Alcuin of York c. 735 – 804

Alcuin of York was an English Anglo-Saxon scholar, deacon, poet, and the principal intellectual adviser of the emperor Charlemagne. After many years as master of the cathedral school at York, he was invited in the 780s to lead the palace school at Aachen and the wider Carolingian renaissance of letters, liturgy, and Christian learning. He produced textbooks in grammar, logic, rhetoric, and theology that shaped medieval education for centuries, advised Charlemagne on questions of doctrine and statecraft, and ended his life as abbot of Saint Martin of Tours. His letters preserve an extraordinary record of early medieval learning.