Born:
735AD York, Yorkshire, England
Died: 19 May 804AD Tours, France
Alcuin of York lived near the East Coast of England and was born
into a high ranking family. He was sent to York where he became
a pupil at Archbishop Ecgberht's School, York cathedral.
He remained there as a teacher, becoming headmaster of the school
in 778. During this time Alcuin built up one of the best libraries
in Europe, and made the school one of the most important centres
of learning in Europe. He wrote a long poem describing the men associated
with York's history before he left for the continent.
In 781 Charlemagne invited Alcuin to go to Aachen to attend a meeting
of the leading scholars of the time. Alcuin accepted and, following
this meeting, he was appointed head of Charlemagne's Palace School
at Aachen. There he developed the Carolingian minuscule, a clear
script which has become the basis of the way the letters of the
present Roman alphabet are written. Before leaving Aachen, Alcuin
was responsible for the most precious of Carolingian codices, now
called the Golden Gospels. These were a series of illuminated masterpieces
written largely in gold, often on purple coloured vellum.
The development of Carolingian minuscule had a large impact on the
history of mathematics, although somewhat indirectly. It was a script
that was much more readable than the old unspaced capital script
in use before this. As a consequence, most of the mathematical works
were freshly copied into this new script in the 9th century. Most
of the surviving works of the ancient Greek mathematicians do so
because of this copying process and it is the 'latest' version written
in minuscule script which has survived.
Alcuin was not only headmaster of Charlemagne's Palace School at
Aachen but also a personal friend to Charlemagne and became the
teacher of his two sons. In fact Alcuin lived in Aachen for two
periods, during the years 782 to 790 and then again from 793 to
796.
In 796 Alcuin became abbot of the Abbey of St Martin at Tours after
retiring from Charlemagne's Palace School. There he had his monks
continue to work with the Carolingian minuscule script. Whilst in
Tours he arranged for some of his pupils to go to York to bring
back to Tours some of the rarer works he had collected there . He
wrote:-
I say this that you may agree to send some of our boys to get
everything we need from there and bring the flowers of Britain
back to France that as well as the walled garden in York there
may be offshoots of paradise bearing fruit in Tours.
Alcuin
wrote elementary texts on arithmetic, geometry and astronomy at
a time when a renaissance in learning was just beginning in Europe,
a renaissance mainly led by Alcuin himself. His lesson books were
written in a question - and - answer format. However his work in
this area, unlike the inspired calligraphy he developed, shows little
originality.
Late in his life Alcuin summed up his own career with a rather beautiful
description:-
In the morning, at the height of my powers, I sowed the seed in
Britain, now in the evening when my blood is growing cold I am
still sowing in France, hoping both will grow, by the grace of
God, giving some the honey of the holy scriptures, making others
drunk on the old wine of ancient learning...
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