SOURCE: “Social Idealism in Ælfric's Colloquy,” in Anglo Saxon England, Vol. 3, 1974, pp. 153-62.

In the following essay, Anderson examines Ælfric's use of Benedictine ideas in the Colloquy regarding self-sufficiency and the need for order.

Ælfric's Colloquy¹ is, of course, first and foremost, a dialogue between a master and his pupils to give practice in the use of Latin at a conversational level. The pedagogic intention of the work is evident from the interlocutors' habit of lingering over commonly used words in various grammatical forms: for example, in a few opening lines (2-11) the deponent loqui appears as loqui, loquimur, loquamur and loqueris, together with the noun locutio, and within a little more than fifty lines (66-119) we find seven forms of the verb capere, two of them occurring four times each and one twice. Yet, equally certainly, this colloquy has more to it than just schoolboy exercises in...