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Alfred the Great was King of the West Saxons from 871 to c. 886 and King of the Anglo-Saxons from c. 886 until his death in 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf, who died when Alfred was young. Three of Alfred's brothers, Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred, reigned in turn before him. Under Alfred's rule, considerable administrative and military reforms were introduced, prompting lasting change in England.
Bede, also known as Saint Bede, The Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable, was an English monk at the monastery of St. Peter and its companion monastery of St. Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles.
Justus was the fourth Archbishop of Canterbury. He was sent from Italy to England by Pope Gregory the Great, on a mission to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism, probably arriving with the second group of missionaries despatched in 601. Justus became the first Bishop of Rochester in 604, and attended a church council in Paris in 614.
Theodore of Tarsus was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690. Theodore grew up in Tarsus, but fled to Constantinople after the Persian Empire conquered Tarsus and other cities. After studying there, he relocated to Rome and was later installed as the Archbishop of Canterbury on the orders of Pope Vitalian. Accounts of his life appear in two 8th-century texts. Theodore is best known for his reform of the English Church and establishment of a school in Canterbury.
Eanflæd was a Deiran princess, queen of Northumbria and later, the abbess of an influential Christian monastery in Whitby, England. She was the daughter of King Edwin of Northumbria and Æthelburg, who in turn was the daughter of King Æthelberht of Kent. In or shortly after 642 Eanflæd became the second wife of King Oswiu of Northumbria. After Oswiu's death in 670, she retired to Whitby Abbey, which had been founded by Hilda of Whitby. Eanflæd became the abbess around 680 and remained there until her death. The monastery had strong association with members of the Northumbrian royal family and played an important role in the establishment of Roman Christianity in England.
Aldfrith was king of Northumbria from 685 until his death. He is described by early writers such as Bede, Alcuin and Stephen of Ripon as a man of great learning. Some of his works and some letters written to him survive. His reign was relatively peaceful, marred only by disputes with Bishop Wilfrid, a major figure in the early Northumbrian church.
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by the Venerable Bede in about AD 731, is a history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally; its main focus is on the conflict between the pre-Schism Roman Rite and Celtic Christianity. It was originally composed in Latin, and is considered one of the most important original references on Anglo-Saxon history and has played a key role in the development of an English national identity. It is believed to have been completed in 731 when Bede was approximately 59 years old.
Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, also known as Saint Eadfrith, was Bishop of Lindisfarne, probably from 698 onwards. By the twelfth century it was believed that Eadfrith succeeded Eadberht and nothing in the surviving records contradicts this belief. Lindisfarne was among the main religious sites of the kingdom of Northumbria in the early eighth century, the resting place of Saints Aidan and Cuthbert. He is venerated as a Saint in the Roman Catholic Church, and in the Eastern Orthodox Church, as also in the Anglican Communion.
The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices. It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the Capitulary Library of Vercelli, in northern Italy.
Wilfrid II, name also spelled Wilfrith, also known as Wilfrid the Younger, was the last Bishop of York, as the see was converted to an archbishopric during the time of his successor. In the 10th century, two different groups claim to have taken the relics of an earlier Wilfrid from Ripon; most likely one party took those of Wilfrid the Younger. The younger Wilfrid's feast is attested in the Calendar of Winchcombe and later martyrologies, though he does not seem to have had a widespread or popular veneration.
Byrhtferth was a priest and monk who lived at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire in England. He had a deep impact on the intellectual life of later Anglo-Saxon England and wrote many computistic, hagiographic, and historical works. He was a leading man of science and best known as the author of many different works. His Manual (Enchiridion), a scientific textbook, is Byrhtferth's best known work.
Saint Mildrith, also Mildthryth, Mildryth and Mildred,, was a 7th and 8th-century Anglo-Saxon abbess of the Abbey at Minster-in-Thanet, Kent. She was declared a saint after her death, and later her remains were moved to Canterbury.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the Chronicle was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great. Multiple copies were made of that one original and then distributed to monasteries across England, where they were independently updated. In one case, the Chronicle was still being actively updated in 1154.
Michael Lapidge, FBA is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy, and winner of the 2009 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize.
Anglo-Saxon riddles are a significant genre of Anglo-Saxon literature. The riddle was a major, prestigious literary form in early medieval England, and riddles were written both in Latin and Old English verse. The pre-eminent composer of Latin riddles in early medieval England was Aldhelm, while the Old English verse riddles found in the tenth-century Exeter Book include some of the most famous Old English poems.
The Leiden Glossary is a glossary contained in a manuscript in Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, Voss. Lat. Q. 69. The lemmata (headwords) come from "a range of biblical, grammatical, and patristic texts". It is based on an Anglo-Saxon exemplar, and was prepared c. 800 in the Abbey of Saint Gall in modern-day Switzerland.
Israel the Grammarian was one of the leading European scholars of the mid-tenth century. In the 930s, he was at the court of King Æthelstan of England (r. 924–39). After Æthelstan's death, Israel successfully sought the patronage of Archbishop Rotbert of Trier and became tutor to Bruno, later the Archbishop of Cologne. In the late 940s Israel is recorded as a bishop, and at the end of his life he was a monk at the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Maximin in Trier.
The hermeneutic style is a style of Latin in the later Roman and early Medieval periods characterised by the extensive use of unusual and arcane words, especially derived from Greek. The style is first found in the work of Apuleius in the second century, and then in several late Roman writers. In the early medieval period, some leading Continental scholars were exponents, including Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Odo of Cluny.
Miles, sometimes Mar Miles, was the bishop of Susa in Sasanian Persia from before 315 until his martyrdom in 340 or 341. He engaged in efforts to evangelize Susa, traveled widely in the Eastern Roman Empire and led the opposition to Papa bar ʿAggai and the supremacy of the bishops of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in the Persian church. He was executed by the Sasanian authorities at the start of the Forty-Year Persecution.
References
- Lapidge, Michael, "Martyrology, OE" in Michael Lapidge et al. (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. ISBN 0-631-22492-0
- Magennis, Hugh (2003-04-30). "Old English Martyrology". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2007-10-20.
- Rauer, Christine. "The Old English Martyrology: An Annotated Bibliography" . Retrieved 2007-10-20.
- Rauer, Christine, The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. ISBN 9781843843474