Letters of Alcuin
The letters of the English scholar who taught at Charlemagne’s court and then at the abbey of St Martin at Tours. They show the Carolingian revival of learning from the inside.
Read the text at archive.org ↗English translation of the letter on his teaching at Tours, in A. F. West, Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools (1892), pp. 66–67 ↗Later critical edition by E. Dümmler (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae 4) ↗
Alcuin wrote to kings, bishops, former pupils and friends in England and on the continent. To Charlemagne he writes as a teacher to a patron, under the court nickname Flaccus and addressing the king as David.
Two letters are used in this wiki. In one, written from Tours at the end of 796 or early in 797, he describes what he teaches there, Scripture, the liberal arts, grammar and astronomy, and asks leave to send pupils to York for books he lacks (no. 78). In another, of the spring of 800, he tells the king’s sister and daughter that he would have sent them more of his commentary on John had the king’s command not kept him busy correcting the text of the Old and New Testament (no. 136).
Cited in
- AD 789, firm date