Anonymous Interpolations in Ælfric's Lives of Saints

We know almost nothing about the anonymous authors of Euphrosyne, Eustace, Mary of Egypt, and The Seven Sleepers, except that each was interested in reading, translating, and transmitting one of these four texts. Each of the four essays in this collection explores what those reasons might have been. None of the four contributors uses Ælfric as the exclusive lens for analysis, and each piece adopts a different theoretical or methodological approach to the text in question; in the process, the four anonymous texts are put into conversation with the Gospels, Freudian psychoanalysis, a fragmentary, fire-damaged manuscript, Old English homilies, and a novel published in 2006. In offering four new essays on the anonymous interpolations in Ælfric's Lives of Saints that take four very different approaches to the texts in question, we hope to open additional lines of inquiry into the lives of the se saints and to promote new scholarship on the anonymous hagiography of Anglo-Saxon England.