Vitae serve as reliquaries for the relics (saints) which they display textually.

In analytic terms, we are not skilled at discussing imitative works as imitations. Once we have noted a so-called model or source, we are only beginning to understand the model as a constitutive element of the literary structure, an element whose dynamic presence has to be accounted for. We have not been adept as literary critics at accounting for imitative successes as against the many failures, or at recognizing the variety of strategies imitative writers pursued.

Abstract

Historians have been baffled by the way Asser interlaces allusions to Einhard, echoes of his own words, and hagiographic clichés. Reading the Vita Alfredi as literature advances the current paradigm shift in our attitudes towards Asser, allowing us to appreciate the rhetoric and imagination that inform his imitatio of Einhard’s Vita Karoli. Thomas Greene on literary imitation, Walter Berschin on Carolingian life-writing, Christopher Ricks on the poetics of allusion, Erich Auerbach on prefiguration and fulfillment, David Howlett on chiasmus, and John Hollander on self-echoing illuminate the literary game Asser plays with clichés, echoes, and allusions. By condensing the modus of Alfred’s life into a childhood fable, a hagiographic figura, he invites us to see him succeed where Einhard failed.

Keywords: V. H. Galbraith, Hiberno-latin hagiography, Asser, Vita Alfredi, Einhard, Vita Karoli