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Thirty Years of the ‘Jeweled Style’
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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2019
Extract
In seventh-century Wiltshire, a scholar-monk began to write classicising Latin poetry. In bold terms he describes himself as the first of the Germanic peoples to write Latin poetry (‘neminem nostrae stirpis prosapia genitum et Germanicae gentis cunabulis confotum in huiuscemodi negotio [i.e. poetry] ante nostram mediocritatem tantopere desudasse’). His programmatic statements cite Virgil explicitly, and allude to Prudentius and Sedulius. His is a poetry that sets out a stall for the beginning of something new, but does so by making clear his predecessors. For Aldhelm, as for much of the Middle Ages, the canonical models of Latin poetry included classical Latin authors as well as the Christian Latin poets of Late Antiquity.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Footnotes
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My thanks to Jessica Blum, Michael Dewar, Andrew Faulkner, Duncan MacRae, Peter Thonemann and the readers for JRS. I should state for full disclosure that Catherine Ware (contributor to Classics Renewed and Poetics) supervised my undergraduate thesis, and Michael Herren (contributor to Classics Renewed) was one of my PhD examiners.
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