A Sermon on the Anniversary of the Death of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick

Abstract

Despite G. R. Owst's important studies, medieval English sermons have been examined only sporadically, and too often, as Siegfried Wenzel has noted, such investigations have treated sermons merely as structural analogues for the works of Chaucer and others. Fortunately, in recent years Wenzel himself and others have reaffirmed Owst's principal concept: sermons are mirrors reflecting the social and literary milieu of their time. This renewed interest in the sermon as historical document, however, may encounter a criticism made of Owst's own procedure, namely, a tendency to select items of significance from a wide range of material without adequate attention to the immediate context of each. The printing of a complete sermon, with its mixture of historical allusion, literary motif, and social commentary—apotpourriof the interesting, the dull, the unusual, and the commonplace—provides not only a necessary balance in method, but a better perspective of the sermon as a literary construction in its own right.