Old English Lives of Saints, Volume III

"Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Ælfric (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. Ælfric 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."--

These volumes contain a series of texts written by the Anglo-Saxon monastic author Ælfric between ca. 994 and 998 CE and assembled by him into a book now commonly referred to as his Lives of Saints (LS). Ælfric describes it in the Old English preface as a "book about the passions and lives of those saints whom those who live in monasteries honor among themselves in their offices." He intended it to complement his two earlier series, now known as Catholic Homilies I and II (CH I and CH II), which had provided two collections for use in preaching to the laity and clergy throughout England. In composing this third collection and dedicating it to a powerful and very religious lay patron, Æthelweard, Ælfric was providing a series of texts that Æthelweard and other devout people, lay and religious, could use as spiritual reading or could listen to being read aloud.--