An Anglo-Saxon fragment of Alcuin's letters in the Newberry Library, Chicago

Abstract

Among the fragments in the Newberry Library listed by Michael Masi in 1972,1his item no. 15 was described as ‘ninth century’ and ‘insular’. When I examined them, the two leaves of this fragment proved to contain portions of three letters of Alcuin, written to Charlemagne in the late 790s.2Copies of these letters are found in several ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts, but the only copy hitherto known to survive from Anglo-Saxon England is an elegant volume now in the library of Lambeth Palace, bound as the third part of manuscript 218, from the library at Bury St Edmunds.3Both the Newberry fragments and Lambeth 218 deserve consideration both on palaeographical grounds and for what they reveal about the literary interests of Anglo-Saxon England. This study explores the circumstances in which they were produced, copied and read, in an effort to restore to them ‘the place, the traditions, the influences, the sources which explain the various aspects of its composition and contents; its destination and its purpose; the people who were involved’.4

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