THE ALFREDIAN CORPUS includes the Old English translations commissioned or completed by Alfred the Great in his mission of cultural, religious, and educational reform in the latter half of the ninth century. In recent years, it has become clear that one text in the corpus – the Dialogues, understood to be translated from Gregory the Great's Latin Dialogi into Old English by Bishop Wærferth of Worcester – suffers from a lack of scholarly attention. The recent discovery of a set of printer's proofs from Heinrich Krebs's never-completed and never-published 1878 edition of this Old English text may enable further study into the missed opportunities and watershed moments that led to the Dialogues’ later reception as inconsequential for scholarly research.

Few have taken notice of the Dialogues’ sorry state, but its value is championed especially by David Johnson, whose vita tells the story of his dedication to the text; presentations, chapters, and articles have all been useful venues for proclaiming the value of the work on linguistic, literary, and historical grounds. He has considered possible audiences for the Dialogues, highlighting the work's importance in the circles of King Alfred and Ælfric, and placed Wærferth's translation of Gregory the Great's Dialogi alongside Bede's Old English Historia Ecclesiastica to review and revise connections between these translations and Alfred's program. Most recently, Johnson has tracked reception of passages on divine justice by analyzing the Otho C.i manuscript of the Dialogues’ pattern of later punctuation emendations, thought to have been added by the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, the thirteenth-century scribe and prolific glosser of Old English texts in both Middle English and Latin. Johnson went so far as to work with his son, Ian Johnson, to develop a program that allows for automated tracking of these haphazardly sketched marginal and interlinear additions, and his ‘Tremulator’ (not yet available for public use) allows him to quickly recognize and analyse patterns in the Tremulous Hand of Worcester's textual interventions.

In his analytical work, Johnson exhorts other scholars not to forget the Dialogues. As is often the case with ‘many didactic texts’, he warns, ‘its historical relevance in the successive periods of its copying has yet to be interpreted and appreciated fully’. But nowhere is he more explicit about this call than in ‘Why Ditch the Dialogues?