Ælfric's Life of Saint Basil the Great: Background and Context. Edited by Gabriella Corona. Anglo-Saxon Texts, 5. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. viii + 272. $90.

Ælfric's Lives of Saints is a messy sequence (at the least, one hard to establish from the surviving manuscript evidence, as the essays of Joyce Hill and others have demonstrated) made up of individual saints' lives which each have their own tradition and history of transmission. Corona's monograph provides insight into the series through careful study and an edition of just one life, that of Saint Basil the Great. The Life of Saint Basil provides a fascinating case study for the appropriation and assimilation by a leading English Benedictine church intellectual from the turn of the millennium, namely Ælfric, of the story of an early Greek Father famed for his pious life, liturgical learning, and his contribution to eastern monasticism. Much can be learned, as Corona demonstrates, both from the range of miracle stories translated and from those omitted.

Jonathan Wilcox
University of Iowa