Sources and Analogues for Blickling Homily V and Vercelli Homily XI

DESPITE a tantalizing reference to ‘se æþela lareow’ (‘the noble teacher’) in its first sentence, Homily V of the Blickling manuscript (Princeton, Scheide Library 71, s. x/xi)1 has, for the most part, evaded the efforts of source scholars seeking to connect the homily to Latin antecedents. Blickling IV, the immediately preceding text, also cites an ‘æþela lareow’, and has been shown to draw mainly on a sermon on tithing by Caesarius of Arles and on a version of the Visio Pauli.2 The two homilies’ common citation of an ‘æþela lareow’ led Milton McC. Gatch to suppose that they were translated from the same homiliary or from works by the same (genuine or pseudonymous) author, but D. G. Scragg has cast doubt on this assumption by showing that Blickling IV was copied after and independently of Blickling V and VI.3 Robert MacG. Dawson, who edited the Blickling Homilies for his dissertation in 1969, did not know of any sources for Blickling V but thought that its reference to an ‘æþela lareow’ might indicate ‘that the homily derives from some unknown pseudo-Augustinian sermon.’4 Since then, an ‘ubi sunt’ passage in the homily has been shown to be loosely adapted from the Admonitio ad filium spiritualem, falsely attributed to Basil the Great, but this is the extent of our current knowledge of the text's sources.5 In the present note I attempt to improve the situation somewhat by proposing a source for the opening lines of the homily.