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The Alphabet of Words (AW), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs among the additions made to the Durham Collectar (D) by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. Previously thought to be extant only in D, and possibly by Aldred himself, AW also survives (without the OE gloss) in a Kassel manuscript (K) from the second half of the eighth century, as well as in a defective twelfth-century copy in Karlsruhe (Kr). Most of AW is also incorporated in a Latin treatise on the alphabet (“Audiuimus multos”: AM) compiled probably in the ninth century. AW belongs to the genre of “parenetic alphabet,” widely attested in Greek but also sporadically in Latin, including in a ninth-century Paris manuscript (P: BNF, lat. 2796) that shares lemmata and glosses with AW for the letters X, Y, and Z. We provide the first critical edition and translation of AW from D, K, and Kr, with variants from AM and P, together with a discussion of AW’s genre and relation to other alphabetical texts as well as a full commentary on the biblical, apocryphal, and patristic lore transmitted by AW’s lemmata and glosses on each letter.

In early medieval Ireland, the cosmos was conceived as tripartite, composed of the heavens, earth's surface, and underearth and undersea. Harmonious relations with cosmic forces were assured by just royal rule. Crossing this vertical coordinate, which also had implications for the human hierarchies of rank and function, were the manifold phenomena as known to human life. This external reality was mentally organized as a vast set of homologies, the recognition and maintenance of which contributed to the prosperity and fertility of the kingdom. The literate record displays multiple taxonomies and categories, often expressed in numerical values. Among these are the pentad and, in spatial terms, the quincunx. This fivefoldness and the order it represented were recognized and replicated on a variety of scales: the five provinces of Ireland, the family farm and its neighbors, the house and its outbuildings. Also implicated as mesocosms were the interior arrangements of royal banquet halls, hostels for kings on circuit and other travelers, and law courts. The quincuncial organization of interior space reflects and promotes macrocosmic order but in the great corpus of literate works is the setting for disruptive human dynamics — the stuff of story — often associated with themes of the heroic life and royal rule. This conception of interior space was elaborated in the pagan period and, in formal terms, was readily accommodated in subsequent Christian centuries, with new hierarchies and the perdurable conception of the kingship as stabilizing factors.

The superior learning of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–704) was acknowledged in both Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic contemporary sources by such renowned scholars as Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, Adomnán of Iona, Stephen of Ripon, and Alcuin of York. Both Aldhelm and Adomnán knew him personally, and texts composed by these two scholars and presented to Aldfrith help delineate the breadth of his educational background. He was educated among the Gaels, and their records described him as sapiens. By examining texts of other seventh-century Gaelic sapientes, and the comments of Aldhelm and Bede about Gaelic intellectual life and educational opportunities, we can expand our purview of the scope of his education. The nature of seventh-century schooling was peripatetic, and Aldfrith's dual heritage requires a broad search for locations. Many scholars accept Iona as the likely source of his learned background, but this essay will argue that, among other likely locations in Britain and Ireland, Bangor in Northern Ireland is best supported by surviving evidence. His benign reign is placed at the end of the first century of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, but his education benefited the kingdom of Northumbria through generations of Gaelic scholarship, as exemplified by peregrini such as Columba and Columbanus, and sapientes like Laidcenn mac Baíth, Cummíne of Clonfert, Ailerán of Clonard, Cenn Fáelad mac Ailello, and Banbán of Kildare. Aldfrith's rule ushered in a period of cultural florescence in Northumbria that saw the first hagiography and earliest illuminated manuscripts produced in Anglo-Saxon England and that culminated in the extensive library authored by Bede (d. 735).

The De tonitruis (or De tonitruis libellus ad Herefridum) attributed to Bede is a short text containing a prologue and four chapters dealing with the meaning of thunder heard (I) in each of the four cardinal directions, (II) in each of the twelve months of the year, (III) on each of the seven days of the week, and (IV) at certain hours of the day and of the night. The text was first published among Bede's works by Noviomagus in Cologne in 1537 and was subsequently reprinted in all editions of the complete works of Bede, including Migne's Patrologia Latina. Charles W. Jones, who was the first to discuss the De tonitruis in detail, convincingly dismissed the attribution to Bede and identified what he thought to be the only extant MS (and also the exemplar used by Noviomagus): Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, 102, fols. 49r–52v, copied in Cologne in the first half of the eleventh century.

In two early medieval manuscripts, Vat. Pal. lat. 220 and Vat. Pal. lat. 212, there are contained seven short sermons or homilies which provide convincing evidence of being Irish in character. They are worthy of publication because the amount of homiletical literature coming from Irish circles at this early time is not very great, and because a careful consideration of them is apt to throw light on the Irish literary method. They reveal various internal characteristics which are known to be symptomatic of the Hiberno-Latin element; and they present sufficient material to allow one to study closely how the Irish used sources in the preparation of their homilies. The approach of our anonymous author to Scripture stands in the Antiochene rather than the Alexandrian tradition. Thus his interest is in the literal more than in the spiritual sense of the text; and in this he shows a certain affinity with the Irish exegetes of this period. I should like to reproduce here the text of these sermons and to elucidate their character by relating them in parallel fashion to other contemporary works that are known to be part of the Hiberno-Latin tradition.