This volume forms a happy and successful conclusion to a Covid-disrupted project on the early medieval insular Latin and Old English homiletic tradition. An international conference originally projected to take place in Vercelli, Italy in 2020, but eventually held online two years later, led to the present thirteen chapters on early preaching practices across the liturgical calendar. This includes texts on movable as well as immovable feasts (temporale and sanctorale) in the forms of homilies and hagiography, a distinction which can be difficult to make as the two subgenres form “two sides of the same coin” (17-18). As Rudolf and Hall emphasise in their Introduction (11-32), the genre’s range is enormous, with hundreds of texts surviving from early medieval England alone, and medieval books ranging from large display copies to pocket-size formats (13). The corpus is famously intertextual, with a long tradition of academic source study which continues to thrive (12) and has recently seen a slew of new or improved editions, translations, and electronic sourcing tools (such as ECHOE, SOEALLC and Fontes). [1]
Prolific as it was in medieval times, sermon production is not always given the historical priority it deserves in today’s academic environment. This thought-provoking volume will remind modern commentators to take note when medieval voices speak with such concentrated urgency on topics that were important to them. The articles in this welcome publication are useful for both experienced researchers and novices, presenting nuanced analyses (often arising from acknowledged earlier groundwork), a great deal of helpful background information, and clear formatting. Functioning also, in a way, as a reference tool for sermon studies, the volume includes multiple indices and handlists. The publisher’s series is known for its high standards of accuracy without which such a vast array of information could not be mediated between two book covers (the tiny font size of the footnotes may be the only drawback of this attention to small-scale detail). Each article is followed by a separate bibliography which will allow for convenient sampling and circulation of individual articles. Distinguishing between the various homiletic texts (a famously fraught business) is made easy here with consistent signposting within the articles (often citing traditional titles alongside manuscript shelf marks) and a comprehensive sermon index and concordance (428-32) at the end with Cameron numbers and standardised short titles for the Old English texts and various other cross-referencing for the Latin material. [2] Three of the articles can here serve as impressive examples of the fields of cultural studies, translation theory, and intertextuality which the volume manages to cover.
Helen Appleton’s article is the first of three contributions on Rogationtide (a springtime feast of supplication during which worshippers processed through their local areas, often holding sacred objects). One of the most popular liturgical occasions (in the sense of involving a large text base with a demographically wide target audience), Rogation is here also shown to be the most performative of feasts, linking textual instruction with practised ritual. Appleton highlights the coincidence of popularity and vernacularity: a corpus of “around twenty plus Old English homilies” survives for Rogationtide (34). The article convincingly foregrounds the texts’ aim of crowd control, an essential element for organised Rogationtide worship, both in terms of preaching and processional practice: religious processions needed to be stopped from descending into secular amusements. Homilies needed to find the psychological leverage to prevent immoral behaviour in their target audience, with an undeniable aim of inducing fear in order to achieve that. This could mean managing the audience’s “eschatological expectation” (45), a term here quoted from Brad Bedingfield. [3] This justified frightening readers and listeners into behaving in ways that would see them safe in the eternal life. Although such educational use of fear might at first seem alienating to modern thought, it becomes more familiar or even attractive when equated with modern health and safety culture, for example, or the artistic interest which horror fiction and film hold in modern times. Appleton pays particular attention here to the texts’ given or absent instructions on the precise nature of the processions (34-8) which still needed to “allow for local variation,” often touching on geographical boundaries and the periphery. The commercial imagery contained in Vercelli homilies XI and XII, which compares responsible earthly behaviour as a currency with which salvation can be bought, (43-5) represents a salutary reminder to modern readers that moral principles tend to come at a cost. The article helpfully links textual with material culture through detailed discussion of the ninth-century Northumbrian Rothbury Cross (49-50) as the sculptural equivalent of homiletic preaching.
Hugh Magennis presents a much-needed application of Lawrence Venuti’s translation theory to an example of Old English hagiography, expanding on a theme already explored to great effect in his work on Beowulf translations. [4] Reading the Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers through Venuti’s lens adds valuable nuance to our understanding of the hagiographer’s working method (332-4), as it grapples with the appearance of saints as unattainably holy and unreal. Importantly, Magennis emphasises that Venuti’s “domestication” here transposes the material into a familiar world of fiction, paradoxically not into early medieval reality, because Anglo-Saxon readers could obviously feel at home in spheres outside their domestic settings. One could make the point that Christian thinking in some ways reverses Venuti’s trajectories, paradoxically associating foreignness with experience of the earthly exile and the domestic with the heavenly afterlife as the true home not visited yet. Where the Old English Seven Sleepers acculturates the source text’s Anatolian cityscape with the help of Anglo-Saxon smalltown vocabulary, Magennis picks out some interesting phrasing, also contextualising prior work by Mark Atherton and Katy Cubitt. [5] The question arises as to how conscious such a process of acculturation may have been for the medieval hagiographer, or to what extent this may have been inspired by authorial misunderstandings, rather than concern for the audience’s experiential horizon: this will remain a vexed question and is already familiar from other cases of overlap between more secular and religious accounts (as with Beowulf and Blickling Homily XVI, for example). The final section of Magennis’s article concludes with an interesting comparison between the anonymous Old English text and an Ælfrician version, the latter making little use of “human-interest” content or “contemporary-experience tweaks” (337, 344), instead domesticating the text with its rhythmical prose. Good use is here made of Mary Kate Hurley’s recent book on translation effects, and future readers will additionally make links with Luisa Ostacchini’s work on how Anglo-Saxon hagiographers across the period characterise global overseas connections. [6]
Using Hildegard Tristram’s terminology as a starting point, Stephen Pelle’s discussion focuses on homiletic stock descriptions, particularly those contrasting heaven and hell, and specifically the formulas of “there is x” and “x without y” (for example, “there is eternal reward”; “there is life without sadness,” 171-82). Characteristically, Pelle’s article has one of the longest lists of primary texts in this volume. It first seems to confirm one’s worst suspicions about homiletic working methods (anonymous cut-and-paste composition; paratactic stream-of-consciousness rants), and Pelle acknowledges that it might be “tempting to skip over” stock descriptions that might “hold little promise of telling us anything new,” in our search for signals among the “noise” (174). Pelle then shows that far more intertextual nuances can be made out with a sympathetic comparison of the texts concerned. Using modern research tools (including his own customised database of formulae), Pelle demonstrates with specific examples that even ubiquitous analogues can sometimes be further distinguished where they travel in distinct and fixed sequences, lifted and recycled en bloc by medieval authors. Analogues, we are reminded, are absolutely valuable for our determining of textual relationships. This leads to a new source identification for the Macarius Homily (183-7), with the help of a less common modification of the stock formula involving a genitive phrase (“there is not death’s fear nor devil’s temptation”). In a further case study, Pelle also works out some new insights for homily HomU.12.1 (187-91). The brilliance of this research lies not just in the ability to spot intricate patterns across a vast corpus of material, but also in the requisite command over the published secondary literature that one needs to have in order to spot gaps in modern scholarship. Pelle completes his survey with comments on the long-lived nature of the homiletic tropes concerned, reaching from early antiquity to Lollard preaching and beyond, across multiple languages. Given the accessibility of not just modern electronic tools but also volumes like the one under discussion, one would hope that some cross-period insights will arise from their use, with further refinement of the relevant technical vocabulary used in source study, such as analogue, formula, stock description, and source.
The volume provides email addresses for individual authors, another commendable measure that will surely stimulate further discussion. To better signal individual contributions, the titles of all contributions to the volume are cited here:
Thomas N. Hall and Winfried Rudolf, “Introduction”
1. Helen Appleton, “Our Spiritual Meeting Places: Regulating Liturgical Processions in Old English Homilies for Rogationtide”
2. Charles. D. Wright, “Rogationtide, Doomsday, and Communitas in Bazire-Cross Homily III”
3. Claudia Di Sciacca, “The Rogationtide Homily In vigilia Ascensionis in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 303: An Eschatological Hodgepodge for Post-Conquest England”
4. Winfried Rudolf, “‘Quoting’ the Bible in Times of Trouble: Wulfstan and the Story of Saul and Jonathan in Napier Homily XXXVI”
5. Stephen Pelle, “Revisiting Some ‘Stock Descriptions of Heaven and Hell’ in the Old English Anonymous Homilies”
6. R. D. Fulk, “The Old English Phoenix Homily and its Congeners”
7. Aidan Conti, “Negotiating the Everyday Exegesis of the Homiliary of Angers”
8. Christopher A. Jones, “Early English Homiletic Treatments of Christ’s Passion: Generic and Liturgical Influences”
9. Thomas N. Hall, “The Earliest Latin Sermon for the Virgin’s Conception at the Annunciation”
10. Hugh Magennis, “Domesticating Translation in the Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers”
11. Jane Roberts, “Some Differences between the Vercelli and Vespasian Prose Guthlac”
12. Rosalind Love, “Starting to Write about the Saints of Kent”
13. Leslie Lockett, “The ‘Sanctification’ of Agustinus in the Old English Soliloquies”
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Notes:
1. ECHOE online: Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English, https://echoe.uni-goettingen.de/; Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by Anglo-Saxon Authors, https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~cr30/Mercian/Fontes; SOEALLC: Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture, https://soeallc.hcommons.org/.
2. Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, eds. A. Cameron, A. C. Amos and A. diPaolo Healey (Toronto, 2024), https://doe.artsci.utoronto.ca/.
3. M. B. Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England, (Woodbridge, 2002).
4. L. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 3rd edition (Abingdon, 2018); H. Magennis, Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (Cambridge, 2011).
5. M. Atherton, “Coins, Merchants and the Fear of the King: the Old English Seven Sleepers Story,”Royal Authority in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. G. R. Owen-Crocker and B. W. Schneider (Oxford, 2013), pp. 63-74; C. Cubitt, “‘As the Lawbook Teaches’: Reeves, Lawbooks and Urban Life in the Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers,” English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1021-49.
6. M. K. Hurley, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England (Columbus, 2021); L. Ostacchini, Translating Europe in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (Oxford, 2024), and her forthcoming work on the Old English Martyrology.