Ælfric's Use of his Sources in the Preface to Genesis, together with a Conspectus of Biblical and Patristic Sources and Analogues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The preface to Genesis by Ælfric which, in three surviving manuscripts, precedes either his translation of the first half of Genesis or the OE Hexateuch, is an independent composition in the form of a letter to "Ælfric's patron, the ealdormanta Æthelweard. The immediacy of the circumstances which gave rise to this letter, the directness of its epistolary style, and the inclusion of some autobiographical material may give the impression that it is an original piece of writing. Perhaps because of this, no systematic study of its sources has ever been made and its editors have been content to point out only the obvious quotations from the first chapter of Genesis and the allusions to other parts of the Pentateuch. However, the introduction to the symbolic interpretation of the Old Testament which forms the main body of the letter is heavily dependent on Biblical exegesis known to Ælfric. It is the purpose of this article to examine his use of scripture and patristics in this text, showing in particular how these sources cast light on the meaning of the preface.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".