Ælfric's substantial corpus is characterized by insistent acts of self-definition, found in prefaces, codas, explanatory asides, careful acknowledgement of the traditions to which his writings belong, and recurring references to senior ecclesiastics and secular patrons, with whose authority he thereby associates himself. These acts of self-definition served his polemical purpose in carrying forward the aims of the Benedictine Reform. They were put to use from the start, in his first major works, the two series of Catholic Homilies, issued respectively in 989 and 994. Here, where the tenets of the faith and the interpretation of the Bible were at stake, the dominant tactic was the naming of his orthodox authorities. It is the names of the Church Fathers that occur in the homilies themselves; but when he sent a copy of the First Series to Archbishop Sigeric, Ælfric took his self-definition a stage further. Here, in a covering Latin letter to an ecclesiastical superior within the Reform tradition, he not only named the major patristic authorities on which he drew, but he also specified two of the Carolingian transmitters of that orthodox tradition, Smaragdus and Haymo. In this professional context, such additional information served to define Ælfric more precisely as a man who was drawing upon works which, in Reform circles, were among the accepted and authoritative textual transmitters of the tradition which they wished to promote.

This sharper definition places Ælfric within a layered tradition which requires us to engage – as he did – with the intertextual relationship between ultimate and immediate sources: in other words, the patristic words upon which he drew, and the mediated form in which he had access to them. His thoroughgoing commitment to the patristic tradition in the Catholic Homilies, which he so carefully highlighted, has been extensively confirmed by modern source-study, and it has been shown that, in terms of practical access to this material, he relied heavily on the Carolingian homiliaries of Paul the Deacon, Smaragdus, and Haymo, where not only was the patristic exegesis conveniently allotted to the days of the liturgical year, but also, in the case of the homiliaries of Paul and Smaragdus, was ascribed to their original authors, by the rubrics in the case of Paul's homiliary, and by marginal annotations in the homiliary of Smaragdus.

WHEN AUGUSTINE AND his companions landed in Kent in 597, ready to embark on the conversion of the English, their initial contact was with the local ruler, King Æthelberht. At first he ordered them to remain on the Isle of Thanet, but not long afterwards he granted them land in Canterbury, the capital of his kingdom, and allowed them to preach the new faith. His own conversion followed soon after, and from then onwards the mission began to flourish. Although there was no coercion by the ruler, this was a process of conversion sponsored by the king's social leadership; it was thus one of acceptance, not of confrontation— at least as narrated by Bede, whatever might have been the reality at a more individual level. The first attempt at the conversion of Northumbria was likewise royally sponsored when Paulinus accompanied Æthelburg, daughter of Æthelberht, on her journey to Northumbria to marry King Edwin, then pagan, but baptized in 627. It is clear that, once again, the mission enjoyed royal support, as it was to do more emphatically when Oswald took power in 634 and almost immediately invited the monastery of Iona to send someone who would be able to bring his people to the faith to which he had been converted in exile. The resulting mission, led by St. Aidan, was generously supported by the king in many practical ways: by the grant of Lindisfarne as the monastic centre of the mission— appropriately isolated in being cut off by the tides twice a day, but yet within sight and reach of the king's power-centre at Bamburgh; by generous alms; and, in the early stages, by the king acting as Aidan's interpreter. We know far less about Birinus's mission from Rome to Wessex at around the same time (ca. 634), but again the conversion of King Cynegils was evidently a key factor: King Oswald was present, stood sponsor at his baptism, and the two kings together granted Birinus the old Roman city of Dorchester-on-Thames as the place where he could establish his episcopal see.

This simple sketch of the nature of the Anglo-Saxon conversion as told by Bede may seem to be rather tangential to a study of saintly mothers and mothers of saints.

In 989, two years after he had transferred from the cathedral monastery of Old Minster Winchester, that great powerhouse of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Reform, to the much more modest monastery of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, Ælfric, then only a monk and masspriest, wrote a letter to Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury. As was appropriate for a letter from one ecclesiastic to another, this was in Latin, and the tone was suitably deferential and humble. But the contents of the manuscript which the covering Latin letter sought to explain and justify departed from normal practice. What Ælfric was sending to Sigeric and in effect commending to him was a collection of forty homilies, mostly on the gospel lections for the day, organized according to the cycle of the church's year, and written in Old English. On the face of it, this might not seem to be innovative since preachers had to use the vernacular, after all, when addressing lay congregations. But what Ælfric had done was to produce a systematic collection of texts in the vernacular which embodied the patristically-based traditions that were characteristic of the Benedictine Reform as he had known it at Winchester. The reformers’ adoption of these traditions, following the example of the Carolingian Reform which inspired the Anglo-Saxon one, had the same aim as did the Carolingians: to improve the standards of scholarship within the monasteries as the educational centres of the day; to eliminate error by going back to the great authorities; and thus in the long run to raise the standards of teaching and preaching within the church as a whole.

Sets of Latin homilies within this tradition had come into England with the Reform, and it is clear that they had been central to Ælfric's own formation as a monk while at Winchester. But, as far as we know, before Ælfric no one in England had worked with these materials to produce new sets of homilies. Now Ælfric was doing so, not in Latin, as the Carolingians had done in their successive homily compilations within this tradition, but in the vernacular. Here was the innovation: an organized collection of homilies, in effect a small selective homiliary, firmly within the Reform tradition as defined within the Latin-dominated world of Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monasticism; composed using precisely the same techniques as Ælfric's Latin models; but with the striking difference that they were in the vernacular.

Ælfric's recurrent claim to be working within a defined tradition of interpretation is one of the distinctive characteristics of his corpus of exegetical homilies. Within the homilies themselves the references are to major patristic authorities: Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome, with Gregory being the most commonly cited as the basis for Alfric's exegesis, Augustine second, and Jerome a poor third. In addition, Alfric frequently names Bede, less often than Augustine but far more often than Jerome, evidently regarding his authority as being on a par with the Church Fathers themselves, although Bede humbly defined himself merely as someone who was following in their footsteps, bringing together brief extracts from their works and adding notes of his own to clarify their sense and interpretation. His reliance on the earlier tradition was signalled directly in his Commentary on Luke and his subsequent Commentary on Mark by marginal letters denoting the authority whose words he was using at a given point. Yet, despite Bede's well-defined position as a transmitter of patristic authority, a weaver and interweaver of texts, he was regarded by the Carolingians as a Doctor of the Church, and was in practice accorded a status that associated him with the Fathers rather than with the Carolingian transmitters of that same authority, whose techniques were in fact no different from Bede's own. Alfric, in treating Bede as an authority to equal Gregory, Augustine, and Jerome, was thus firmly within a tradition defined by the Carolingians, whose texts underpinned many of the areas of intellectual achievement of the Benedictine Reform in England. Indeed, their works are major immediate sources for Alfric's homilies: the homiliary of Paul the Deacon, which is in large part an anthology of patristic lection-based homilies with the authors being identified in the rubrics; Smaragdus, whose homiliary consists mainly of homilies which are individually composed of a chain or catena of passages drawn from different authorities whose identity is signalled throughout by marginal letters, in the mode of Bede's Commentaries on Luke and Mark; and Haymo of Auxerre, whose homiliary is steeped in patristic authority, but whose method of composition is more individual, constantly echoing the words, phrases and ideas of the Fathers, but in a freer form than the anthology-compilatio of Paul or the homily-by-homily catenae of Smaragdus.