The scholar-monk Walahfrid Strabo was born about 809 in Alemannia in the south-west region of Germany (Swabia). His first name is sometimes spelled Walafrid. Strabo is a personal epithet meaning “Squinter” and wasn’t carried as a family name.
When Walahfrid was about eight years old, his family placed him as an oblate in the Benedictine Abbey at Reichenau, an island in the lower branch of Lake Constance in central Europe. Wettin, Walahfrid’s tutor, and Grimald, the head of the abbey school at Reichenau, recognized Walahfrid to be a brilliant student. In 826, Walahfrid was sent from Reichenau to the monastery at Fulda to further his learning under the erudite and eminent scholar Hrabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda.
Walahfrid’s Visio Wettini {Vision of Wettin} is an important dream-vision precursor to Dante’s Commedia. Walahfrid’s On the Cultivation of Gardens {De cultura hortorum} is a highly sophisticated masterpiece of Christian incarnational understanding. Walahfrid was a brilliant medieval Latin poet filled with love for God, men, and all of creation.
Sedulius’s immodest fifth-century Paschale carmen apparently influenced Walahfrid’s humble ninth-century masterpiece of Christian literary gardening. … Read the post Walahfrid followed Sedulius in Christian literary gardening
While Roman Empress Messalina is famed for her sexuality, Charlemagne’s peer Oliver outdid her with a Byzantine princess in the Pilgrimage of Charlemagne. … Read the post Charlemagne’s peer Oliver outdid Emperor Claudius’s wife Messalina
Writing with love for men, Walahfrid in an epic Christian garden poem used the rose and lily to reject love & war in Gallus’s love elegy and classical epic. … Read the post Walahfrid’s rural rose & lily respond to love and war in Roman elegy
Cuckolding under the fundamental gender inequality devalues fatherhood relative to motherhood. Medieval poetry of Walahfrid and Alcuin upheld fatherhood. … Read the post motherhood, fatherhood, and fundamental gender inequality
Hrabanus’s In honorem sanctae crucis depicts in carmen figuratum Hebrew scripture’s seminal blessing: men can make children as numerous as stars of heaven. … Read the post men’s blessing of seminal creativity as numerous as stars of Heaven