Anglo-Latin literature


Anglo-Latin literature consists of works originally written in Latin and produced in England or other English-speaking parts of Britain and Ireland. It was written in Medieval Latin, which differs from the earlier Classical Latin and Late Latin.

Authors and style

Chroniclers such as Bede, with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, and Gildas, with his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, were figures in the development of indigenous Latin literature, mostly ecclesiastical, in the centuries following the withdrawal of the Roman Empire around the year 410.
The Vita Sancti Cuthberti is the first piece of Northumbrian Latin writing and the earliest piece of English Latin hagiography. The Historia Brittonum composed in the 9th century is traditionally ascribed to Nennius. It is the earliest source which presents King Arthur as a historical figure, and is the source of several stories which were repeated and amplified by later authors.
In the 10th century the hermeneutic style became dominant, but post-Norman Conquest writers such as William of Malmesbury condemned it as barbarous.

Early medieval

Anglo-Norman era

Plantagenet era

Modern literature