Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England

Essays in Honour of Susan Powell

Edited by Martha Driver Edited by Veronica O'Mara

Book cover: Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England

Extent: 410, 410 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Medieval Studies, Religious Studies

Series: Sermo

Series volume number: 11

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(July 2013)

ISBN: 9782503541853

Price: $150.00

In stock

This volume explores the richness of Middle English and Latin material in prose and verse, concerning the preaching of the word of God in late medieval England.


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.

Acknowledgements Preface: Susan Powell and the Growing Study of the Middle English Sermon - Ronald Waldron Introduction - Martha W. Driver and Veronica OMara Studies G. R. Owst and the Politics of Sermon Studies - Dere k Pearsall A Cycle Recycled: Sermons from Carolingian Italy in a Miscellany for Pastoral Care from Fifteenth-Century England - R. N. Swanson So Far and Yet So Near: Distance or Proximity of Author and Witness in Manuscripts of John Wyclif s Sermons - Anne Hudson The Devil as Narrator of the Life of Christ and the Sermo literarius - William Marx Preaching by Numbers: The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost in Late Middle English Sermons and Works of Religious Instruction - Margaret Connolly Preaching with a Pen: Audience and Self-Regulation in he Writing and Reception of John Mirk and Nicholas Love - John J. Thompson Scribal Performance in a Late Middle English Sermon Cycle - Stephen Morrison Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confirmanda est: The Lections in the Latin Martiloge of the Syon Brethren - Vincent Gillespie Punctuating Mirks Festial: A Scottish Text and its Implications - Jeremy J. Smith Dating Wynkyn de Wordes Devotional, Homiletic, and Other Texts, 150111 - Joseph J. Gwara Preachers in Pictures from Manuscript to Print - Martha W. Driver Some Middle English Sermon Verse and its Transmission in Manuscript and Print - Julia Boffey Texts Preaching in the South English Legendary: A Study and Edition of the Text for All Souls Day - Oliver Pickering The Syon Pardon Sermon: Contexts and Texts - Kari Anne Rand A Victorian Response to a Fifteenth-Century Incunabulum: The Boy Bishop Sermon and How It Was First Edited - Veronica OMara Susan Powell: List of Publications - Prepared by Ronald Waldron

  • Edited by Martha Driver
  • Edited by Veronica O’Mara