This chapter talks about the comparison of Anglo-Saxon intellectual culture with that of Frankish Gaul. Both Anglo-Saxon England and Frankish Gaul inherited the Roman script system. Many of the later eighth-century manuscripts from Francia and Italy reflect the early years of the Carolingian Renaissance. The chapter discusses the importance of the preservation of knowledge, copying of essential texts, compilations of excerpts from a range of authoritative authors and the building up of libraries with mainline as well as more obscure patristic and early medieval writers. There is one further genre of Christian writing to which many individuals, in every part of western Europe, made particularly creative contributions in the eighth century, and this is hagiography. From the overwhelmingly biblical and patristic orientation of early medieval intellectual endeavour one can gain a crucial indication of the formative influences and characteristics of early medieval religion and the institutional and intellectual frameworks established to support it.

Christianity is unique among the world religions in being born with a Bible in its cradle. The use of the Old Testament continued to play a great part in Christian writing as it had done previously in Christian speech. The existence of an authoritative Bible would have had the negative effect of inhibiting any thought of producing fresh books, and there is more than a suggestion in the early Church of a reluctance to write. With the exception of the Pauline letters the New Testament writings were relatively slow in appearing, and a high proportion of them are anonymous. The Old Testament supplied the basis of early Christian thought, it did not supply the models for its writing, and in the matter of literary forms the New Testament is remarkably independent of the Old. The New Testament was not, like the Old Testament, revealed the limited amount of material available for canonisation.