his disciples. Evangelical doctrine, therefore, forms the
cornerstone of Ælfric’s instructional mission, and, to that
end, Ælfric composed his fi rst major work, the Catholic
Homilies (also known as the Sermones catholici), which
appeared in two separate volumes, issued respectively in
989 and 992. Each set of the Catholic Homilies contains
a series of 40 sermons arranged according to the calen-
dar of the church year (beginning with Christmas and
ending with the second Sunday in Advent) and designed
for distribution among the priests of England as preach-
ing texts for alternate years of the liturgical calendar. The
texts provide instruction not only in such fundamental
topics as the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Com-
mandments, the plan for salvation, the story of Christ,
and other matters appropriate to the catechumenate, but
also in more theologically advanced matters involving
patristic exegesis and allied forms of allegorical and
typological interpretation of scriptural texts.
Viking attacks, political tumult, the approach of the
year 1000, and the disastrous reign of King Æthelred II
doubtless contributed to the millenarian concerns voiced
in Ælfric’s preface to the fi rst series of the Catholic
Homilies. Yet his writings show less alarm for death at
the hands of the Vikings or the coming end of the world
(which, Ælfric points out, though soon, might still be
distant by human measures of time) than for gedwyld,
“error.” Gedwyld for Ælfric meant more particularly
religious error, especially the kind spread in unorthodox,
apocryphal, or misleading religious writings, such as
the popular Vision of St. Pa u l or works prohibited by
the Gelasian Decretals, including narratives about the
Virgin’s birth or a certain Passio sancti Georgii that
featured fantastic accounts of St. George’s seven years
of torture, the fragmentation of his body, and his several
preliminary deaths and resuscitations.
The Catholic Homilies and later writings attempt
to provide sound spiritual instruction, free from error
and heresy, as weapons for the salvation of the English
nation. Ælfric marshals the best patristic authorities
available to him, and his corpus of writings offers an
epitome of ecclesiastical thought as transmitted through
the channels of Carolingian learning and the Benedictine
Reform. His translations include the works of Augus-
tine, Gregory the Great, Bede, Jerome, Smaragdus,
Isidore, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Cassiodorus, Sulpicius
Severus, a version of the Vitae patrum, Hilduin of St.
Denis, Abbo of Fleury, Donatus, Priscian, a treatise on
liturgy by Amalarius, and a host of other sources. Ælfric
turns to his patristic authorities, particularly Augustine,
Gregory, and Bede, for his exegetical homilies, which
compose the great bulk of his Catholic Homilies, some
55 or so homilies out of 80, and he uses these and other
sources for his other sermons, which include about sev-
enteen saints’ lives, expositions of the liturgy, and more
thematically diverse works that encompass such general
topics as creation and eschatological concerns.
Ælfric refers to the Catholic Homilies as a transla-
tion from Latin books, sometimes rendered literally but
sometimes paraphrased to capture the sense rather than
the wording of his source. Recent scholarship confi rms
Ælfric’s enormous debt to the homiliary of Paul the
Deacon, who edited and composed nearly 250 homilies
at the request of Charlemagne for use throughout the
Carolingian Empire. Yet those who closely scrutinize
Ælfric’s Latin sources now realize that he frequently
consults other authorities, evaluates differences, selec-
tively edits, confl ates, and condenses to avoid tedium,
amplifi es to explicate an obscurity, and sometimes so
deviates from his sources that his work approaches
originality. As Pope has observed, the “thought is scru-
pulously traditional yet fully digested and feelingly his
own” (1967: 150).
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ælfric’s fa-
mous Sermon on the Sacrifi ce on Easter Day (Sermo de
sacrifi cio in die Pascae, item xv in Catholic Homilies
II), the fi rst and most controversial text ever printed in
OE. Published in 1566 or 1567, Ælfric’s sermon argu-
ably marks the beginning of English studies, securing
for the study of the English language an importance
that had previously been accorded only to the classical
languages. Printed by Archbishop Matthew Parker as
ancient testimony of the continuity between the religious
beliefs of the Protestant reformers and the Anglo-Sax-
ons, particularly with regard to eucharistic teaching,
Ælfric’s sermon seemingly offered early evidence
against the “bodely presence” of Christ in the eucharist
or, as later Protestant theologians argued, against the
doctrine of transubstantiation.
Although Ælfric’s Easter homily raises a number of
doctrinal questions, the second set of Catholic Homilies
does not typically differ from the fi rst by showing a
keener interest in these matters of theological contro-
versy. Ælfric instead seems to shift emphasis away from
exegesis toward narrative. The second set of Catholic
Homilies, for example, contains far more narratives of
saints’ lives, the Bible is more often treated as a story
rather than as a text for analysis, and the narrative
form itself receives sharper dramatic emphasis through
Ælfric’s initial and sporadic experiments with rhythmi-
cal prose.
Ælfric sustains and strengthens these narrative and
stylistic impulses in his third major set of original
translations, his Lives of Saints, which also contains 40
sermons ordered according to the church calendar, now
predominantly cast in rhythmical prose. The set recounts
the lives and passions of those saints honored by monks
in their Latin services, but Ælfric’s English translations
make these lives available to a wider, presumably lay
audience, including his patron, Æthelweard, who com-
missioned the work. Ælfric treats Old Testament saintsÆLFRIC