Scholarship; or why I fear St Dunstan

I wrote a book about a little gospel-book in the Bodleian Library which belonged to St Margaret of Scotland. It's an endearing little manuscript owned by an interesting woman. I enjoyed writing my book very much; it was a way of cocking a snook at the RAE and doing something a bit more alive. My aim was to make something that wouldn't be annoying to scholars but would still be enjoyable by the well-educated public, which I know is a tough remit. Still I do honestly think it would make a good present for your intelligent aunt, if you're lucky enough to have one.

Anyway, through a concatenation of slightly odd circumstances the idea has now been mooted, with some heavyweight backing, that I should do a similar thing on St Dunstan's Classbook. It would go in the same series, Treasures of the Bodleian Library, which is supposed really to be about the Bodleian's pretty books, but St Dunstan's Classbook has even fewer pictures than St Margaret's Gospel-book (one line-drawing as opposed to four painted evangelists) so my book would have to take a similar line to the St Margaret one and be as much about the owner as the manuscript. I ought to decide pretty soon whether to do this or not. The problem is that Margaret was an educated lay-person, an intellectual but not a scholar, and would have been someone's favourite intelligent aunt if she had had any nieces or nephews. (Edgar the aetheling was too busy swash-buckling about Europe and being one of William Rufus's fast set to produce offspring and Christina, one gathers rather against her inclination, was a nun in Wessex.) Dunstan, on the other hand, was a mad scholar in the long venerable British tradition of mad intense scholarship. The stories about his life are fine; I could write an entertaining book about that without crossing the line of scholarly respectability. I could look at his role in the government, his sanctity, the strangely furious miracles he performed. The manuscript is largely Welsh, and it attests to something really important we have lost: a sense of the Gaelic and Brittonic lands as the homes of scholarship, places where the English might as easily go for their higher education as anywhere on the Continent, or more so. Aldhelm got annoyed with people who went to Ireland to study, saying one could as well study in England; but he was almost certainly himself the student of an Irish master at Malmesbury. The Irish and Welsh as wandering scholars, educating the English and contributing on the Continent too, is fine, I can write about that. I can point out what a terrible thing we lost in the sixteenth-century when Glastonbury fell, the place where we'd expect to preserve this evidence; I can speculate on why almost everything we have surviving from Wales before 1100 left Wales before 1100 (I'd have to check my facts first, this is off the top of my head).

The real problem is the scholarship itself. It's all very well to write about something as an example of great learning passing from place to place, but if you can't match the learning yourself you may be in trouble. The manuscript has Eutyches De verbo, from Brittany via Wales, which is a grammatical work perhaps by the great monophysite heretic, and is probably manageable, even if all that stuff about the two natures of Christ does make my head hurt. It has Ovid's Ars Amatoria, the only copy known from Anglo-Saxon England, which is OK, though I'll have to read it -- I only know that bit that Marlowe translated ending "Jove send me more such afternoons as this", and I would have to think why St Dunstan is reading this -- is it quoted in grammars, for example. The problems are the so-called "Liber Commonei" in the middle, a miscellany of Welsh learning including a runic alphabet and large amounts of Greek and Welsh, with glosses in Welsh; and the Breton glosses on the Eutyches. My Welsh is so rusty as to be not far from non-existent; my Greek doesn't go much further than "en arche en ho logos"; I have no Breton at all. So I'm wondering if this rules it out. It just goes to show though the importance of ASNC as a subject; you can't leave the Welsh and Irish out of it when you study Anglo-Saxon England. But people persist in doing this. I recently read a draft of a survey article on English Square minuscule which made no mention at all of Welsh Revived minuscule, by a professor who shall remain nameless (pointlessly, since anyone who would be likely to recognise the name will be able to guess who it was anyway). (Though since I wrote a thing for the same exercise on English Caroline minuscule it's quite possible he read it and thought crikey, writing about English Caroline minuscule without mentioning X -- if that's the case it's too late, X will have to remain an unknown quantity, I'm told it's finally moving presswards.)