been attacked and mutilated by Roman enemies and had fled to the Frankish court while it was at Paderborn in Saxony. Alcuin expressed shock and an insistence that the king should take action against the miscreants: this would certainly involve an expedition to Rome, in which, however, he would not be taking part because of his age and ill health (the descriptions of his symptoms suggest that he suffered from recurrent malaria as well as cataracts). He also complained that he was not being kept informed about what was going on. Since 797 at the latest, a very few of Alcuin's letters addressed to the king or to friends who were also royal councillors and which are mainly concerned with very different topics, including astronomical and exegetic ones, refer in passing to a 'Christian authority' or a 'Christian Empire' which the Frankish king exercised or ruled over and the territorial bounds of which he had extended. Alcuin never attempts to explain what these terms signified for him (although modern scholars have speculated freely) nor directly to link them with, for example, Augustine's notions of 'empire' and the City of God; only in a poem of 799 or 800 does he speak of Charlemagne's right and duty to restore the 'ruler of the church' to his position of lawful authority in Rome.
In April 800 Charlemagne was at St Martin's, declaredly for the purpose of prayer. What passed between Alcuin and the king on that occasion is irrecoverable; the only reflection of the visit in his writings is the inclusion among his letters of a distinctive funerary oration for 'the lady Liutgard' (probably never formally queen) who died there. The further claim that Alcuin's preparation of a revised text of the Vulgate Bible already had the Frankish king's assumption of the imperial title in view similarly does not stand up to critical enquiry. Alcuin's supposed initiative or leading voice in the events leading to Charlemagne's acclamation and coronation as emperor at St Peter's, Rome, on 25 December 800 is much less clear than has sometimes been claimed.
Alcuin's subsequent approval and enthusiasm for Charlemagne's new dignity is unmistakable. Yet very soon after the emperor's return to Francia they came into open and at times bitter conflict, recorded in written exchanges of 801-2, which were for the most part preserved only by a successor with court connections. The occasion was a supposed violation of the right of sanctuary at St Martin's by officials of Theodulf, archbishop of Orléans, who had sought to recover a fugitive criminous cleric. The emperor's wrath was aroused by the violent counter-measures taken by the abbey's community and dependants; and although he accepted that Alcuin was not personally guilty of sedition, he was neither convinced nor appeased by his citation of both civil and canon law in defence of the Turonians' behaviour. They were brought before an imperial missus (a judge with delegated authority), whose conduct of the proceedings was in turn sharply criticized by Alcuin.
All this notwithstanding, the achievements of his last years, when Alcuin was over sixty, are substantial and remarkable. His earlier exegetical writings, only rarely datable but apparently extending over the whole period from the late 780s to his last years, were probably more important in his estimate of himself--filling in gaps left by the much-admired Bede--than that of modern scholars, who have been content to note their dependence on the great fathers (Jerome, Augustine, John Chrysostom in Latin translation, Cassiodorus). The implied range of reading is, however, impressive; his selection and abbreviation are far from arbitrary and allow Alcuin to give a different emphasis from his models or sources; and the greater concision was obviously welcome to succeeding generations. In 801 he completed his great commentary on St John's gospel which still found readers in twelfth-century Cistercian houses. Shortly afterwards he wrote a three-book De fide sanctae trinitatis with a strong Christological bias, dedicated to the emperor and claiming (not very justifiably) to use the methods of dialectic; it enjoyed early acclaim, and continued to have a wide readership in later centuries.
The substantial corpus of Alcuin's verse, much of it without any internal evidence of date and not clearly showing any stylistic or linguistic development, seems to have had few medieval readers and has been variously but usually negatively judged by modern scholars. Recently, however, its variety and the various techniques employed by its author to imitate and improve on the work of earlier poets have been stressed.
A high regard for Alcuin as a liturgist is evident in clerics of the next generation, who were themselves liturgical innovators or commentators, such as the chancellor Helisachar and Bishop Amalarius: for the latter Alcuin was 'the most learned teacher of our country' whose authority in such matters was unchallengeable (Amalarius, 3.94, 99). His De laude includes office chant-texts for which there is no other pre-800 record; perhaps during his years at court he 'revised' and supplemented an older Roman list of Old Testament and epistle mass readings; his composition (or organization) of a substantial series of votive masses which established themselves in later liturgy and of masses for new commemorations (notably All Saints but also the saints of particular churches) is well established. That he was responsible for the supplement(s) to the (papal) Gregorian sacramentary, as was believed for much of the twentieth century, has effectively been disproved. Alcuin had, however, a lifelong commitment to the importance and power of prayer, whether personal or collective, and its associated angelic presence. He made a not precisely definable but certainly major contribution to the compilation and early continental dissemination of books of private prayers (libelli precum) of which the oldest copy now extant is associated in manuscript with the Tours-written earliest copy of his De vitiis et virtutum, a moral treatise dedicated to the defender of the Breton frontier, Count Wido. Another and related work of his last years, prepared originally for Archbishop Arno but known only from copies made after his death, is a devotional handbook made up predominantly of meditational comments on parts of the psalter.
The creation of a distinctive and outstanding minuscule script at Tours cannot be credited to Alcuin personally--his own handwriting, of which there are a very few examples, was essentially 'insular' in its forms. If, however, the earliest Tours-written books in which it is used, including both a rare Virgil commentary and the earliest complete Bibles (which reflect Alcuin's personal orthography), are correctly dated to the years immediately either side of 800, then it is difficult not to accept his personal influence on the fine sense of page layout and the adoption of a hierarchy of scripts, as well as on the forms of punctuation in which he was certainly interested, in the products of the monastery's scriptorium.
Death and reputation
Alcuin died at St Martin's on 19 May 804, his last days being recorded in a largely conventional way in his life; but the same text records a vision in Italy of his death and admission to heaven as well as one closer at hand. Over his burial-place in the abbey a tomb was erected with an epitaph composed by himself. It was destroyed in viking attacks on Tours in mid-century and nothing certain is known of its appearance, but the text of the epitaph is widely preserved in manuscript copies. At least one of his disciples (perhaps named Candidus) included what seems to be a deliberately uncomplimentary reference to him in a sermon preached not long after his death. In general, however, Alcuin was held in high regard by those who had been taught by him or were pupils of his pupils; and only at the end of the century are there signs that his reputation was diminishing. At the end of the eleventh century and in the early twelfth century his achievements were lauded in different ways by Sigebert of Gembloux and William of Malmesbury. Although he was of little interest to the schools and universities of the high and later middle ages, a surprising number of his works continued to be copied in other centres; the De fide sanctae trinitatis was printed at Basel in 1493 as part of a widely used homiliary and reprinted many times in the next century; and some of the pedagogical and exegetical works were also printed in the sixteenth century. Alcuin's modern reputation, however, may be said to have begun in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when the French historian and politician Guizot saw him as his own precursor, as 'Charlemagne's Minister of Education'.
D. A. BULLOUGH
Sources
E. Dümmler, ed., Epistolae Karolini aevi, MGH Epistolae [quarto], 4 (Berlin, 1895)
Alcuinus, Patrologia Latina, 100-01 (1863) [reproduces B. Flacci Albini seu Alcuini... opera omnia, ed. F. Forster (1777); still the only edn of most of Alcuin's exegetic, dogmatic and pedagogic writings]
'Vita Alcuini', ed. W. Arndt, [Supplementa tomorum I-XII, pars III], ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores [folio], 15/1 (Hanover, 1887), 184-97
Alcuin, 'Carmina', Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Poetae Latini Medii Aevi, 1 (Berlin, 1881), 160-351, 631-3
Alcuin, The bishops, kings, and saints of York, ed. and trans. P. Godman, OMT (1982)
Alcuin, Libri IV de laude Dei et de confessione orationibusque sanctorum collecti, extracts only published, edn in preparation
A. Werminghoff, ed., Concilia aevi Karolini, MGH Concilia, 2/1 (Hanover, 1906), 110-71, 220-5
G. B. Blumenshine, ed., Liber Alcuini contra haeresim Felicis, Studi e Testi, 285 (1980)
Alcuin, De orthographia, ed. H. Keil, Grammatici Latini, 7 (1880), 295-312
The rhetoric of Alcuin and Charlemagne, trans. W. S. Howell (1941) [text with Eng. trans.]
Alcuin, 'Vita Willibrordi', ed. W. Levison, Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici, MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, 7/2 (Hanover, 1920), 81-141
Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, ed. D. Wilmart (1940)
Amalarius, Opera liturgica omnia, ed. J. Hanssens, 3 vols., Studi e Testi, 138-40 (1948-50)
L. Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne (1959)
J. Marenbon, From the circle of Alcuin to the school of Auxerre: logic, theology, and philosophy in the early middle ages, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (1981)
D. A. Bullough, Carolingian renewal: sources and heritage (1991)
D. A. Bullough, Alcuin: achievement and reputation [forthcoming]
Archives
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, MSS of writings
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, MSS of writings
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MSS of writings
BL, MSS of writings
Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels, MSS of writings
Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen, MSS of writings | Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, acta concilii Ephesi, MS lat. 1572
Likenesses
manuscript illumination, 12th cent., Trinity Cam.
medallion drawing, Staatsbibliothek, Bamberg, Bamberg Bible, MS Bibl. 1, fol. 5v [see illus.]
portrait, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Fulda dedication pictures, MS Reg. lat. 124, fols. 2v, 3v
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