"This volume is the first of two containing a series of homilies and sermons written between 987 and 995 CE by the English monk and abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, collected by him into two sets now known as the Catholic Homilies, First Series, and Catholic Homilies, Second Series. In the English Preface to the First Series, Ælfric says that he was moved to write them "because I saw and heard great error in many English books which unlearned people in their simplicity have taken for great wisdom, and I regretted that they did not know or did not have the gospel teaching among their writings." He describes his work as a "translation," though it is quite a bit more than that, and he presumes that it will be used for preaching by the clergy to lay people. Like much else in Ælfrics substantial and diverse body of work, the Catholic Homilies are written with distinctive clarity and care and reveal a breadth of learning and accomplishment that is almost unrivaled in English in the early medieval period. They were widely copied and circulated long after the Norman Conquest, and stand as one of the monuments of Old English literary and religious culture"--.