A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MIDDLE ENGLISH SERMON ON THE DECLINE OF THE WORLD AND THE AGE OF STONE

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)TWs is an edition of a Middle English sermon preserved in London, British Library, Royal MS 8 F.vii.1 The text is not part of any longer cycle or collection of sermons, and seems in fact to have been a late addition to this manuscript, being bound in at the end with an incomplete copy of the Oculus sacerdotis, Veronica O'Mara includes this sermon in her 'Checklist of unedited late Middle English sermons that occur singly or in small groups', and it has also been described in the Repertonum of Late Middle English Prose Sermons compiled by O'Mara and Suzanne Paul, but the text has never been edited before, and has received very little critical attention.2 The sermon deserves to be better known, however, not least for its detailed accounts of materials derived from the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses and from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. While Ovid and Isidore were often cited in medieval sermons, this text devotes an unusual amount of space to paraphrasing and explicating them, presenting a detailed account of Latinate learning in a semi-popular, vernacular context. For the most part, the sermon discusses Ovid and Isidore with comparatively Kttle concern for moral instruction, being at least as interested in the specialized information that these texts contain as it is in what they might be made to say by analogy about Scripture or pastoraKa. As a result, the Royal 8 F.vii sermon invites us to ask new questions about the kinds of material that were thought useful or appropriate for dissemination in fifteenth-century preaching, and to look again at the possibilities for education that were available in the controversial arena of vernacular writing.The protheme of the sermon describes the decline of the world using material attributed to Ovid, dividing prehistory into ages of gold, silver, brass, and iron on the model of Metamorphoses, book I, lines 89-150. Extending the logic of this narrative, the preacher extrapolates a fifth age, an age of stone, which encompasses the present day and is worse than any previous historical period. Finally, he compares the seven sins in this age of stone to the properties of seven different types of stone, citing the entries for diamond, beloculus, magnetite, coral, selenite, tombstone, and pyrite from Isidore's Etymologies, As such, the sermon amounts to a digest of materials from the core curriculum of Latin education, presented in the vernacular and accessible to a lay audience.Fifteenth-century preaching in Middle English has been characterized in terms of its self-conscious orthodoxy, primarily in response to WycHfism. Examining the evidence of late medieval English sermon texts, Helen Spencer concludes that 'there had been a conscious attempt, which lasted about twenty years, c1390- c.1410, by at least some secular priests to encourage preaching, followed by a period of successful repression, which in turn gave way to moderate promotion of sermon collections, often of a self-consciously orthodox kind'.3 Fifteenth-century sermons habitually avoid the exposition of Scripture, and focus instead on pastoraua, suggesting a studied effort to avoid those things that Wyclifism made controversial. This account of English preaching is the more persuasive because it accords with two important narratives about the role of English texts in late medieval religious life. The first of these describes how parish priests, obliged by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century pastoral legislation to provide their congregations with an elementary education in the faith, looked increasingly to the pulpit as a place to deliver it, and to English as the language to deliver it in.4 The second describes the rise and fall of Vernacular theology', the increasing sophistication of religious writing in English in the fourteenth century, and the suppression of this genre by legislation designed to limit the spread of Wyclifism in the fifteenth. …