Latin Literature
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.
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.
Adomnán's most important work is the Vita Columbae, a hagiography of Columba, and the most important surviving work written in early medieval Scotland. It is a vital source for knowledge of the Picts, as well as an insight into the life of Iona Abbey and the early medieval Gaelic monk. The vita of Columba contains a story that has been interpreted as the first reference to the Loch Ness Monster.
Written just after or possibly contemporarily with Adomnán's Vita Columbae, the Vita Sancti Cuthberti is the first piece of Northumbrian Latin writing and the earliest piece of English Latin hagiography.
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“He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
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To compound the imagination’s Latin with
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—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man’s family.”
—J.M. (John Millington)