Ælfric of Eynsham (Old English: Ælfrīc; Latin: Alfricus, Elphricus; c. 955 – c. 1010) was an English abbot and a student of Æthelwold of Winchester, and a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres of Christian literature. He is also known variously as Ælfric the Grammarian (Alfricus Grammaticus), Ælfric of Cerne, and Ælfric the Homilist. In the view of Peter Hunter Blair, he was "a man comparable both in the quantity of his writings and in the quality of his mind even with Bede himself." According to Claudio Leonardi, he "represented the highest pinnacle of Benedictine reform and Anglo-Saxon literature".
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👉 Ælfric of Eynsham in the context of Judith (homily)
Judith is a homily written by abbot Ælfric of Eynsham around the year 1000. It is extant in two manuscripts, a fairly complete version being found in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 303, and fragments in British Library MS Cotton Otho B.x, which came from the Cotton Library.
The homily is written in Old English alliterative prose. It is 452 verses long. The story paraphrases the Biblical original closely. Ælfric ends the homily with a detailed exegetical interpretation of the story, which he addresses to nuns.
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Ælfric of Eynsham in the context of Judith (poem)
Judith is an Old English narrative poem describing the beheading of Assyrian general Holofernes by Israelite Judith of Bethulia. Found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, it is one of many retellings of the Holofernes–Judith tale as it was found in the Book of Judith, a story still present in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian bibles but considered apocryphal by Protestants. There is one other extant version in Old English; Ælfric of Eynsham, the late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer, wrote a homily (in prose) of the tale.
Ælfric of Eynsham in the context of Old English Hexateuch
The Old English Hexateuch, or Aelfric Paraphrase, is the collaborative project of the late Anglo-Saxon period that translated the six books of the Hexateuch into Old English, presumably under the editorship of Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham (d. c. 1010). It is the first English vernacular translation of the first six books of the Old Testament, i.e. the five books of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and Joshua. It was probably made for use by lay people.
The translation is known in seven manuscripts, most of which are fragmentary. The best-known of those is a richly illuminated manuscript in the British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv (from which the illustrations on this page are taken). Another copy of the text, without lavish illustrations but including a translation of the Book of Judges (hence also called the Old English Heptateuch), is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 509.