Homilies: In Praise of God's Holy Mother, On Our Lord's Words to His Disciples at the Last Supper (review)

Ogier of Locedio (d. 1214), also known as Oglerius de Tridino, was a monk and, from 1205, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Locedio in Piedmont. He is an undeservedly obscure figure principally because his most widely circulated and influential work, the Liber de Passione Christi et doloribus et planctibus matris eius, also known as the Planctus Marie and the Quis dabit (from its incipit), was attributed in the Middle Ages to St. Bernard of Clairvaux. It was not until 1952 that H. Barré demonstrated for modern scholarship that the Quis dabit or Planctus Marie was an extract from Ogier's Tractatus in laudibus Sancte Dei Genetricis, which survives with his other major work, the Expositio super Evangelium in coena Domini, in Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale MS E.V.4. This manuscript is from the library of the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria di Staffarda in the diocese of Saluzzo in Piedmont, near Ogier's home monastery; it was compiled probably during his lifetime and is the most important witness to his works. The only edition of this manuscript is by J. B. Adriani, published in 1873 (Turin), but is almost unobtainable. This then is the background to Martin Jenni's translation of Ogier's two major works, which is based on the Staffarda manuscript and Adriani's edition, and for the Quis dabit or Planctus Marie my edition of 1994 (Journal of Medieval Latin, 4). This volume will open up to the general reader and specialist the work of Ogier and give a context for the Planctus Marie, for the Tractatus in laudibus Sancte Dei Genetricis here entitled In Praise of God's Holy Mother is a sermon cycle forming a narrative of meditation on the life of Mary. As Jenni points out, this narrative structure seems to have been imposed on the series of homilies; nevertheless, the Tractatus highlights much about the nature of Cistercian devotion to the Virgin, how it was conceived and developed in the light of the influence of St. Bernard's writing.

The second text, On the Lord's Words to His Disciples at the Last Supper, is a mature work that provides an insight into the profound thoughts and feelings of a Cistercian monk who has drawn on a lifetime of meditation on the words of Christ.

The Introduction is informed and deals with some of the problems of the Tractatus in a careful manner. The question of the origins of the Planctus Marie, that is, whether its circulation predates the compilation of the Tractatus or it was extracted from the finished work, is acknowledged here but Jenni rightly avoids becoming preoccupied with an issue that requires more work on the manuscript tradition of that text than is so far available or indeed relevant to this volume. Just to set the record straight, on page 19 Jenni states that he believes that his is the first modern English translation of the Planctus Marie. There is a translation in Thomas Bestul's Texts of the Passion published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1996 as 'Appendix I,' but this is based on a manuscript chosen seemingly at random and does not, therefore, carry the authority of Jenni's translation.

This volume is most welcome and should win for Ogier or Oglerius many new readers. It is to be hoped that it also stimulates a publisher to reprint the Adriani text or to commission a new edition.