Ogawa Hiroshi. Language and style in Old English composite homilies

Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010. — 224 p. — (Medieval and renaissance texts and studies 361).Of the large body of Old English literary works written in prose, homilies (including both homiliae and sermones) are perhaps the most important genre, both in the number of texts that have survived and the literary quality they achieve. There are some three hundred texts that are so classified by the Toronto Dictionary of Old English. These, together with related genres such as saints’ lives and biblical translations, constitute a body of vernacular religious prose which no other European language of the period can rival.
This corpus of homilies represents a vernacular prose tradition extending over several centuries, from the composition of the earliest homilies, possibly in the pre-Alfredian ninth century, to those homilies which are preserved in manuscripts of the early twelfth century.