The focus of this volume, on Middle English and Latin material in prose and verse, concerns the preaching of the word of God in an expansive sense in late medieval England. This collection of essays explores the multiple ways in which the sermon in England in the later Middle Ages both influenced and was influenced by other devotional and didactic material, both implicitly and explicitly. The essays pay special attention to examples of textual complexity in the sermon as manifested in the manuscript and early printed traditions. By examining sermon technique and methodology contributors present related material that either travels alongside sermons or shares the same preaching or teaching milieu. While analysing sermons and other homiletic material, the essays also explore areas, such as the dating and illustration of incunabula, which have an important bearing on the sermons and devotional literature of the period, but are normally studied in an isolated fashion. These fit in well with the particular emphasis in the collection on the sermon in the early printed period. In addition, attention is paid to some of the ways in which sermon-study was first brought to the fore by late nineteenth-century editors and early twentieth-century commentators. In this way various threads are brought together, new texts and ideas presented, and potential future avenues for research suggested that will continue to be important for an understanding of sermons and related religious literature in late medieval England.
Author(s): Martha W. Driver, Veronica O'Mara
Series: Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 11
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 408
City: Turnhout
Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements ix
Preface: Susan Powell and the Growing Study of the Middle English Sermon / Ronald Waldron xiii
Introduction / Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara 1
Studies
G. R. Owst and the Politics of Sermon Studies / Derek Pearsall 11
A Cycle Recycled: Sermons from Carolingian Italy in a Miscellany for Pastoral Care from Fifteenth-Century England / R. N. Swanson 31
So Far and Yet So Near: Distance or Proximity of Author and Witness in Manuscripts of John Wyclif's Sermons / Anne Hudson 49
The Devil as Narrator of the Life of Christ and the 'Sermo literarius' / William Marx 63
Preaching by Numbers: The 'Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost' in Late Middle English Sermons and Works of Religious Instruction / Margaret Connolly 83
Preaching with a Pen: Audience and Self-Regulation in the Writing and Reception of John Mirk and Nicholas Love / John J. Thompson 101
Scribal Performance in a Late Middle English Sermon Cycle / Stephen Morrison 117
'Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confirmanda est': The Lections in the Latin 'Martiloge' of the Syon Brethren / Vincent Gillespie 133
Punctuating Mirk's 'Festial': A Scottish Text and its Implications / Jeremy J. Smith 161
Dating Wynkyn de Worde's Devotional, Homiletic, and Other Texts, 1501–11 / Joseph J. Gwara 193
Preachers in Pictures from Manuscript to Print / Martha W. Driver 235
Some Middle English Sermon Verse and its Transmission in Manuscript and Print / Julia Boffey 259
Texts
Preaching in the 'South English Legendary': A Study and Edition of the Text for All Souls' Day / Oliver Pickering 277
The Syon Pardon Sermon: Contexts and Texts / Kari Anne Rand 317
A Victorian Response to a Fifteenth‑Century Incunabulum: The 'Boy Bishop' Sermon and How It Was First Edited / Veronica O'Mara 351
Susan Powell: List of Publications / Prepared by Ronald Waldron 391
