Bède dans les Lettres d’Alcuin : de la source à l’Exemplum

Abstract

In the some three hundred letters of Alcuin’s correspondence there are several explicit references to Bede. In this short study, the author would like to examine how the image of Bede is construed by the learned Anglo-Saxon cleric, chief educator of the Frankish world. The paper starts with a short survey of the ways Bede’s name is inserted in the text. The author then proceeds to show how bede, both historical persona and, as auctor, a source for epistolary writing, becomes both an exemplum and an emblematic figure for Alcuin the letter-writer.