The Collectio Canonum Hibernensis and the Literature of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Reform

Abstract

The Collectio Canonum Hibernensis is an eighth-century Hiberno-Latin compilation of patristic florilegia that was brought to England by Breton ecclesiastics and employed by Anglo-Saxon reformers as a canonical resource. This article addresses the Hibernensis as an Irish product that was subsumed into the corpus of continental regulatory materials which then circulated throughout the Anglo-Saxon centers and assisted in the articulation of the ideological framework for the English Benedictine Reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This discussion delineates the ways in which the Hibernensis was transmitted throughout the English centers, in company with Anglo-Saxon and continental regulatory materials alike (including the Amalarian liber officialis, the Regularis Concordia and Wulfstan’s Canon Law Collection), and shows that the Hiberno-Latin text was employed in the regulatory scholarship of Oda of Canterbury (the Constitutiones), AElfric of Eynsham (the Letter to Brother Edward), and Wulfstan of York ...