The Old English Homily
Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation
Edited by Aaron J Kleist
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
Other Titles in this Series
England and the Continent in the Tenth Century
Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876-1947)
Volume 37
Mosaics of Time, The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD
Volume I, A Historical Introduction to the Chronicle Genre from its Origins to the High Middle Ages
Volume 33
Sacred Sites and Holy Places
Exploring the Sacralization of Landscape through Time and Space
Volume 11
Poetics of Wonder
Testimonies of the New Christian Miracles in the Late Antique Latin World
Volume 31
The Crisis of the Oikoumene
The Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in the Sixth-Century Mediterranean
Volume 14
The Beginning of Scandinavian Settlement in England
The Viking 'Great Army' and Early Settlers, c. 865-900
Volume 29
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