In another hugely useful volume from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Roy M. Liuzza makes Ælfric’s most important work widely accessible in an edition and translation that is informative, economical, and supremely usable. A short and efficient introduction situates Ælfric and his works, observes how the homilies were intended for lay people and clerics in the context of the English tenth-century monastic reform, unpacks Ælfric’s interpretive method, and discusses Ælfric’s sources, the likely audience, and the process of circulation of these works. Next come the forty homilies themselves, with the Old English on the verso pages and Liuzza’s translation on the recto. The homilies are followed by a Note on the Text, giving brief accounts of each of the twenty-three manuscripts containing the First Series of Catholic Homilies; Notes to the Text, where Liuzza records scribal corrections within his chosen manuscript and the most substantial variants from other manuscripts; and Notes to the Translation, which provide condensed commentary on the content of the homilies, keyed to homily and paragraph number of the edition. The whole volume makes superb use of the best scholarship on Ælfric to shape an efficient and appealing presentation of the first homiletic cycle created by the most prolific writer of Old English.

The Old English text here is drawn from Cambridge University Library MS, Gg. 3. 28 (MS siglum K), which will be familiar as the base text for the nineteenth-century edition by Benjamin Thorpe but differs from the twentieth-century scholarly edition for the Early English Text Society by Peter Clemoes, who based his text on Ælfric’s earliest surviving draft of the homilies, British Library MS, Royal 7 C. xii (MS A). [1] Liuzza’s choice makes sense for the present edition as MS K includes Ælfric’s prefaces and textual notes, duly included here, and provides the only complete manuscript of the second series of Catholic Homilies, which is promised for a subsequent volume. The Old English text is presented using modern print conventions of word division and punctuation and without cluttering the page by marking abbreviations or accents. This makes for a clean format that is easy to read, unlike the Clemoes 1997 edition, which contains a wealth of information for specialist scholars but is hard to use as a reading text. Liuzza’s translations are crisp and readable and a useful updating of the only previously available translation, that contained in Thorpe’s 1844 edition and still widely used. Liuzza’s commentaries on the homilies (in the Notes to the Translation) are judicious in the extreme, masterfully summarizing a wealth of information on sources and content to provide a crisp and selective account of each of the forty homilies in the cycle (often drawing from the commentary volume by Malcolm Godden, published by EETS in 2000, [2] which will remain a crucial reference point for further study). The resulting volume as a whole makes Ælfric’s first series of Catholic Homilies newly accessible and readable in both the original and in translation for any audience with an interest in Old English literature.

The work that is thereby revealed is a synthesis of basic Christian doctrine as perceived by a well-read late-tenth-century monk and preacher. Aided by Liuzza’s masterful work, a reader here will get to see Ælfric’s sense of appropriate doctrine, garnered from an array of patristic and homiletic reading and synthesized into basic doctrinal explanations appropriate to share with a broad sweep of English society. The first homily for a specific occasion is CH I.2, for the Nativity of the Lord. The homily retells the gospel story of the birth of Christ and the visit of the shepherds and explains how these events symbolize the process of Christian redemption. Liuzza’s explanatory note elucidates Ælfric’s method in this and many subsequent pieces. After pointing to the sources, namely the gospel reading for the celebration of mass on Christmas Day, Luke 2:1-20, and homilies by Bede and Gregory, Liuzza observes: “As is usual in his homilies, Ælfric rarely follows one source in detail for more than a few lines, but freely edits, abridges, combines, and adds his own thoughts and interpretation. As is also usual, Ælfric is less interested in historical explanation than in allegorical interpretation” (811).

That very process of interpretation is sometimes explicated by Ælfric as when, discussing the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand in the homily for Mid-Lent Sunday (CH I.12), he insists miracles call for more than just wonder:

Þis wundor is swiðe micel, and deop on getacnungum. Oft

gehwa gesihð fægre stafas awritene; þonne herað he ðone

writere and þa stafas, and nat hwæt hi mænað. Se ðe cann

ðæra stafa gescead, he herað heora fægernysse and ræd þa

stafas, and understent hwæt hi gemænað. On oðre wisan we

sceawiað metinge, and on oðre wisan stafas. Ne gæð na mare

to metinge buton þæt þu hit geseo and herige; nis na genoh

þæt þu stafas sceawige buton ðu hi eac ræde and þæt andgit

understande. Swa is eac on ðam wundre þe God worhte mid

þam fif hlafum--ne bið na genoh þæt we þæs tacnes wundrian,

oþþe þurh þæt God herian, buton we eac þæt gastlice andgit

understandon (CH I.12, §6, 222).

This miracle is very great, and deep in its significance. Often

someone sees fair letters written; then he praises the writer and

the letters, and does not know what they mean. He who

understands the meaning of the letters praises their beauty

and reads the letters, and understands what they mean. We

look at a picture one way, and at letters another. For a picture

you need do no more than see it and praise it; it is not enough

to look at letters unless you also read them and understand their

meaning. So it is with the miracle which God worked with the

five loaves--it is not enough that we wonder at the sign, or praise

God for it, without also understanding its spiritual sense (223).

The image here is adapted from Augustine, and its use by Ælfric tantalizingly hints at expectations of literacy in tenth-century England. Liuzza’s translation is accurate and readable and in the process broadly recreates the style of Ælfric. While we will have to wait until the second series for Ælfric’s more elaborate rhetorical style, usually characterized as rhythmical prose, even in this first series there are strong hints of artistry in Ælfric’s prose rhythms and a love of word play and mellifluous sound in the chiming of key words. This passage is enveloped by the favorite Ælfrician concept of getacnung (signification or symbolism as well as Liuzza’s chosen “significance”), picked up with the echoing tacen (“sign”) at the end, and the key idea of wundor (appropriately translated by Liuzza as “miracle,” but cognate with Modern English “wonder” and so carrying somewhat greater resonances), picked up at the end with the verb that derives from the noun but is seen as an inadequate response, wundrian (“wonder”). The wundor... micel (“great...miracle”) of the opening statement gently sets up alliterative expectations for some of the key terms that get repeated in modified forms: awritene… writere… wisan… wisan… wundre… worhte… wundrian; mænað… gemænað… metinge… mare… metinge, mostly captured in Liuzza’s “written... writer… way... miracle... worked... wonder; mean... mean... picture... picture... more.” The oft-repeated stafas (“letters”) usefully alliterates in the Old English with the climactic understande… understandon (“understand”) in a way that Modern English doesn’t replicate. Elsewhere in his writings, in the preface to his translation of Genesis, Ælfric observes that different languages have different ways and this forces even a translator who wants to stay close to the source to adapt to the expectations of the target language. Liuzza does this very well, albeit within the inevitable constraints such adaptation entails. Fortunately, the format of the series provides a reader with the best of both worlds by giving easy access to both the original Old English and the Modern English translation.

What this volume has made so appealingly available is a tenth-century primer in Christian learning. The story that is told is a predictable one, of course: the basic Christian story, centered on the narrative of the gospels, parceled out across preaching occasions through the liturgical year, and interleaved with the stories of selected important saints. While this version has been crafted by a single author working in the small monastery of Cerne Abbas, Dorset, in the late tenth century, its significance is amplified by the evidence of massive circulation. The multiple manuscripts surviving or inferable suggest that versions of this series of homilies were distributed to preachers of the day, who would share these very words to the broader public, with such wide scope that these words probably reached across the whole of Æthelred’s kingdom, heard by more English speakers than any other text that survives. If King Alfred famously initiated the translation into English of those books most necessary for all people to know, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies may show us precisely what people in tenth- and eleventh-century England did know, or at least were told across the course of a year.

In all of this, as Liuzza observes, Ælfric’s special contribution is to present this story and the consequent moral doctrine through “a breadth of learning” and with “distinctive clarity and care” (ix). These are qualities which Liuzza has now brought to Ælfric’s first and major work, making a voice that once sounded loudly in tenth- and eleventh-century England broadly accessible to a twenty-first century audience.

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1. Benjamin Thorpe, ed. and trans., The Sermones Catholici, or Homilies of Ælfric: In the Original Anglo-Saxon, with an English Version, 2 vols. (London: Ælfric Society, 1844-1846); Peter Clemoes, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series; Text, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

2. Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary, and Glossary, EETS s.s. 18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).