The first book ever to be printed in Old English was Ælfric's Easter homily, edited by Archbishop Matthew Parker and his circle, and Ælfric played a paramount role in the formative period of Anglo-Saxon studies from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. It was through his Latin Grammar written in Old English and the Latin paradigms provided with English translations that the early ‘antiquaries’ gained a first glimpse of the grammatical structure of Old English, and, above all, it was through his vast corpus of homilies and saints' Lives that scholars such as Matthew Parker, William L'Isle, George Hickes and Elizabeth Elstob sought to demonstrate that the Church of England had its venerable roots in pre-Conquest times. Scholarly interest in Ælfric has not abated since the days of these pioneers, and consequently Ælfric is one of the best researched authors in Old English literature. Surprisingly, perhaps, in spite of this wealth of secondary literature, there remain aspects of his oeuvre on which so far scarcely any work has been done. In a recent article Michael Lapidge has pointed out one such aspect when he suggested that the structure of Ælfric's sanctorale and the principles according to which Ælfric selected the saints and feasts for commemoration in his homilies and Lives would deserve close attention. As Lapidge pointed out, there are obvious peculiarities with regard to the saints and feasts chosen by Ælfric for commemoration in his sanctorale, when, for example, he commemorates the deposition of St Swithun (2 July), not the feast of the translatio (15 July), or when, as a Benedictine monk, he celebrates only one of the two feasts of St Benedict (again the less important depositio), or when, though Winchester-trained, he seems to depart from Winchester's liturgical practice in commemorating the feast of Quadraginta milites (9 March), while omitting from his sanctorale all the Northern French and Flemish saints such as SS Vedastus, Iudoc or Bertin, who were especially culted at Winchester.