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.
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. Liuzza’s translation is accurate and readable and in the process broadly recreates the style of Ælfric. What this volume has made so appealingly available is a tenth-century primer in Christian learning. 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.” 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.
Jonathan Wilcox
The Medieval Review
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