Preface

Summary

This book does not claim to be a comprehensive monograph on Ælfric's hagiographic writings. Indeed, the idea to write a book on the subject only occurred to me after I had finished what are now its first two chapters, which were commissioned for specific purposes and which are included here in a revised and updated form. When I was invited to contribute to a Festschrift for Don Scragg, my immediate reaction was that a piece dealing with saints might be appropriately presented to a scholar who had devoted a considerable amount of his working life to saints' uitae and homilies. In the course of my previous work on the intellectual foundations of the English Benedictine reform I had become convinced that the most lavish book which was produced during Ælfric's lifetime, the Benedictional of his master Æthelwold, had interacted with various kinds of contemporary intellectual activities such as defining the essence of kingship or translating Christian key terms into the vernacular. I therefore proposed to explore possible relationships between the texts and the iconography of the Benedictional and the formation of Ælfric's sanctorale, that is, his selection of the saints to be represented in his three great cycles of Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints. As a result, the present chapter 1 took shape, in which a possible influence of the Benedictional is reviewed in the context of other factors which may have contributed to the formation of Ælfric's sanctorale.