| Ամփոփում: | <p>The attention which has recently been devoted to Ælfric's dependence on large collections of Latin writings for his homiletic sources is in this study extended to hagiographic texts through an examination of the relationship between the sources of Ælfric's saints' lives and an early Latin legendary, here termed Cotton-Corpus. Chapter I reconstructs the contents of an early form of the collection and outlines broad areas of agreement and disagreement between these and the particular sources used by Ælfric. Chapter II builds on this general discussion by examining new sources provided by the collection The more specialized problem of the textual relationship between the extant manuscripts of the collection and Ælfric's conjectural exemplar is introduced in Chapter III, and then developed in Chapter IV (and Appendix II) where individual studies of the Cotton-Corpus sources for forty of Ælfric's lives are presented. The final chapter draws conclusions and suggests ways in which the sources in the collection may be of use in other areas of Ælfrician scholarship.</p> <p>Though the nature of the material precludes absolutely firm conclusions, the evidence suggests that Ælfric had access to a collection belonging to the same family as Cotton-Corpus. In all, this collection, as we know it, provides some fifty of Ælfric's sources, some not previously identified, as well as a large number of individual source readings (particularly prevalent in the comparatively late witness, Hereford Cathedral, MS P 7 vi) not available in the standard printed texts. In addition, it helps to shed light on several related features of Ælfric's work: notably, the extent of his acquaintance with the works of authors such as Gregory of Tours, the principles which governed his selection of saints for the <em>Homilies</em> and <em>Lives</em>, his references, or lack of them, to sources and books, and his occasional adaptation of hagiographic sources to essentially homiletic purposes.</p>
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