Editing Aldhelm (section)

===Modern reputation===
Modern historians have contrasting views of his writings. [[Peter Hunter Blair]] compares him unfavourably to Bede: "In the mind of his older contemporary, Aldhelm, learning of equal depth produced little more than an extravagant form of intellectual curiosity...Like Bede he drank deeply from the streams of Irish and Mediterranean scholarship, but their waters produced in him a state of intellectual intoxication which delighted its beholders, but which left little to posterity."{{sfn|Hunter Blair|2003|p=326}} However, [[Michael Lapidge]] praises his immense learning, observing that his knowledge of Latin texts is greater than any other pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon writer, and that "the originality and importance of his corpus of Latin writings well justifies his status as the first English man of letters".{{sfn|Lapidge|2004}}