political sphere also, for under Æthelberht the earliest
written collection of Anglo-Saxon laws was produced.
Augustine is recorded as having astonishing success
in winning converts; by Christmas 597, shortly after he
had received episcopal consecration, 10,000 are reputed
to have been baptized. Surviving correspondence reveals
that he sought and received guidance from Gregory on
the organization, rites, and practices of the infant church.
Particularly notable is Gregory’s advice that pagan
temples not be destroyed but purifi ed and rededicated
to Christian service. Augustine did not manage to real-
ize Gregory’s ideals for the organization of an English
church in northern and southern provinces, each with an
archbishop and twelve bishops. He also failed to obtain
the British (Celtic) church’s recognition of his authority
and their help in converting the English. Augustine’s
mission affected only the southeast of England, and the
diffi culties that beset the new church following the death
of Æthelberht (in 6l6?) underline the extent to which the
early successes had depended on the king’s favor. But
then Augustine did not have many years in which to
work; he died somewhere between 604 and 609.
See also Bede the Venerable; Gregory I, Pope;
Grosseteste, Robert; Joachim of FioreFurther Reading
Attenborough, F.L., ed. and trans. The Laws of the Earliest Eng-
lish Kings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922
Brooks, Nicholas. The Early History of the Church of Canter-
bury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066. Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1984
Chaplais, Pierre. “Who Introduced Charters into England? The
Case for Augustine.” In Prisca Munimenta: Studies in Archival
and Administrative History Presented to A.E.J. Hollaender,
ed. Felicity Ranger. London: University of London Press,
1973, pp. 88–107
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-
Saxon England. 3d ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1991
Wood, Ian. “The Mission of Augustine of Canterbury to the
English.” Speculum 69 (1994): 1–17
Wormald, Francis. The Miniatures in the Gospels of St. Augustine:
Corpus Christi College, MS. 286. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1948.
Richard GamesonAVERROËS, ABU ‘L-WAL ̄I D
MUHAMMAD B. A. HMAD B. RUSHD.
(1126-1198)
Commentator on Aristotle, philosopher, physician
and jurist; the greatest intellectual fi gure of Islamic
Iberia. Averroës (the name is a corrupt Judaeo-Latin
transcription of the Arabic name Ibn Rushd) was born
in Córdoba in 1126, into a family of eminent judges.
Little is known for certain about his early career, but heundoubtedly received the traditional Islamic education
in Arabic literature and linguistics, jurisprudence and
theology, together with instruction in medicine and phi-
losophy. Of the great Muslim sages of medieval Iberia,
Ibn Rushd can personally only have known Ibn Tufayl,.
who became his mentor at the court of the Almohad
caliph Abū Ya’qū b Yū suf. In an incident that Gauthier
has described as being “of capital importance not only
in the biography of Averroës, but in the development of
European philosophy” Ibn Tufayl introduced Averroës.
to the learned sovereign, who was deeply impressed by
his subject’s thorough knowledge of the opinions of the
“philosophers” (that is to say, the Arabic falasifa work-
ing in the tradition of Aristotle and the Neoplatonists).
Abū Ya ’ qū b subsequently called upon Averroës to make
Aristotle’s hitherto all-too-obscure writings more per-
spicuous by means of commentaries. As a result of the
caliph’s favors, he was appointed q ād.ī of Seville in
1169, chief q ād.ī of Córdoba in 1171, and physician to
the court of Marrakesh in 1182. The accession to the
cali phate, in 1184, of Abū Yaq’ū b’s son, Al-Man-
s ū r, did not at first change Ibn Rushd’s fortunes.
However, around 1194/5, Al-Mancū r found himself
obliged to dissociate himself from him, yielding to
the growing pressures of popular fundamentalism;
Averroës’ s philosophical writings were burned, and
the philosopher himself exiled to Lucena, southeast
of Córdoba. This sentence, so obviously out of tune
with the caliph’s own intellectual leanings, was soon
revoked, however and Averroës was allowed to return
to Marrakesh, where he died on 10 December 1198.
Averroës’s cardinal legacy are his commentaries on
Aristotle; they earned him the antonomastic title “the
Commentator” among the Latin schoolmen, who kept
relying on his translated commentaries after St. Thomas
Aquinas had tried to supplant them with his own work
and even after the great Averroistic crisis of the 1270s.
Signifi cantly, Aristotle’s works continued to be accom-
panied by the elucidations of his commentator in the
printed editions of the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Averroës composed two kinds of commentaries, “short”
and “middle,” on most of the writings of the Aristotelian
corpus accessible to him; in addition, we have “long”
commentaries” on the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De
Caelo, De Anima and Metaphysics. The short com-
mentaries or epitomai (in Arabic jaw mi‘) are manuals
of Aristotelian philosophy, paraphrases written early in
Averroës’s career, and show the commentator under the
infl uence of the Neoplatonizing Aristotelianism of his
predecessors Al-F ā r ābī and Ibn Sī n ā (Avicenna). In the
later middle commentaries (Arabic, talkhīs), more
detailed expositions of the philosopher’s thought, we
already witness a gradual emancipation from this older
tradition of interpretation and see Averroës working
toward an ideal of recovering Aristotle’s thought inAUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY