Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Susan Powell ed. by Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara (review)

This festschrifthonours Professor Susan Powell, well known to her fellow medievalists as an editor of Middle English sermons, on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Salford. It contains twelve studies and three editions, all relevant to English and Latin texts that can be regarded as ‘sermons’ in one sense or another.

The volume opens with Derek Pearsall on G. R. Owst, ‘the first founder of English sermon studies’ (p. 11). Pearsall excavates Owst’s personal background as an ‘outsider’ to explain his attitude towards the medieval Church, his belief in vernacular sermons as a national shaping force foreshadowing the Reformation and in their value as a source for social history, and his uncritical attitude towards his sources. R. N. Swanson follows with an account of a fifteenth-century parish priest’s anthology containing part of a sermon-cycle, the so-called Italian Homiliary, which surprisingly turns out to date to the eleventh century. The individual texts, however, are Carolingian and their circulation in late medieval England raises interesting questions about medieval perceptions of the past. Anne Hudson writes on two Bohemian manuscripts of John Wyclif’s sermons. She demonstrates that, although far removed in time and place from Wyclif himself, they are often textually superior to the earlier manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.16.2, that was written in England. William Marx examines The Devil’s Parliamentas a ‘sermo literarius’ (p. 64) that was designed to be read but never delivered, and the ironic role within it of the Devil as narrator. Margaret Connolly studies sermon expositions of teaching on the difficult subject of the Holy Ghost and, in particular, the short texts enumerating the Seven Gifts typically found in devotional anthologies. John J. Thompson writes on ‘preaching with a pen’ (p. 101) in Mirk’s Festialand Love’s Mirror, which both circulated far beyond their primary audiences during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in numerous manuscripts and print editions. Stephen Morrison discusses ‘scribal performance’ (p. 116) and recomposition in a group of late fifteenth-century sermon manuscripts, four of which were written by the same scribe.

The remaining five ‘studies’ are considerably longer than the preceding. Vincent Gillespie studies the Syon brothers and the ‘often aphoristic’ (p. 142) daily readings on the priestly life contained in their Latin martilogein BL, MS Additional 22285: many concern preaching and teaching by example. Jeremy J. Smith studies the unusually sophisticated punctuation practices, probably designed to guide silent private reading, in a manuscript copy made in Scotland of an early printed edition of Mirk’s Festial. Joseph J. Gwara reassesses, with copious black and white illustrations, the evidence for the dating of Wynkyn de Worde’s output between 1501 and 1511. Martha Driver (who shares the editing of the whole collection) contributes a comprehensive study of the visual representations of ‘preachers’ as varied as Christ, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonah, Mohammed, Langland’s Dobet, and interchangeable bishops, in and out of their pulpits, in late medieval English and early Tudor manuscripts and printed texts. The final ‘study’ is by Julia Boffey, on the textual transmission of Middle English verse found in sermons. By reviewing ‘a small sample of sermon material incorporating verse of some kind’ (p. 260), she shows that such slippery verse had a life of its own.

The group of ‘texts’ opens with Oliver Pickering’s discussion and re-edition, with glosses, of the late thirteenth-century South English Legendary’s All Souls’ Day poem on Purgatory, as found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 108. This is not a sermon but has preaching characteristics and, he argues, ‘is the work of more than one writer’ (p. 288). Kari Anne Rand edits extracts from the...