Ælfric's Andrew and the Apocrypha

Frederick M. Biggs, University of Connecticut

As with his other writings on New Testament figures, Ælfric's homily on Andrew, in his First Series of Catholic Homilies (I.38), takes us into a potentially uneasy place where the genres of apocrypha and hagiography overlap. Malcolm Godden, who has concluded that Ælfric would have encountered passions of the apostles among other saints' lives in the Cotton-Corpus Legendary, simply labels these texts as hagiographic, an approach that Scott DeGregorio supports. Yet it now appears less certain that Ælfric knew this collection and, even if he did, his use of specific material not recorded in the Bible about Biblical persons might still appear inconsistent, as Aideen O'Leary has suggested, with his condemnation of other apocryphal traditions. One way to account for his decision would be to note that the information he accepted about the deaths of the apostles poses little risk of contradicting the Bible since, for example, the Acts of the Apostles ends with Paul still alive, although imprisoned, preaching in Rome. To consider this material simply as hagiographic, however, would be to overlook an opportunity to investigate Ælfric's understanding of the canon and of the apostles', as well as his own, relationship to it. His decision to relate Andrew's passion, I argue, does not indicate a tolerance of apocrypha in our modern understanding of the term but, rather, reveals Ælfric's tendency to view the Bible as little different from other authoritative religious writings, and the "apocrypha" as any deviation from orthodox tradition.