ÆlfricBata’s Colloquia: Reassessing an Eleventh-Century Latin Textbook

This article reassesses one collection of colloquies composed by Ælfric Bata (fl. 1005), a monk and teacher of Latin likely working in Winchester or Canterbury. Bata was a student of Ælfric of Eynsham (c.955–c.1010) and later editor of his work and his own colloquies continue in the same educational tradition. The only extant manuscript is in St John's College, Oxford MS 154, a collection of pedagogical resources for the teaching of Latin. There are two printed editions of the text, first by Stevenson (1929) and Gwara & Porter (1997), both of which take an editorial approach to the text that is not represented in the materiality of the manuscript, particularly in where different dialogues start and end and how different colloquies are grouped through the use of initials, which causes the contextual connections between the dialogues to be obscured. This has resulted in negative interpretations of the work that are less founded when the work is taken as a whole, namely the deliberate contrasting of poor and idealised monastic behaviour and the embedding of morality within the dialogues. This article seeks to critique their approaches to the text and discuss how their decisions have impacted the treatment of Bata’s work in scholarship and reassess its importance a pedagogical work in pre-conquest English monastic education.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

ma

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Grisbrooke-Campbell, Gulliver

• PR Llenyddiaeth Saesneg

Dc Identifier Grantnumber

UWTSD

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.uwtsd.ac.uk:2079