Old English Lives of Saints, Volume I

Among his several works, Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk Aelfric (ca. 955-1010), Abbot of Eynsham wrote a series of lives of saints for clergy to use in their homilies for laity or other clerics. This edition has the Old English original with facing pages of modern English translation. Clayton and Mullins also include notes on the language, on the content, and on the translation. This first edition contains the Nativity of Christ, Saint Eugenia, Saint Basil, Saints Julian and Basilissa, Saint Sebastian, Saint Maur, Saint Agnes and Saints Constantia and Gallicanus, Saint Agatha and Saint Lucy, the Chair of Saint Peter the Apostle, and the Forty Soldiers. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric, portrays an array of saints—including virgin martyrs, kings, soldiers, and bishops—whose examples modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance at a turbulent time when England was under severe Viking attack.
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.