Sermon-Writing Women: Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Sermons from the Augustinian Convent of Jericho in Brussels

On December 8, 1459, Maria van Pee, canoness regular in the Brussels convent of Jericho, decided to write down the sermon that she heard her confessor, Jan Storm, deliver in the convent’s church. Her initiative laid the foundation for a long and carefully maintained tradition of sermon writing, which would endure until the beginning of the eighteenth century. After providing a short historical background, this article focuses on the convent’s literary production and especially on the sermon collections and their prologues in which the female scribes account for their contribution to the writing and editing of the sermons and the composition of the manuscripts. By concentrating on the collection of Maria van Pee, it demonstrates how the sisters handled the sermons they heard their confessors preach in order to keep them from oblivion and how they thereby designed a creative and collective “authorship” for themselves, a role that was unusual for the Middle Ages.