Aldhelm of Malmesbury and the Ending of Late Antiquity

This book is a study of Aldhelm (c.639-709) and his complementary roles as a spiritual theorist in a nascent Christian society and as an ecclesiastical administrator. In both, he is shown as innovative and purposeful. His own theology responded to an experiential knowledge of the realities of power in his society. Born into West Saxon royal kin, he spoke directly to the concerns and needs of his aristocratic society, transforming the patristic norms of Christian behavior into the heroic concepts intuitively meaningful to his Germanic society. For Aldhelm, the dedicated virgin was as heroic as a warrior serving his lord.

Despite the extensive work on the long-neglected Aldhelm by this last generation of Anglo-Saxonists, which has succeeded in restoring him as a major subject of Anglo-Saxon studies, there has not been a book-length treatment of Aldhelm’s career as a whole in over a century. Thus, the present book seeks to move beyond the somewhat parochial concerns of Anglo-Saxon history to bring Aldhelm into the mainstream of Late Antique studies, a figure as fully at home with the cultural trappings of Rome as he is with Christian patristic literature. Aldhelm was unique, among his fellow Anglo-Saxon notables of his period, in being a high ecclesiastic also engaged in innovative scholarship, though, in this, he stood very much in the mainstream of the great figures of Christian Late Antiquity, East and West, uniformly bishops and scholarly theologians. In many ways, Aldhelm was the last significant figure of Late Antiquity in the West.

George Dempsey is a Research Associate at the University of California at Davis. He has studied Aldhelm for some four decades, publishing many specialized articles. This book represents his summation of that effort to understand Aldhelm and his innovative adaptation of the theological certitudes of Christianity to the concerns and values of his society and, thus, Aldhelm’s place in Western intellectual history.