SOURCE: “Experiments in Genre: The Saints' Lives in Ælfric's Catholic Homilies,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints' Lives and Their Contexts, edited by Paul E. Szarmach, State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 261-87.

In the following essay, Godden contends that Ælfric's emphasis on narrative in Lives of Saints was a deliberate choice on his part, made in order to resolve exegetical and hagiographical problems.

Medieval hagiography was a highly varied genre, serving several different functions and drawing on a variety of traditions. As Rosemary Woolf puts it, describing the literary saint's life, “in origins it is part panegyric, part epic, part romance, part sermon, and historical fact dissolves within the conventions of these forms.”¹ Thomas Hill's chapter in this volume has already shown the complexity of the genre, its variety of functions, and its relation to other genres. Such complexities were probably as...