ABSTRACT
Ælfric (c. 950-1010) was a Benedictine monk and then in 1005 the abbot of Eynsham outside Oxford. Having been educated at Winchester as a student of Bishop Æthelwold in the 960s and 970s, he became the most prolifi c and versatile author of the whole period. His surviving works include translations of the Bible, stories of saints, a treatise on astronomy, a Latin grammar, texts on the duties of monks and priests, an assortment of letters, and about 130 sermons. The sermons consist of two series of 40 homilies each, Catholic Homilies (Sermones Catholici) I and II, which he completed in 995, as well as The Lives of Saints which followed on from there. There are also many Supplementary Homilies ascribed to Ælfric, whose prose is marked out from that of other homilists for a lively and attractive style in which complex ideas are expressed with remarkable clarity. Ælfric modelled his style consciously on Latin literature so as to bring such longdeveloped rhetorical techniques of this as repetition and parallelism into the English language. In his later work he went further, this time employing the alliteration of Old English poetry in tandem with the rhythms of ordinary English speech. It was still prose, nor did it baffl e its audiences with the traditional vocabulary of Old English verse, but Ælfric now wrote sentences that could be set out as lines of poetry.
