Book chapter
Ælfric in Dorset and the landscape of pastoral care
Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, pp.52-62
09/15/2005
DOI: 10.7722/j.ctt81nfr.9
Abstract
The voice of pastoral care in late Anglo-Saxon England is, to a very great extent, the voice of one single writer: Ælfric. This monk of Cerne Abbas composed a remarkably extensive and well-informed commentary on the Christian story, on the individual's responsibility to society, and on ethics and morality in sequences of homilies and saints' lives that dominate the surviving record of Anglo-Saxon preaching. In broad terms, Ælfric's works are what survive of pastoral care in action in late Anglo-Saxon England. For all that those works have been the object of much study, the very fact of one monk in a small Dorset monastery so dominating the homiletic voice of pastoral care is a phenomenon in need of explanation. In this essay I will engage this question by reconsidering Ælfric in the landscape of Dorset and show how that most local context helps to map his relation to pastoral care.Ælfric was trained in the monastic and metropolitan centre of Winchester and would later become abbot of Eynsham, but he composed and disseminated the vast majority of his writings when he was a monk at Cerne Abbas, Dorset. His pastoral programme ismost fully realised in the two series of Catholic Homilies – two sequences of forty homilies each for Sundays and festivals through the church year, written at Cerne between 987 and 995, and disseminated massively throughout Anglo-Saxon England.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Ælfric in Dorset and the landscape of pastoral care
- Creators
- Jonathan Wilcox - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, pp.52-62
- DOI
- 10.7722/j.ctt81nfr.9
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 09/15/2005
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984363649102771
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