| Sumario: | For some Anglo-Saxonists, Old English literature is one of the finest achievements of the pre-conquest period. For others, particularly some Anglo-Latinists, it is evidence of a deplorable ignorance of Latin, which isolated England from the West European intellectual mainstream and the cultural heritage of the ancient world until the Normans arrived. In this overview, I am therefore surveying the use of the vernacular for ‘scientific’ or ‘secular’ subjects (primarily computus and medicine) within the context of Latin literacy and learning, in the hope of modifying the view that use of the vernacular and ignorance of Latin inevitably went hand in hand. Although the attention given here to the Age of Bede may seem disproportionate, my intention is to emphasize that this was indeed a time of Latin literacy and scientific advance, for despite Christopher Hohler’s claim that if Augustine of Canterbury was ‘under any illusions about the Englishman’s natural aptitude for foreign languages’, he must ‘soon have lost them’, Anglo-Saxons were not racially destined to monolingualism (although as insular speakers of a Germanic language they were at a disadvantage in learning Latin). At the same time, however, I want to suggest that the lack of evidence of vernacular prose and a vernacular teaching tradition in the Age of Bede might be an artefact of the low survival of manuscripts from that period. In considering the origins of vernacular medical literature (which appear to have predated the decline of Latin learning in the ninth century), I argue that practical usefulness to specialist physicians rather than ignorance of Latin was the motivating force. In examining the two vernacular computus texts of the Benedictine Reform period (Ælfric’s De temporibus anni and Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion), I am particularly concerned to argue that these works are in the vernacular because they were intended for the edification of parish priests, and that they tell us nothing about the Latin literacy and learning of their authors or the general standard of Latin literacy and learning in Anglo-Saxon monasteries. I also suggest alternative ways of identifying the milieu of Benedictine Reform manuscripts that have been regarded as evidence of a low level of Latin literacy even among monks at reformed monasteries. Finally, I survey the unexpected persistence and vitality of the vernacular medical tradition, particularly arguing against the claim that it was only with the introduction of Latin manuscripts by Normans in the eleventh century that English medicine rejoined the European mainstream.
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