Many Old English homilies consist of exhortations to repentance, illustrated by devotional commonplaces that recur in varying forms in different contexts. Such are some items of the Blickling and Vercelli collections (for example, Blickling 5, 8, 10, and Vercelli 2–4; 8–10; 20–21) which are not translated as a whole from identifiable Latin originals. This field of Old English studies was opened more than fifty years ago by Max Förster; and other scholars, principally K. Jost and R. Willard, have investigated the Latin literature in which these commonplaces circulated. Detailed work on the origin and distribution of some central themes has recently been published by J. E. Cross.