Source Studies in the Lambeth Homilies

By virtue of being one of the few Middle English homily collections of its time to survive to the present day, London, Lambeth Palace MS 487 (West England, s. xii/xiii) is a crucial witness to the state of English preaching around the year 1200.¹ Still, the place of the manuscript in the history of English religious literature has proved difficult for scholars to determine, largely because its contents vary considerably in date of composition. Four of the seventeen Lambeth Homilies (II and IX–XI) are adapted partially or completely from surviving Old English homilies by Ælfric and Wulfstan, and thus go back to texts composed around two centuries before the manuscript was made.² Most of the other homilies, however, seem to be newer compositions, which have no direct parallels in Old English homiletic literature.

In the last two decades, as English homilies composed and copied in the twelfth century have emerged from relative obscurity, collections like Lambeth 487 have become the object of a growing amount of attention.³ Scholars like Mary Swan and Elaine Treharne have effectively discredited the arguments of earlier scholars that Lambeth 487 and other English homiletic manuscripts of similar date represented a deterioration of the Old English homiletic tradition, “a last flicker”⁴ or “a pale reflection”⁵ of the works of the Anglo-Saxon homilists. Swan’s research has primarily focused on the articles in Lambeth 487 and other late manuscripts that go back to pre-Conquest originals, and her works have demonstrated the continuing relevance and renewal of the works of the Anglo-Saxon homilists (particularly Ælfric) at the turn of the thirteenth century.⁶ At the same time, Treharne has explored critical approaches toward and historical implications of the composition and copying of English works in the centuries after the Conquest.⁷ While Swan and Treharne have discussed the continuities in homiletic manuscripts like Lambeth 487, Bella Millett has been instrumental in bringing to light their differences from Anglo-Saxon traditions, most importantly by showing that many of the anonymous texts in these manuscripts show structural similarities to twelfth-century Continental “model sermons” and in their original form are unlikely to antedate the manuscripts by more than a few decades.⁸ All these scholars have shown that the environment in which Lambeth 487 was written was one of intellectual dynamism and modernity rather than decrepitude and antiquarianism.

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in the Lambeth Homilies, much work remains to be done. Scholarly access to the collection still depends on Richard Morris’s EETS edition of 1868, which, while it is a generally faithful transcription of the manuscript, contains no apparatus criticus or fontium and only sparse textual notes.⁹ Many questions about the manuscript’s composition and audience remain unanswered.¹⁰ Furthermore, while Millett’s work is a good starting point in the study of the relationships between the twelfth-century English homilies and contemporary Latin sermons, almost no further effort has been devoted to identifying possible textual sources for the anonymous texts in Lambeth 487, even though several of them are structured around running Latin quotations. By identifying partial or complete sources for three of these homilies in the present article, I hope to provide a clearer picture of the literary and theological background of the manuscript.

I. Lambeth Homily I

Celia Sisam published one of the most important studies of Lambeth 487 in 1951.¹¹ While her view of the homilies as a backward-looking production with no literary value has been rightly abandoned, her analysis of the scribal traditions and known sources of the homilies remains influential. Her examination led her to the following conclusion: homilies I–V and IX–XIII (which she called Group A) were copied from a relatively old manuscript (which she called X), which contained a significant proportion of works from the Anglo-Saxon period, while homilies VII, VIII, and XIV–XVII (Sisam’s Group B) were copied from a younger source (her manuscript Y), and have no direct connection to Old English texts.¹² Lambeth VI, a rhymed discourse on the Pater noster, does not...