In the later Middle Ages (thirteenth through fifteenth centuries), sermons for the dedication of a church formed a standard component of what one may call model sermon collections and usually appeared at the end of cycles for the saints' feasts (de sanctis). In this well-produced monograph, the second in a new series "Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching" brought out by Brepols, its author presents what has struck her as the predominant themes of such sermons: their understanding and development of the concept ecclesia as the physical building, as an idea of the Universal Church, and as an extended metaphor for the human soul in its relation to and progress toward God.
In her initial chapter Horie speaks of the history of dedicating a church, which goes back to Old-Testament narratives and laws, and then summarizes the dedication rite that would have been followed in the Latin West during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, using as her base an incunable edition of the Pontificale Romanum. Chapter Two lays out her textual corpus, and we learn that it is primarily sermon cycles in incunable editions she has worked with. These have been identified by going through Johannes Baptist Schneyer's Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters, für die Zeit von 1150-1350 (Münster, 1969-1990). She is at some pains to demonstrate that these must have enjoyed a good deal of popularity, since many of the incunable editions were printed more than once; and of course in manuscript the same cycles exist, again, in multiple copies.
With Chapter Three she turns to their contents. First she discusses six dedication sermons by St. Augustine (three genuine and three "supposititious") and six by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, to show that the themes and concerns of late-medieval dedication sermons indeed stood in a long tradition. Her mode of exposition here is essentially that of summarizing the main ideas of sermon after sermon, which makes for a certain amount of repetition. The next chapter (4) then analyzes recurrent key terms: ecclesia, domus Dei, templum, and tabernaculum, and brings us to the main concern of Horie's investigation, the notion of "church" in these sermons. In the same chapter she also discusses "several key passages in Scripture" that were used again and again in these sermons, such as the gospel involving Zachaeus (particularly "Today I must bide in your house," Luke 19:5), the apocalyptic vision of Jerusalem, Jacob's Dream (Genesis 28), and others, including a number of Psalms. Most of these biblical passages, used as themata in the sermons, occurred in the dedication rite itself.
The next three chapters form the center of this monograph, for in them Horie gathers what the sermons tell us about "the physical church as symbol and concrete reality" (ch. 5), "perceptions of Ecclesia universalis" (ch. 6), and "consecration and the church of the soul" (ch. 7). The first two topics remain on the meager side-- dedication sermons do not seem to yield much substance on medieval ecclesiology, and in fact Horie has to go outside dedication sermons to find material for the notions that the Church is like a ship or a vineyard. But the last issue, the human soul as a church or temple of God, furnishes "a fundamental motif in dedication sermons" (77). Indeed it seems even more than one motif among others, for it recurs in Horie's discussion of the dedication rite itself as well as her chapters on the physical church and on Ecclesia universalis. This would of course wholly agree with the predominantly moral- psychological tendency of all Western preaching. Thus, the cleansing of the new church building with a mixture of salt, ashes, water, and wine becomes a symbol of the purification of man's soul in baptism; the officiating bishop's threefold striking at the as yet closed church door expresses God's power over heaven, earth, and hell, or else the soul's testing "in the buffets of tribulation and temptation" (80); and thus with a good number of other details performed in the rite (except for the bishop's nearly endlessly taking off his miter and putting it on again). The soul's dedication to God and divine indwelling were of course topics of fundamental interest outside dedication sermons, and thus Horie again draws on some relevant material from mystical writers from Hugh of St. Victor to Tauler, and from sermons that were not written for church dedications.
This concern with individual salvation and sanctification, while hardly news to readers of medieval spiritual literature in general, is still worth pointing out as evidently the chief one in dedication sermons. One might ask what else preachers at a dedication or the anniversary of their church would have talked about: attending Mass regularly? coming to confession to their appointed parish priest? paying their tithes? The last-mentioned topic actually occurs in the dedication rite according to the Pontificale Romanum, as part of the bishop's short address (191). But one wonders what ordinary layfolk would have heard from the pulpit on dedication day or the feast day of their church's saint. The sermons Horie deals with, in other words, are at best models, probably drawn upon by parish priests when the need arose. But Horie does not present any evidence of actual preaching on these occasions, nor does she discuss dedication sermons that have survived at random, outside the model sermon collections. That was not her aim, but students of medieval preaching would still want to hear more about the actuality of dedication preaching.
These seven chapters occupy just one hundred pages of her book, and the much larger remainder is given over to supporting materials, but no index. Readers will find it helpful to have a lightly edited transcription of the dedication rite from the Pontificale Romanum, with the rubrics and the prayer texts typographically set apart (Appendix Five, pp. 175-203). Equally helpful are the transcriptions of twelve dedication sermons (Appendix Six). With the exception of Peraldus and Jacobus de Voragine, both writers of much utilized model collections, these come from authors who hailed from German-language areas and were active during the late fifteenth century. The texts have been "faithfully" transcribed from incunable editions and are indeed accurate except for an occasional slip or misunderstanding (such as the formulaic quesumus, which appears as ques [p. 190] and quis [p. 197], whereas other abbreviations have been correctly expanded). More questionable seems to me Horie's refusal to introduce effective punctuation in the sermon texts. Medieval texts, whether in manuscript or early print, need to be made transparent to their modern readers, especially when given in the original Latin, and the addition of punctuation from commas to quotation marks to paragraph divisions strikes me as a sine qua non. Appendix Four succeeds somewhat in opening up the text of the dedication rite by furnishing of a schema, but for the sermons readers are left to their own ingenuity.
In the remaining appendices (1-3) Horie presents guides to the raw material on which her study is based. Evidently she has searched through Schneyer's Repertorium--at least through the first five volumes of named authors, but not vols. 6-9, which inventory anonymous collections--and collected dedication sermons (which in Schneyer's work carry the siglum C11). She has thus found "over four hundred extant sermons" (14) written in the period of 1150-1350. In addition she has identified sermons by later writers. Though she does not indicate so, these can now be found in the electronic Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones für die Zeit von 1350-1500 (2001). But it is more specifically sermons that are available in early printed editions ("incunable sermons") that Horie uses as the base of her study-"about sixty-five" of them (p. 14, cf. p. 41) and including such late-medieval writers as Michael Lochmair (Vienna), Jacobus de Clusa (from Juterbog in Brandenburg, later at Cracow and Erfurt), and Pelbartus de Themeswar (Hungary), whose names recur again and again in her discussion. In the appendices she distinguishes between "preachers in print" and "preachers in manuscript," and in each case lists preachers' names (without biographical details) and their themata, and then a second time the themata utilized in dedication sermons in the order of their biblical source. The result, to my mind, is rather confusing as well as repetitious. Thus a dedication sermon "Domum tuam, Domine, decet sanctitudo" by Guilelmus Peraldus appears at least in four different places (the incunable sermon itself is reproduced on pp. 221-226). Further, the lengthy Appendix 2 lists libraries where the respective texts, often in more then one incunable editions, may be found. This list is limited to European libraries.
In sum, Horie's monograph has two ostensible aims: first, to show that in the later Middle Ages dedication sermons were produced in fairly large numbers and that you may find them in an incunable edition in a library near you if you live in Europe; and second, to analyze their major themes and concerns. Regarding the former aim, Horie herself acknowledges that her inventories are "probably not exhaustive, but may serve as a guide" (p. 109, said about incunable sermons but applicable to sermons in manuscript as well), and students should keep in mind that Schneyer's Repertorium is not only enormously helpful but also notoriously unreliable in detail, and that other dedication sermons are extant that were not only included in de sanctis cycles but actually preached on specified occasions. The other aim, to discuss their dominant theological and moral ideas and concerns, has resulted in a valuable contribution to medieval sermon studies.