Each of the entries below comments on a particular text section, and consists of three parts. The first aims to summarise the sources of each section and comment on the presumed composition; the second provides notes on specific passages and points of difficulty; the third gives a summary bibliography. Within the bibliography, items are ordered according to the extent to which they comment on the entire text section: more wide-ranging items are listed first, and are followed by items commenting on more detailed aspects. The term ‘source’ is used to refer to texts which the martyrologist could have accessed directly or indirectly (in the latter case as an antecedent source, that is, excerpted or quoted from an otherwise unidentified intermediary text).

The notes below are not intended to provide comprehensive biographical information on the saints themselves; this can be found in the standard dictionaries of saints, for example Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, John and Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, or easily accessible electronic tools, such as the Catholic Encyclopedia. More detailed biographical, literary and historical information on each saint can also be found in Whatley, ‘Acta Sanctorum’, Blair, ‘A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Saints’, and Caraffa, ed., Bibliotheca Sanctorum. Overlap between the feasts of the Old English Martyrology and other martyrologes and Anglo-Saxon calendars is presented in user-friendly tables in Kotzor, I, 290–300 and 302–11, together with the relevant bibliographical details of such comparative material.