Israel the Grammarian

Israel was an accomplished poet, a disciple of the ninth-century Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena and one of the few Western scholars of his time to understand Greek.

The Carolingian Empire collapsed in the late ninth century, while the tenth is seen as a period of decline, described as the "Age of Iron" by a Frankish Council in 909.

This negative picture of the period is increasingly challenged by historians; in Michael Wood's view "the first half of the tenth century saw many remarkable and formative developments that would shape European culture and history.

He embarked on a programme of revival, bringing in scholars from Continental Europe, Wales and Mercia, and himself translated works he considered important from Latin to the vernacular.

His grandson, Æthelstan, carried on the work, inviting foreign scholars such as Israel to England, and appointing a number of continental clerics as bishops.

"[9] He argues that the bishop of Bangor in County Down, Dub Innse, described Israel as a "Roman scholar", and that he therefore does not appear to have recognised him as a fellow Irishman.

[19] In Foot's view: Israel was a practitioner of the "hermeneutic style" of Latin, characterised by long, convoluted sentences and a predilection for rare words and neologisms.

[21] Hermeneutic Latin was to become the dominant style of the English Benedictine reform movement of the later tenth century, and Israel may have been an early mentor of one of its leaders, Æthelwold, at Æthelstan's court in the 930s.

[22] The Latin texts which Israel brought to Æthelstan's court were influenced by Irish writers, and the historian Jane Stevenson sees them as contributing a Hiberno-Latin element to the hermeneutic style in England.

[26] Between 948 and 950 he may have held a bishopric in Aachen, where he debated Christian ideas about the Trinity with a Jewish intellectual called Salomon, probably the Byzantine ambassador of that name.

[29][d] Mechthild Gretsch describes Israel as "one of the most learned men in Europe",[31] and Lapidge says that he was "an accomplished grammarian and poet, and one of the few scholars of his time to have first-hand knowledge of Greek".