It is safe to assume that the original draft of this, afterwards maybe enlarged by his pupil and copyist, Ælfric Bata, was by Ælfric, and represents what his own scholar days were like.Ī third series of homilies, the Lives of the Saints ( hagiography), dates from 996 to 997. Finally, his Colloquy was intended to help students to learn how to speak Latin through a conversation manual. In his glossary the words are not in alphabetical order, but grouped by topics. In his Grammar, he translated the Latin grammar into English, creating what is considered the first vernacular Latin grammar in medieval Europe. Īfter the two series of homilies, he wrote three works to help students learn Latin – the Grammar, the Glossary and the Colloquy. Ælfric of Eynsham also denied the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. ii.262 seq.) was appealed to by the Protestant Reformation writers as a proof that the early English church did not hold the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. Ælfric's teaching on the Eucharist in the Canons and in the Sermo de sacrificio in die pascae (ibid. The first series of forty homilies is devoted to plain and direct exposition of the chief events of the Christian year the second deals more fully with church doctrine and history. He may also have translated the Pseudo-Basilian Admonition to a Spiritual Son. John Earle ( Anglo-Saxon Literature, 1884) thinks he aimed at correcting the apocryphal, and to modern ideas superstitious, teaching of the earlier Blickling Homilies. In the preface to the first volume he regrets that, except for Alfred's translations, Englishmen had no means of learning the true doctrine as expounded by the Latin fathers. (The series were edited by Benjamin Thorpe and published in 1844–1846 for the Ælfric Society and edited more recently by Malcolm Godden and Peter Clemoes for the Early English Text Society.) The Latin preface to the first series enumerates some of Ælfric's authorities, the chief of whom was Gregory the Great, but the short list by no means exhausts the authors whom he consulted. It was at Cerne, and partly at the desire, it appears, of Æthelweard, that he planned the two series of his English homilies, compiled from the Christian fathers, and dedicated to Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury from 990 to 994. Æthelmaer and his father Æthelweard were both enlightened patrons of learning, and became Ælfric's faithful friends. This date (987) is one of only two certain dates we have for Ælfric, who was then in priest's orders. Ælfric no doubt gained some reputation as a scholar at Winchester, for when, in 987, the abbey of Cerne (at Cerne Abbas in Dorset) was finished, he was sent by Bishop Ælfheah ( Alphege), Æthelwold's successor, at the request of the chief benefactor of the abbey, the ealdorman Æthelmær the Stout, to teach the Benedictine monks there. He seems to have actually taken part in the teaching activities of the abbey. Æthelwold had carried on the tradition of Dunstan in his government of the abbey of Abingdon, then in Berkshire, and at Winchester he continued his strenuous support for the English Benedictine Reform. Ælfric was educated in the Benedictine Old Minster at Winchester under Saint Æthelwold, who was bishop there from 963 to 984. Another copy of the text, without lavish illustrations but including a translation of the Book of Judges, is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. Ælfric was responsible for the preface to Genesis as well as some of its translations. The Tower of Babel, from an illustrated English manuscript (11th century) in the British Library, containing some Latin excerpts from the Hexateuch.
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