The Old English Homily

Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation

Edited by Aaron J Kleist

Book cover: The Old English Homily

Extent: 548, 548 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Medieval Studies

Series: Studies in the Early Middle Ages

Series volume number: 17

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(December 2007)

ISBN: 9782503517926

Price: $70.00

In stock

This volume compiles a broad range of essays on Anglo-Saxon homilies as they are being studied today.


The quarter-century that has passed since Paul Szarmach’s and Bernard Huppe’s groundbreaking The Old English Homily and its Backgrounds (1978) has seen staggering changes in the field of Anglo-Saxon homiletics. Primary materials have become accessible to scholars in unprecedented levels, whether digitally or through new critical editions, and these have generated in turn a flood of secondary scholarship. The articles in this volume showcase and build on these developments. The first five essays consider various contexts of and influences on Anglo-Saxon homilies: patristic and early medieval Latin sources, continental homiliaries and preaching practices, traditions of Old Testament interpretation and adaptation, and the liturgical setting of preaching texts. Six studies then turn to the sermons themselves, examining style and rhetoric in the Vercelli homilies, the codicology of the Blickling Book, sanctorale and temporale in the works of Aelfric, and the challenges posed by Wulfstan’s self-referential corpus. Finally, the last entries take us past the Conquest to discuss the re-use of homiletic material in England and its environs from the eleventh to eighteenth century. Together, these articles offer medieval scholars a new Old English Homily, one that serves both as an introduction to key figures and issues in the field and as a model of studies for the next quarter-century.

  • Edited by Aaron J Kleist