Current Projects

Current Work

Our current work focuses on digitalizing selected texts from Aelfric’s literary oeuvre as well as writings related to his intellectual heritage, beginning with a manuscript now housed at the British Library, Cotton MS Julius E VII, otherwise known as Aelfric’s Lives of Saints. This collection of texts was written by Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950–c. 1010), between 990 and 1002. These hagiographies – written lives or biographies of saints – were designed to commemorate particular saints’ feast days, days set aside in the Christian calendar when church services were devoted to a specific saint.

Ælfric was the abbot of a Benedictine abbey in Eynsham, Oxfordshire. The form of Old English in which he wrote suggests that he was from the early medieval English kingdom of Wessex. Ælfric wrote homilies, sermons, saints’ lives, and biblical translations that were intended to make orthodox Christian teaching widely available to the laity. Ælfric is often praised for his clear narrative style. The Cotton Julius manuscript dates to the first third of the 11th century and therefore contains one of the earliest known copies of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, along with two other texts associated with him, together with four anonymous saints’ lives: Euphrosyne, Eustace, Mary of Egypt and the Seven Sleepers. The manuscript was probably made either in the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds or in Canterbury and contains glosses and corrections that appear to have been written in the early 11th century.

No edition of Lives of Saints (LS) has yet been published electronically beyond the digitized photographs found on the British Library website.  TASP is now creating digitalized editions that include facing transcriptions, translations, running commentaries, glossaries, and other ancillary research materials so that these texts can be more easily studied and placed within their literary, historical, theological, and cultural contexts.  EVT’s team of coders will soon release the software’s 3rd iteration, which will allow TASP to continue our work producing a web-based display platform. Additional texts, including Continental manuscripts that share textual relationships to Aelfric’s LS, will eventually be published, among which will be the so-called Boulogne Sermon, a Latin text linked to the writings of Aelfric that was first published in Professor Leinbaugh’s Harvard PhD dissertation, which will be shared in our next update. Professor Leinbaugh will also be adding supplementary introductory material and articles to the website, which will allow students, scholars, and casual viewers to explore the literary, historical, and cultural contexts of these texts. We will be adding glossaries, translations, and related information as our work moves forward. The proposed glossary entries will initially be coded as XML documents for which we are currently creating a schema. Glossary entries will follow from principles found in the Mitchell-Robinson textbook, A Guide to Old English. Dictionary entries will follow guidelines and practices found in the University of Toronto’s Dictionary of Old English. The digital editions that TASP produces will be hosted on servers owned and maintained by the TFED, the sponsoring nonprofit organization that “that bridges the worlds of international diplomacy and higher education, with particular focus on transatlantic relations and the role of the humanities in fostering cultural literacy and global understanding.”