Ælfric of Eynsham

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What? I'm your host Tom Kerns and welcome to the Anglo-Saxon England podcast.

Episode 108, Alphrich of Insham. Alphrich of Insham, born around 950, died around 1010,

was one of the most learned scholars of late Anglo-Saxon England and a

prolific and elegant writer of vernacular prose whose work were widely

regarded in his own time and widely read and who later played an important

part in controversies surrounding the reformation. Alongside Wolfstand,

Alphrich is very much the pinnacle of Old English prose in terms of its

technical sophistication. We know very little about Alphrich's actual life. We

know that he was educated under Bishop Athawold at the Monastic School of

Winchester where he became a monk and a priest. Throughout his entire life and

his whole career, he exhibits a deep reverence and respect for Athawold

specifically and his vision of pure reformed Benedictine monasticism. In

around the year 987, Alphrich moved to the Abbey of Sun Abbas, which had been

newly founded or re-founded, there's some uncertainty about the fact by

saying Athomar, the Sun of Aildman, Athawword. In 2005, Athomar re-founded the

Abbey of Insham and Alphrich became its first abbot. Internal illusions

fabric in his writing suggest that he had travelled somewhat in the north of

England and in Italy, probably on pilgrimage to Rome, and that he may have been

taught by Dunston as well as Athawold, although that is much less

certain than his education under Athawolds, influence. And that's really all

that we know about Alphrich's life. We know that he was in regular or semi-regular

contact with Wolfstand that they exchange letters, but for the most part he

seems to have been dedicated to his life of preaching and writing. His

earliest known works and some of the works which he's most famous are his

Catholic homilies, or Simone's Catholic E in Latin, which he composed in the

years between 990 and 995. The Catholic homilies consist of two different

series of 40 homilies each focused on the Gospels, on saints' lives and on

various doctrinal educational theological themes. From the preface's that he

produced along with the Catholic homilies, we see a clear intent that they be

used as essentially a kind of yearly liturgical reading or preaching. The

intent being that the first series which tended to be a little more

introductory in terms of its themes and subject matter was to be read first and

then the second series which was a slightly more advanced. The project was

encouraged by Alphrich's friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cigaric and the

Eldermann Atholware who is known to have had a whose known to have had a deep

interest in education and religious matters. To say that the Catholic homilies

were influential is something of an understatement. There are over 30

manuscripts extant that draw to some extent on the Catholic homilies, ranging

in date from the late 10th century all the way up to the 13th century. Beyond

that Alphrich's homilies entered wider circulation and came to exert a major

influence on the production of homiletic material in England generally. As I

mentioned before homilies as a whole are quite formulaic and trope heavy

bod types of literature. Therefore it was extremely common for homilists to

essentially create homilies by fusing together bits and pieces from other

homilies that existed previously. So prior to Alphrich and Wolfstand with the

so-called anonymous homilies we find those widely circulated and much

copied and much emulated and once Alphrich and Wolfstand's text entered

the ecosystem if you will of Old English homiletics they too came to be

fused heavily with a lot of anonymous material and to produce new homilies.

That were well new for lack of a better term homilies that were intended to serve

a general audience. Given the extremely accessible and structured pedagogical

approach that defined Alphrich's homilies and his clear exposition of

difficult ideas is easy to see why his homilies became so influential

particularly compared to the somewhat more slightly more haphazard or

bedded say less rigorous or less consistently rigorous approach that we find

in many of the anonymous homilies although it is worth pointing out that

Alphrich's ordered structured regular approach does have some precursors in

some of the anonymous homilies particularly some of the homilies of the

Chelley book. Alphrich himself never abandoned his Catholic homilies over the

course of his life he would revise them and add to them adding about 40 new

homilies and organising them into various different collections over the

course of his life. As he made a clear in his preface to the first series the

original impetus for the work was Alphrich's deeply held

millenarian beliefs and specifically his belief in the approaching reign of

Antichrist and the need for proper Orthodox teaching in the vernacular to help

counter the spread of what he saw as a ronious doctrine. He gives the famous

account that his childhood priest growing up had used the Old Testament in the

story of Lot to argue for the sanctity of incest as an example of

erroneous teachings that were circulating in England at the time how accurate

this true this story is is a matter of debate since that's quite an extreme

example but the impetus and the point he's trying to make is clear there is a

need for rigorous and strictly correct teaching or if you will to use an

Arthur Waldion term pure teaching. As Alphrich's career progressed he

became less millenarian in his thinking a tendency that contrast heavily with

Wolfstander who was extremely millenarian throughout his entire career. In terms of

his intellectual influences Alphrich made heavily use of the typical sources

for Old English religious thought namely Augustine of Hippo Gregory the Great

Jerome bead and various Carolingian homolytic exemplars. The Catholic homolies the

first two series were followed by essentially a third series although it's

usually treated as a separate undertaking focused on the lives of various

saints. The collection was made at the request of Arthur Wald and his son

Athomar and was mainly intended for reading rather than preaching. Specifically the

well-worn practice of Lectio de Wiener or sacred reading which was promoted

within monastic circles and was increasingly becoming something that the

pious laity or the pious upper class laity were interested in engaging in. The

choice of subjects in the third series and appended discussions show a

particular interest in topics such as war, royal and military saints. The

history of English monasticism the problems of the Vikings and the

interpretation of dreams not to mention the careers of various Old Testament

kings and some brief discussion of pagan deities although this is extremely

brief and not particularly informative. About the same time of that is around

998 Alphrich is also known to have produced a grammar of Latin written in

English which also served some role as a text essentially trying to grammatically

explain Old English thus being one of the first texts to attempt to do so.

Alphrich is also known to have produced a few Old Testament translations and

paraphrases written seemingly for the use of the educated laity. The direct

translation or paraphrasing of the Bible into Old English was something that

had a bit of precedent but particularly in the realm of poetry but the idea

of a translation meant for devotional reading by the laity was a fairly new

thing in the early 11th century. After his death the works that Alphrich produced

were combined with other translations and illustrated to produce what's

known as the Old English Hexat-Yukh. In addition to all of this Alphrich also

authored two pastoral letters, one are the request of Bishop Wolf siger of

Sherborn and the other are the request of Wolfstan which were meant to be

circulated among the members of those bishops respective religious

communities. This indicates the extent to which Alphrich was held as an expert

on ecclesiastical practice and canon law. In these letters we also see the

strong influence of Athawalt on his thinking and hence his debt to that

specific branch of reforming Benedictineism from the late 10th century. It's

clear from all of this that Alphrich was widely known and regarded in his life as

a scholar and it was for the next couple of centuries that Alphrich's works

continued to be widely read and adapted and heavily highly respected. As a writer

Alphrich can also be said to have perfected Old English prose. His beautiful

poetic prose, similar to Wolfstan's but certainly slightly more accomplished

although that is a very subjective claim, is easily among some of the best and

most accessible Old English writing out there. His attempt to examine the

language using his knowledge of the grammar of Latin is also a highly valuable

undertaking that laid the roots for essentially the study of the Old English

language itself. In many ways his writing marked a deliberate rejection of a

lot of the trends that we see in older Anglo Latin and Old English writing.

Specifically the Anglo Latin that he would have read as he was educated at

Winchester was famously of the hermeneutic variety meaning that it was

extremely deliberately complicated used many obscure and difficult to

understand words usually derived from Greek. Yet Alphrich in his Old English

deliberately assumed this in favour of grammatical and linguistic

accessibility and simplicity but always with a marked stylistic poetic edge

that makes his writing for lack of a better word extremely elegant. His

commitment to the education of the laity is marked by the fact that the

majority of the works that he's known to have produced were written in English

rather than Latin. We know obviously that he was extremely capable with Latin

and highly educated and competent in the language but his interest in the

education of the laity meant that he much preferred or tended to prefer to write

in Old English. I mentioned briefly that Alphrich's fame was somewhat

revived during the reformation after he had fallen out of prominence in the

intervening centuries with the rise of middle English at which point Old

English became harder for scholars to understand. During the reformation he

specifically his Catholic homies dealing with the Eucharist became subject to

intense debate and renewed interest because Alphrich had engaged heavily with

Frankish debates in the 9th century about the nature of the Eucharist and the

essentially what would become known subsequently as transubstantiation.

Alphrich took a somewhat nuanced perspective on the topic and held that the

Eucharist was not necessarily literally the body and blood of Christ and a

claim that the more radical proponents of the English reformation seized upon

to use for their justification for obviously the sweeping religious changes so

they were advocating for which they were advocating. It's important to

remember that largely because the doctrine of transubstantiation had not

really been fully formulated in the late 10th and early 11th centuries it was

really fully fleshed out by Aquinas in the 14th century I believe. It's

difficult to read Alphrich with the idea specifically of transubstantiation in

mind and thus hold that he wholeheartedly rejected the idea.

Philosophically Alphrich and Aquinas were coming at the topic from very different

traditions Aquinas was much more Aristotelian in his influence whereas

Alphrich, via Augustine and Gregory, had a more platonic base to his thinking

although he certainly never read Plato. We don't even know if he'd heard of

Plato. So while Alphrich is casting some doubt on whether or not the

Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ in the ritual of the mass his

faith that there was some kind of spiritual transformation and some kind of

spiritual effect in the mass that somehow united people with their God was

never in question. So it's really the debate during the reformation that

Drawn Alphrich were really trying to fit him into a philosophical metaphysical

whole that he was never educated in or even seemingly familiar with. We don't

the extent to which classical Greek philosophy like Plato and Aquinas and

Aristotle was known in Anglo-Saxon England is a matter of debate.

Certainly there was a little bit of knowledge of it but no no widespread

familiarity. Today Alphrich's beliefs about the Eucharist are an

interesting topic of discussion for those who are interested in

intellectual history and religious history but his primary place today is in

his perfection of Old English prose as a form for conveying complicated

ideas in an artful and accessible way. He is without a doubt the

finest surviving Old English writer or definitely one of the top three.

We owe a great deal to Alphrich and his place, his fame in the study of the

Anglo-Saxon period is very well earned today. Thank you for listening. I hope you

enjoyed this episode of the Anglo-Saxon England podcast. I've been your host Tom

Curns and I hope you'll join me again next time.

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