If one study may be said to have defined modern conceptions of Ælfric's career, it might well be Peter Clemoes’ exposition of ‘The Chronology of Ælfric's Works’. Originally published in 1959, reprinted as an Old English Newsletter Subsidia volume in 1980, and published again as part of Paul Szarmach's 2000 collection of readings on Old English Prose, the ‘Chronology’ draws on Clemoes’ extensive analysis of Ælfrician manuscripts to achieve two watersheds in Anglo-Saxon scholarship: defining the contents of Ælfric's canon and placing them in broad chronological order. Remarkably, despite the decades that have passed since its appearance, this monolithic study as a whole remains largely unchallenged, continuing to influence students and editors of Ælfric's work. As Joyce Hill states:

Over the years, however, like sharks worrying a vast carcass, scholars have questioned Clemoes’ conclusions regarding authorship and dates piecemeal, with little effort being made either to account for all challenges proposed or to assess their implications for Clemoes’ theory as a whole. Here, we will consider controversies surrounding a series of key dates that have consequence for major portions of Ælfric's corpus, map those dates onto the development of the Catholic Homilies in detail, and then set forth a comprehensive list of Ælfric's works in updated chronological order, paving the way for a detailed discussion of each of Ælfric's works and an examination of the manuscripts in which various versions of them are preserved. While the data still permit nothing near certainty, and disagreement and doubt remain, scholarship since Clemoes offers us nonetheless a remarkably coherent portrait of Ælfric's endeavours.