SOURCE: Houghton, John William. “(Re)Sounding Brass: Alcuin's New Castings in the Questions and Answers on Genesis.” Proceedings of the PMR Conference 16/17 (1992-93): 149-61.

In the following essay, Houghton contends that Alcuin was a skillful weaver of others' texts, not a mere compiler, and that his work speaks in a single voice.

Depreciation—ridicule, even—of the Carolingian renewal of the empire is an ancient, if not venerable, tradition¹, reaching back to contemporary sources: the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor reports the events of Christmas Day, 800, with the mocking observation that the Pope anointed the King of the Franks “with olive oil from head to foot,” i.e., that the Bishop of Rome did not even know the proper form for anointing a Roman emperor.² The Chapel which Odo of Metz designed for Charlemagne's palatium at Aachen invites, by its borrowings of plan and material, a comparison with...