The roots of this volume lie in a conference convened in June 2005 to celebrate the 1,300th anniversary of Aldhelm's foundation of the bishopric of Sherborne. Both conference and volume are a testament to the energy of Katherine Barker, co-editor of a previous volume on St Wulfsige and Sherborne. She commissioned a musical performance of Aldhelm's Carmen Rhythmicum, contributed three papers to the final volume and assembled a group of some of the best-qualified scholars to write about Aldhelm. Professor Nicholas Brooks has been a leading authority on the Anglo-Saxon Church since his excellent monograph on Canterbury. Professor Michael Lapidge is the person to whom most of the advances of our knowledge of Aldhelm's career and scholarship over the last thirty years can be attributed. Dr David Howlett has published a number of important papers on the composition of Aldhelm's prose and poetry. Professor Barbara Yorke is the leading expert on the history of the West Saxons and Dr Duncan Probert has produced a doctoral dissertation and a number of publications that are revising our understanding of the relationship between the West Saxons and the Britons of the south west. Dr Graham Jones is an expert on saints’ cults and church dedications, directing a project to produce a Transnational Atlas and Database of Saints’ Cults.
If the anniversary provided the occasion, the impressive leaps forward in Aldhelm scholarship over the last thirty years provided ample justification. An accessible and judicious overview of that scholarship is provided by Nicholas Brooks's introduction to the volume, which will be a useful starting point for scholars and students alike. Aldhelm's career has to be pieced together from problematic sources: in addition to Aldhelm's own works, there are brief biographies by Bede in the early eighth century and by Faricius of Malmesbury and William of Malmesbury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which may be supplemented by problematic diplomas and abbatial/episcopal lists from Malmesbury and Sherborne. What may be said with reasonable certainty is that Aldhelm spent some time in Irish territories, studied in Theodore and Hadrian's school at Canterbury in the 670s, was abbot of Malmesbury by the 680s and was bishop of a see west of Selwood from 705 to 709, perhaps located at Sherborne. Barbara Yorke and Michael Lapidge offer new accounts of Aldhelm's education among the Irish. Building on previous work, Yorke argues persuasively that the Irish personal name Maíldub, preserved in the place-name forms of Malmesbury and the Secgan (list of saints’ resting-places), testifies to an Irish founder-abbot who probably followed Roman observances and was venerated at Malmesbury. Nonetheless, she considers Aldhelm's period among the Irish with the future King Aldfrith of Northumbria in the 660s (acknowledged in his Epistola ad Acircium) as the source of his knowledge of Irish learning. Within this broader picture of Aldhelm's education Lapidge makes a compelling case for placing Aldhelm and Aldfrith together at Iona in the 660s, because the study of Virgil under Admonan at Iona is the likely explanation for links between Aldhelm, Virgil and the ‘Epinal-Erfurt’ glossary. A series of arguments by Duncan Probert and Katherine Barker seek to draw out more clearly the political and territorial context within which Aldhelm was working. Probert provides a careful dating and close reading of Aldhelm's Epistola ad Geruntium – a letter to Gerent, ruler of the Dumnonians (in what is now Devon). He reconstructs an image of Aldhelm working within a complex set of political relations. King Ine of the West Saxons was probably overlord of Gerent, who was in turn possibly overlord of other Dumnonian leaders. Gerent may have ruled a territory within which there were some British religious communities following Roman observances, perhaps acknowledging the jurisdiction of a West Saxon bishop. All this may represent the gradual growth of West Saxon power and the careful political manoeuvring of a neighbouring British ruler – a far cry from more traditional accounts of West Saxon expansion westwards. Across two much longer and denser papers, Barker argues that the subject of Aldhelm's Carmen Rhythmicum was a church and estate at Lyme on the later Devon–Dorset shire boundary, reflecting the importance of coastal and riverine estates in West Saxon expansion and in grants to religious communities. Further contributions use this context of British and West Saxon interaction to throw light on other evidence. For Barker, in her third paper, this may be important background to Aldhelm's Carmen Rhythmicum, which she considers a translation of British and Irish traditions of oral poetic composition into Latin. For David Howlett it may be a context for continuing methods of composition involving the interweaving of rhythmical and numerical patterns into Latin works, in this case Faricius's Vita Aldhelmi. For Graham Jones it may be an explanation for some apparent patterns in church dedications.
Perhaps the most striking moments in this volume for the present author were those evoking the human Aldhelm at work – imbibing oral teachings at Canterbury and working them into his texts, negotiating with Britons in British territories on foot and on paper, and experiencing the storm described in the Carmen Rhythmicum. Though it is impossible to know how similar or different the performance is to those of Aldhelm's time, this is nowhere more true than in the recording of Vonkale's performance of the Carmen Rhythmicum distributed with the volume.
