Anglo-Saxon schoolbooks

Abstract

Anglo-Saxon pedagogy derives from late Roman and provincial precedents, extant booklists or books, and descriptions of monastic routines, both English and Continental. In a Roman school a boy would learn both language arts and arithmetical calculation in the elementary curriculum. Many of Isidore's derivations are fanciful, but their occurrence in texts and glosses may reveal a linguistic precision covered in grammatical study. Science in the Anglo-Saxon classroom took the form of computus and natural history. Elementary computus was found in the Anglo-Saxon curriculum and may be best represented in Bede's De temporum ratione or De temporibus. The advanced curriculum in the Anglo-Saxon monastery may have included a significant amount of Latin verse. Prosper's Epigrammata may be thought of as superseding Cato's Distichs a thoroughly pagan work. Production of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the translations of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica and Orosius' Historia adversus paganos suggest the prominence of the subject.

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