Locuples gazarum opulentia, or, De conviviis barbaris: Forty Studies in Honor of Michael Lapidge

Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge. Edited by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe and Andy Orchard. 2 vols. Toronto Old English Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005 Pp. xvii + 460; xviii + 431. $150.

The "heaping splendor of his treasures"—a homely translation of Aldhelm's locuples gazarum opulentia, by which the author described the riches taken from Chrysanthus by his pagan father, distraught at his son's conversion, in a lurid exemplum of male chastity tried and tested in the author's torturous prose De virginitate. If— there is some critical ambivalence about Aldhelm's style—the tautological example cited can seem either rhythmically bounding or bumbling, according to one's tastes—one can in no uncertain terms declare central the work of Anglo-Latinist Michael Lapidge in promoting and clarifying Aldhelm's opera. Though the existence of the field in its modern form owes very much to his wide-ranging editorial and critical work on most of the tradition's representative authors, the value of worthy scholarship on works of antiquity is not necessarily a register of the value of the works on which the scholarly attention was lavished; all the more so with Aldhelm's early Anglo-Latin works. And the achievements made by English writers such as Aldhelm, descendants of 'barbarians,' in a non-native tongue, who are said to have drawn on a 'hermeneutic' style and vocabulary, are no doubt judged more leniently by modern interpreters than the carmina of those genuinely working in a 'hisperic' or Mediterranean tradition. Writing perhaps not much more than a century before Aldhelm's birth, a North African epigrammatist could acerbically observe of Gothic (or Vandalic) convivial company: "Inter 'eils' Goticum 'scapia matzia ia drincan' / non audet quisquam dignos edicere versus" (Midst Gothic "Heils" and "bring food, bring drink," / no one dares utter lines any more worthy). How much sweeter Aldhelm's glossarial diction might have sounded to the epigrammatist's ear is uncertain.