The Sermons of William of Newburgh. Edited by A. B. KRAEBEL.

Abstract

Additions to the Toronto series of medieval Latin texts are always welcome. This edition is of sermons of the twelfth-century historian William of Newburgh, printed by Thomas Hearne in 1719 but previously without a modern edition. The edition contains an excellent full discussion of what is known of William’s life, the manuscripts, and the content of the sermons. It lacks only an equally comprehensive discussion of their place in the development of the genre of medieval sermons. Such exegetical sermons, intended for a community of regular (Augustinian) canons, and of the period just before the Ars Praedicandi emerged in the nascent universities of Europe, are of particular interest in this respect. One of the distinctions which was going to be drawn more sharply in the new academic world was between ‘lecturing’ and ‘preaching’ on the Bible. It may all have been much the same thing in the days of Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great but that was about to change. These three sermons, polished and literary though they are in their surviving form, were originally intended as homilies for members of a community to guide them in their chosen way of life. They are reflective, designed to encourage meditation, and they conspicuously lack the crisp but formal patterns of theme and division of theme developed in the early thirteenth-century universities for preaching purposes. On the other hand—and this is especially noticeable in the second sermon—William was clearly familiar with the possibilities of figurative interpretation. The third sermon, on St Alban, makes a good deal of use of texts from the Cantica Canticorum; William was the author of a commentary on the Song of Songs. These interesting questions apart, this is a more than worthy addition to an excellent series.