The writings of Aldhelm of Malmesbury (c. 639–709) provide some of the earliest evidence for hagiographical activity in Anglo-Saxon England. Preceding his more famous contemporary, the Venerable Bede, by a generation, he is thought to have been born in Wessex within a decade of the conversion of that region to Christianity, quite possibly into the West Saxon royal family that played such an instrumental role in the promotion of the new faith. He enjoyed a career that brought him into contact with some of the most prominent churchmen of his day and bore witness to some of the most important developments of the early English Church. Aldhelm has been justly described as the first English man of letters: he was the author of two treatises on the Latin hexameter, composed a series of Enigmata that would influence later writers in both Latin and Old English, wrote a collection of poems to commemorate the dedication of churches, and compiled a large composite work addressed to King Aldfrith of Northumbria known as the Epistola ad Acircium. Aldhelm's fame, however, rests chiefly upon his opus geminatum (‘twinned work’), the De Virginitate, the only one of Aldhelm's works to be described in any detail in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica: