As our above study of his chronology suggests, Ælfric's corpus is nothing if not complex. So is the history of his corpus in print. Ælfric himself habitually revised, reissued, and repurposed his own writings. For centuries after – against his express wishes – others included Ælfrician selections in heterogeneous collections or incorporated extracts into anonymous composite works. From Elizabethan England to the present age, moreover, scholars have published editions of his material – much of which is out of print, languishes in dissertations, overlooks manuscript witnesses, fails to recognize multiple authorial originals, or dismisses as illegitimate compilations only possibly assembled by Ælfric or only partially written by him at all. Building on the overviews of Clemoes and Pope, the following seeks to capture our current understanding of Ælfric's canon and to untangle the dizzying array of editions that preserve it.

One caution: it should come as no surprise given the complexity of the evidence that when speaking of authorship there are gradations of doubt. Was Ælfric completely responsible for a given form of a text? Even taking differences between medieval and modern notions of ‘originality’ as a given, previous scholarship has (understandably) tended to seek a binary answer to this question. Take, for example, the controversy around De sancta uirginitate [1.6.1.2.2; UK 7], a text made up entirely of material composed by Ælfric: if Ælfric did not himself assemble the component passages, the assumption goes, the text should not be counted in his canon. Arguably, however, even anonymous composite homilies drawing on Ælfric and other authors are important witnesses to Ælfrician textual history. Future accounts of canon contents may well include such compositions. For the present, our list is more conservative, being restricted to items that were at least possibly composed by Ælfric. Even so, it calls us to reconsider and perhaps redefine what makes a text ‘Ælfrician’, for the boundaries are anything but clear-cut.