Aelfric – författare

This is the third and final volume in the Early English Text Society's edition of AElfric's Catholic Homilies, a set of preaching texts in two series composed in Old English around 900 for the use of preachers throughout England. AElfric (monk of Winchester, and then Cerne Abbas, and the first abbot of Eynsham) was one of the leading scholars of his time and the foremost prose stylist of the Anglo-Saxon period.The Catholic Homilies represent the longest extant text in Old English, and are AElfric's most important work. The text of the Second Series, edited by M. R. Godden, was published in 1979, and the text of the Fisrt Series, edited by Peter Clemoes, in 1997; both volumes included an analysis of manuscripts and a detailed account of the textual history.This final volume gives an account of the origin, function, and dating of the Catholic Homilies and their Latin sources; a detailed commentary on all eighty homilies; and a glossary of all words occurring in the text.

A contemporary edition and translation of one of the great monuments of Old English literary and religious culture.The homilies of the monk Ælfric, written in the last decade of the tenth century, offer some of the most important prose writing in Old English. They convey contemporary Christian doctrine shaped during a period of monastic reform. Taken together, the homilies offer a distillation of the spiritual inheritance of the English Church before the Norman Conquest. They cover a broad range of topics, from biblical exegesis to saints’ lives to general Christian history, with a strong focus on the gospel reading at Mass, explained in language that laypeople could understand. Ælfric is famous for his lucid prose, which he later developed into a rhythmical and alliterative style that has often been likened to verse.In the second series of Catholic Homilies, Ælfric continues his project with an additional forty sermons, sometimes multiple for the same occasion, and relies again on the works of Church Fathers such as Augustine, Gregory, and Bede. This is the first complete translation of the Catholic Homilies since 1844, presented alongside the newly edited Old English text.

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in his distinctive alliterative prose, portrays an array of saints—including virgin martyrs, married virgins, aristocrats, kings, soldiers, and bishops—for a late Anglo-Saxon audience. At a turbulent time when England was under increasingly severe Viking attack, the examples of these saints modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance. The Lives also covers topics as diverse as the four kinds of war, the three orders of society, and whether the unjust can be exempt from eternal punishment. Aelfric intended this series to complement his Catholic Homilies, two important and widely disseminated collections used for preaching to lay people and clergy. The translation is presented alongside a new edition of Lives of Saints, for which all extant manuscripts have been collated afresh.