Nearly eight decades ago, G. R. Owst's Preaching in Medieval England: an Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge, 1926) opened a window on the greatest preachers of the Middle Ages through an evocative account of their collections of sermons. Owst was readable, and Owst was influential, especially once his Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England followed in 1933. His work was as much a social and literary exploration of the phenomenon of preaching, seen through the surviving manuscripts, as anything else. Like many other pioneering books, Owst's work raised as many questions about his subject as he answered.
Most scholars who have written on English medieval preaching more recently have taken up some of the issues that Owst first began to explore, including English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages by H. Leith Spencer (Oxford, 1993). Other studies have also been vital. For the Lollards, Pamela Gradon and Anne Hudson's five-volume edition of English Wycliffite Sermons (Oxford, 1996) is a surpassing achievement. Together with Gloria Cigman's edition of Lollard Sermons (Early English Text Society, vol. 294, 1989), they have revealed a great deal about a persecuted movement. Highly influenced by the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, the Lollards were heretics who never quite fully removed themselves from the embrace of the Roman Catholic Church, but rather, were its internal critics. They raised important questions about the nature of the Eucharist and the priesthood, and they disparaged pilgrimages as well as the efficacy of praying to the saints. When they postulated that the Bible should be read, understood, and memorized exclusively in the vernacular, they challenged the primacy of St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Thus their sermon cycles, important now to theologians and literature scholars, were in English. The Church and Parliament tried to suppress them. By 1408, vernacular translations of the Bible were prohibited in England by canon law and statute. The Lollards began a covert existence that continued, despite episodic persecution, until they were overtaken by the Protestant reforms of the sixteen century.
The latest book that answers Owst is the present work under review, Siegfried Wenzel's Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif, which represents the culmination of a lifetime's patient labors among many of England's (and France's) finest manuscript treasuries. Wenzel is the author of numerous other studies concerning sermons, including Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England ( Ann Arbor, 1994), and he has edited the Fasciculus Morum: a Fourteenth-Century Preacher's Handbook (London, 1989).
Latin Sermon Collections is concerned with the efforts that fourteenth and fifteenth-century preachers made to counteract the Lollard threat. All of the sermon collections Wenzel explores here are in blameless Latin, and they consist of compilations of dozens or hundreds of texts destined for the pulpit. He has surveyed three-dozen collections, comprising no fewer than an impressive 2100 sermons (as he reveals on p. 395), from the period c. 1350-c. 1450. The best known of the collections is probably John Mirk's sermon cycle (which was published in a 1905 edition by Theodore Erbe for the Early English Text Society, and it has been frequently studied since) which Wenzel calls "a curious mixture" (59) of sermons meant for specific holy days (including Sundays, Lent, and Christmas) as well as the feast days of the saints. Most collections specialized, either in sermons related to specific days in the Church's calendar (sermones de tempore), or those, like Jacobus de Voragine's collection of saints' lives, in sermones de sanctis. Either or both were useful resources for the pulpit. More than half of Wenzel's book is devoted to comments on each of the thirty-six collections of sermons (pp. 26-223), and to inventories of each collection (pp. 403-671), sermon by sermon, by their themes and sources from the Vulgate, and by their opening and closing words. He also provides some comparatively brief discussions on topics relating to preaching, including bishops as preachers, parish preaching, and the influence of the mendicant friars on preaching. Although the sermons he explores were largely orthodox, and were written in response to the challenges that the Lollards posed, Wenzel notes that vast theological differences are not always simple to discover between them, especially if morality (and not doctrine) was the topic being addressed from the pulpit. While some sermons seem to have been composed to inform other priests, many were meant for lay audiences. If a sermon was written in Latin, can we assume that it was always delivered in Latin? Church laws may have tried to repress heresy, but they also encouraged preachers to teach the laity the fundamentals of their faith. Did priests translate their Latin sermon notes extemporaneously into English when they spoke ad populum? Manuscript sermon collections seem to have been less common after 1450, Wenzel writes, (210, 397), but the reasons that would explain the decline are still not altogether certain. While the libraries of many religious houses were scattered during the Reformation, causing irreparable losses in manuscript material for the period from 1450 to 1540, perhaps the effects of the printing press need to be considered too. Printed sermon collections began to flood from the continent well before 1500. When William Caxton and Julian Notary transplanted their presses to England, they found ready buyers for the sermon collections they printed. Caxton issued some of Mirk's sermons as early as 1483. Advances in technology, as well as disaster, helped to make the sermon collections in manuscript less common than once was the case. As a result of Wenzel's painstaking efforts, more work can now be pursued concerning the learning and thinking that went into the sermons considered here in brief. For scholars who wish to have an entree into orthodox manuscript sermons cycles, Wenzel's Latin Sermon Collections will be a valuable finding aid and guide.