The Last Judgement in Medieval Preaching ed. by Thom Mertens et al. (review)

Marianne Cecilia Gaposchkin noted a few years ago that the literature on preaching in the later Middle Ages is vast and growing. Beryl Smalley, whose work on Franciscan preaching in the fourteenth century was innovative at the time, might be surprised at the ways in which present-day historians think sermons can be used to illuminate aspects of past everyday life. As Nicole Beriou comments in her Introduction to another collection on sermons, they include attitudes to marriage, death, the body, sanctity, and women.

Only death and sanctity are considered in this volume. It is part of a series on patristic medieval and Reformation sermons and preaching that has sprung from one of the various distinct conference groups that have come together to study aspects of the role and function of the sermon in society, in this case the European research group established in Berlin in 1996. It is the much delayed publication of the papers presented at a conference held in Brussels and Antwerp in 2000 which may help explain why some of them have appeared elsewhere in a slightly different form.

Most of the contributors to this collection are involved in the production of repertoriaof the surviving sermons in various vernacular languages, in emulation of Johannes Baptist Schneyer’s massive Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters. Although their chapters are directed to the specific issue of sermons on the Last Judgement, the repertoriain many cases shape their approach giving the manuscripts and their sources priority in the discussion of the way ideas about death and judgement vary depending on the place, the period, the audience, and the theological background of the sermon writer.

It is perhaps unfortunate that all but one of the chapters are concerned with Dominican writers as it is likely that different emphases would emerge from a study of Franciscan and other orders of preachers but these seem the preserve of the circle around Beverley Mayne Kienzle and the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society. Christopher Burger’s examination of an Augustinian sermon in Latin on the Advent of Christ as Judge, probably designed for the opening of a synod, is the only exception and he does not stress the distinctions.

Stephan Borgehammar is the only other author in this collection who considers Latin Sermons and in a somewhat disjointed piece expresses the hope that understanding of how the Latin and vernacular traditions interlock might help explain ‘how that whole reality works’ (p. 13) but so far this has eluded the specialists contributing to the volume.

Readers unfamiliar with the structure of sermon collections may be surprised at the relative paucity of references to the Day of Judgement in recorded sermons. Representations of the Day of Doom in medieval churches from the grand entrances on cathedrals to the humbler wall paintings in parish churches would suggest that consciousness both of particular judgement and of the Final Judgement was frequently present in medieval minds but sermons were tailored to the liturgical calendar. Although Veronica O’Mara shows in her study of medieval English prose sermons that in England they were a popular category outside the set dates such as the second Sunday in Advent, in most vernacular collections commentary, as Maria Sherwood Smith shows, they were confined to the Sundays when the relevant gospel passages Matthew 25. 31–46, Luke 21. 10–11, 25 were the gospel readings. Preaching on Revelations was less common probably because as Carola Redzich explains in her examination of Johannes Nider’s sermons on Revelations 22. 14–15 it was seen as a difficult text and one that often led people to heresy. She makes the important point that sermons on the Last Things were not necessarily associated with consideration of Eternal Life before the fifteenth century because the two concepts were derived from different exegetical traditions.

The authors look at the motifs...