This tripartite collection of sixteen essays is a very welcome, rich and packed one, with Precedent, Practice and Appropriation all receiving due weight in a very impressive range of contributions. As the editor, Aaron Kleist, explains in his introduction, this volume is intended as a quarter-century update to Szarmach and Huppé's Old English Homily and its Backgrounds, to serve as an "introduction to key figures and issues in the field and as a model of studies for the next quarter century." It does much more.
The first five contributions take as their focus the contexts of and influences on the Old English homily, sources broadly speaking, and the volume opens with Charles Wright's lucid, authoritative essay on Old English homilies and Latin sources in which he moves, seemingly effortlessly, from the nitty-gritty to the overview. Wright is particularly good on what source studies can and cannot achieve and details how they have contributed to textual criticism (essential reading for all editors), literary history (the section on audience being especially good), intellectual history (in which he demonstrates how "choosing sources could also mean choosing sides" (52)) and stylistic analysis, with examples drawn principally from anonymous homilies. Source studies have at times been regarded as little more than a fairly mechanical amassing of correspondences and parallels but Wright proves again and again how this is merely an essential starting point for the real work. A useful bibliographical survey of anonymous homilies and Latin sources completes this contribution.
The next two essays deal with Carolingian sources, one looking at Paul the Deacon's homiliary and the next at the Carolingian capitula De festiuitatibus. Joyce Hill takes up a challenge from Helmut Gneuss and seeks to establish what the versions of Paul the Deacon's homiliary circulating in late Anglo-Saxon England looked like, especially that used by Ælfric. Hill looks at the different approaches taken to this problem--source studies of Ælfric's homilies, studies of what precisely his copy of Paul the Deacon did and did not include and how it was organised, studies of the copies of Paul the Deacon written or used in England up to c. 1100; she concludes that we are a little nearer to establishing what Ælfric worked from but that much remains to be done in this area. Nancy Thompson then looks at another aspect of Carolingian influence, the capitula De festiuitatibus, which set out the special feasts of the liturgical year and required lay people to attend Mass on these occasions, with preaching, at least sometimes, as part of the celebration, and she considers again the disputed question of the extent of preaching to the laity in the Carolingian church. Thompson reveals well the diversity within the Carolingian church and the very different levels of provision for preaching envisaged in different texts and she goes on to suggest that the Blickling Book "may well have been a response to the same impulse that encouraged secular and ecclesiastical authorities to publish such lists for their clergy" (103). Where the capitula appear in manuscripts from England, however, the context is a monastic one. Thompson's use of the evidence is careful and balanced and, while she scrupulously holds back from concluding that the capitula can answer our questions about preaching to the laity in Anglo-Saxon England, she points the way to further investigation.
The first section of the book concludes with two essays devoted to Ælfric. Rachel Anderson considers his Old Testament works, still relatively neglected, and she focuses on what Gatch called his "non-liturgical narrative pieces," especially on the least-studied, Kings and Judges. As she shows, both demonstrate how Ælfric produces "a didactic text that showcases his narrative desire to create clear oppositions and repetitions" (136). Her treatment of these radically reworked versions--they are very far from being faithful translations--is very persuasive, with a particularly good reading of the portrayal of Samson and Delilah in Judges. Stephen Harris, on the other hand, looks at the Rogation texts in the Catholic Homilies, arguing that the liturgy for these days provided "some of the themes that guided Ælfric as he composed"; (144) such themes, investigated in detail in this piece, are the poor, the Apostles' Creed, prayer and grace, visions of heaven and good works. The liturgy is an under-explored area in Ælfric studies, even though it must have been of enormous significance for him, and one that offers great potential for the future.
From sources and how they are treated, we move in the next section of the book, "Practice," to the sermons themselves, with essays on the Vercelli Book, Blickling, Latin sermons for saints, Ælfric and Wulfstan. Samantha Zacher's detailed and nuanced piece on style and rhetoric in the Vercelli book shows her strengths as a reader as she seeks to correct the tendency of past scholarship to neglect the aesthetic and literary aspects of the anonymous prose texts. As well as a very good introduction to the book as a whole, including the memorable characterisation of it as "a 'greatest hits' anthology of homilies" (180), Zacher gives a very fine reading of Vercelli homily XVII, for the Purification of the Virgin. M. J. Toswell's piece is concerned with the codicology of Anglo-Saxon homiletic manuscripts and especially of the Blickling Book; her focus is on booklets and on how Anglo-Saxon homiletic manuscripts tend to be collections of booklets. Toswell analyses punctuation, in conjunction with other features such as quiring, wear and tear and ordinatio, for what it can tell us about the compilation of the Blickling Book and concludes that the collection was copied from different exemplars over a period of time, perhaps in a small scriptorium, is composed of seven booklets and is not, and should not be studied as, a "unified whole" (226). Her work is a considerable advance in our understanding of this important collection.
Thomas Hall's important essay on Latin sermons for saints in Early English homiliaries and legendaries examines the question of what texts were read in Ælfric's monastery at Eynsham on saints' feasts, offering what he modestly terms a "set of notes" on the texts for saints' days termed sermo or homilia in manuscripts from England up to the twelfth century. Looking in turn at homiliaries (all derived from Paul the Deacon), legendaries and other hagiographic manuscripts, such as collections devoted to single saints, he uncovers fascinating evidence for how these collections were transformed to meet the needs of English monasteries, signalling several unpublished texts in the process. Hall concludes that, on the question of the use of sermons for saints' days, Ælfric was "right in step with the dominant European custom" (263). Robert Upchurch follows with a meticulous essay on a saint's life, that of Cecilia, from Ælfric's Lives of Saints, which he views through the lens of Ælfric's sermons, showing how those sermons provide us with a homiletic context for understanding the hagiography while the saint's life provides a hagiographical context for homiletics. Upchurch's conclusion is that Ælfric blurs the lines between priests and laymen in his treatment of chastity and he suggests that the life may have worked to erode the laity's support for married priests. The trio of pieces on Ælfric concludes with Loredana Teresi's essay on whether or not Ælfric was responsible for a temporale collection, as Clemoes and Godden argued. Teresi argues that the temporale collections in CCCC 302, Cotton Faustina A. xi and CUL Ii. 4. 6 do not necessarily go back to Ælfric, as Clemoes was the first to argue, but could instead derive from two collections assembled independently from Ælfric's works by two people with access to his complete works. This fresh look at the topic is thought-provoking and very worthwhile, but leaves some questions unanswered; if a compiler was close enough to Ælfric to have access to everything in its most up-to-date form, then the distinction becomes rather tenuous.
Andy Orchard's article on Wulfstan as reader, writer and rewriter is a tour de force that ends the central section of the book, providing a rich overview of the oeuvre and the issues involved in studying it; his discussion concludes by adding a further instance of Wulfstan's use of Ælfric, along with a close stylistic analysis of how Wulfstan transformed his source.
The final section of the book, "Appropriation," turns to the impact of Old English homilies, ranging from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. What might seem like the least promising topic in the book, the late Old English stanzaic poem, Seasons for Fasting, is the subject of Mary Richards's absorbing essay; she gives a detailed sourcing of the text and looks at its affinities with the homilies, concluding that the sources and how they are treated point to a connection with Wulfstan's circle. Aidan Conti considers the circulation of the Old English homily in the twelfth century, concentrating on Bodley 343 and analysing the series of Latin homilies which this manuscript contains for what it can tell us about the use of the vernacular material which it accompanies. Conti identifies these homilies as a version of the Carolingian homiliary of Angers (also the source of the Taunton fragments recently edited by Mechthild Gretsch in Anglo-Saxon England 33), a collection of simple Latin texts probably intended to provide models or outlines for preaching to lay audiences; their presence in Bodley 343 bolsters, he suggests, "the notion that content, not language, should guide the discussion of sources for popular preaching" (398). Mary Swan also looks at post-Conquest preaching in English, discussing Lambeth 487 and Cotton Vespasian A. xxii. She shows how the Old English works in Lambeth are reshaped, probably by the Lambeth compiler, and her close attention to matters such as the ruling of the manuscript, the inclusion of Latin phrases and the errors is very productive. Vespasian A. xxii's Old English contents are in a single quire among Latin pieces and Swan again focuses on the physical characteristics of the quire for what they can reveal about how and why Old English homilies were copied c. 1200.
Christopher Abram's piece takes us from Anglo-Saxon England to Scandinavia and investigates the transmission, dissemination and influence of Old English homilies there. Looking in turn at Anglo-Saxon homiletic manuscripts exported to Scandinavia, the use of sources from England in Old Norse-Icelandic homilies and the stylistic and rhetorical influence of Anglo-Saxon homiletics on Old Norse-Icelandic compositions, he offers a fascinating insight into the traffic of ideas to Scandinavia, in which Bury St Edmunds and Worcester, in particular, appear to have played a central role. Aaron Kleist concludes the volume with a compendious survey of those who collected and used Anglo-Saxon homiliaries in Tudor and Stuart England, assembling detailed information on 38 individual collectors. He is also responsible for the very serviceable appendix, which surveys all Anglo-Saxon homiliaries listed in Ker's Catalogue and lists published descriptions of them.
The Old English Homily is a handsome, weighty volume and the generous length of the essays gives space for in-depth studies. It offers an excellent statement of where we are in studying the Old English homily but is far more than just an introduction to the area. The Blickling and Vercelli Books, Ælfric and Wulfstan, Latin texts circulating in England and the continuing influence of the Old English homily are all illuminated in important ways and future work will build on this volume.