1 - Intellectual Priorities, Individuals, and Intra-Communal Veneration

Summary

Ælfric humbly greets ealdorman Æthelweard, and I say to you, beloved man, that I have now gathered in this book the passions of those saints that it was in my power to translate into English… that you never had in your language before… We translated, in the two earlier books, the passions and lives of those saints that the English people honour with feast days; now it has seemed fitting to us to compose this book about the passions and lives of those saints whom [only] those who live in monasteries honour among themselves in their offices.

– Ælfric, Old English Preface to the Lives of the Saints

SO WROTE Ælfric of Cerne and Eynsham in his Old English preface to the Lives of the Saints. He expressed the same sentiment in his Latin preface, too. ‘It has pleased us in this little book to arrange also the passions or lives of those saints whom not the general public but the monks honour with their offices’. In claiming that the specific saints in Lives of the Saints were not venerated by groups outside of monasteries in late tenth-century England, Ælfric seems to have succumbed to the scholarly temptation to overstate the novelty of his contribution. Many of the saints and feast days featured in Lives of the Saints were already the subject of substantial lay interest by the time Ælfric was writing in the 990s: these include Christmas, St Martin, St Swithun, and St Æthelthryth. Nevertheless, Ælfric was probably right that some forms of veneration were primarily practiced by monks and nuns, either individually or intra-communally. Monks and nuns could engage in individual prayer. Their days were punctuated by readings in intra-communal settings, from the martyrology read during chapter meetings, to excerpts from hagiography read during mealtimes and Night Offices. Æthelwold's monks and nuns also seem to have used hagiographies as teaching tools in the schools attached to Æthelwold's houses. Other scholarly works, such as the circle's elaborate poems, may also have been created with an intra-communal audience of other monks and nuns in mind, as will be discussed below. Of course, the venues for intra-communal veneration were not always sealed off from witnesses from outside the community.