Medieval Sermons Research Articles

A Companion to Piers Plowman ed. by John A. Alford

REVIEWS JOHN A. ALFORD, ed. A Companion to Piers Plowman. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xii, 286. $32.50. In this new book John Alford has supplied a much-needed guide to the problems and contexts of Piers Plowman, arguably the most difficult poem of the English Middle Ages. Like Piers, the book is arranged in trinities: three sections of three chapters each. The first, "PiersPlowmanand the Late Middle Ages," contains essays on the design of the poem byJohn Alford, on its historical context by Anna Baldwin, and on Langland's theology by Robert Adams. The second section, "Generic Influences on Piers Plowman," focuses on allegorical visions (Stephen Barney), on satire (John Yunck), and on medieval sermons (Siegfried Wenzel). The final section, "The Text and Language of Piers Plowman," offers essays on the text by George Kane, on the dialect and grammar of the poem by M. L. Samuels, and on alliterative style by David Lawton. In conception these trinities are certainly not a progression from Do-well to Do-best; rather the design seems to proceed from the least to the most specialized. The three sections in turn are symmetrically bracketed by Anne Middleton's Prologue on the history of Piers criticism and Anne Hudson's Epilogue on the influence of Piers. This is an all-star lineup: all the contributors are leading experts on their areas, and some of them have done groundbreaking work on the poem. Each of their eleven essays concludes with a lengthy and useful bibliography on its own subject. The Companion seems intended for an audience well advanced in medieval studies, especially graduate students, for whom it is likely to become a vade mecum. Even specialists will benefit from its up-to-date summaries of recent research. None of the many passages in the poem's difficult Middle English, however, and very few of the citations in Latin are translated. The essays of part III are often quite technical. Hence under­ graduates are likely to profit most from Alford's perceptive "interpretive summary" (which is also a structural analysis) of the poem and from Anna Baldwin's examination of the fourteenth-century historical context. Bald­ win focuses on the poem's intersection with the feudal system, the prob­ lems of agricultural labor (especially as a consequence of the Black Death), the Peasant's Revolt, the Wycliffite movement, the conflict of secular and 89 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ecclesiastical authorities over properties and rent, the Hundred Years' War, and England's unstable governance and kingship. In his fine survey of"Langland'sTheology," RobertAdamsdeals first with three traditionally controversial questions about the drift of Langland's thought. IsPiers's central concern theredemption ofsociety or theredemp­ tion ofthe individual? IsPiersa poem aboutthe way to perfection orsimply the way to salvation? Is Langland's approach to God mainly "vertical" or "horizontal," the mystic's ascent beyond time, or the prophet's pilgrimage through time? Then Adams turns to more recently controversial topics: Langland's theology ofGrace (and his semi-Pelagianism, a topic on which Adams has done pioneering work); Langland's attitude toward the sacra­ ments, especially baptism and penance; and Langland's apocalypticism. Finally, the chapter summarizes Langland's theological sources and paral­ lels among monastic writers, the moderni, and Wyclif and his followers. Stephen Barney's chapter on "Allegorical Visions" studies the traditions of allegory and visionary literature in biblical, prophetic visions, in the Apocrypha, in the platonic tradition of Macrobius, Boethius, Martianus Capella, and Bernard Sylvestris; in French literature; and in English liter­ ature before Langland. John Y unck surveys the sources and traditions behind Langland's satire in estates literature, Menippean satire, and the medieval sermon, as well as in fourteenth-century satirical writers ofpoems and drama. He locates the "spiritual intertext" and the ethical interests of fourteenth-century satire in the great religious renewal that began in the thirteenth century with the Fourth Lateran Council, the rise ofthe mendi­ cant orders, and the institutionalization of the universities. The gem of the section on generic influences, however, comes from Siegfried Wenzel, on medieval sermons. His survey ofscholarship on both sermon content and sermon form is excellent...

Dance and Punishment

The medieval sermon often included a number of short stories among other rhetorical devices and means of persuasion. The classical and clerical traditions called such narratives exempla. As well as entertaining the listeners, avoiding boredom and focusing their attention, they had a specific and important function in the strategies adopted by the preachers to prove their cases: that is to say to exemplify a piece of moral instruction by providing an illustrative example more or less realistic in which behaviour was either clearly rewarded or clearly punished. In this context, dance in various form is the subject of several narratives. The purpose of the present article is to sketch the tradition of dance exempla, and to comment on the image of dance promoted by these narratives in the society of the time. Inevitably, the most frequent element is a monastic-penitential condemnation of worldly enjoyment. However different connotations are sometimes introduced; and the means by which the narrative patterns are used to elicit condemnation are often significant in themselves.1

The Word Eclipsed? Preaching in the Early Middle Ages

The modern interest in and study of medieval sermon literature was first driven by a combination of confessional acrimony and professional scholarship. L. Bourgain, Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Richard Albert, Rudolf Cruel, Anton Linsenmayer, and G. R. Owst combed through the archives to uncover the written remains of medieval preaching, and what they discovered came as a surprise to those who had been raised on the Protestant black legend of a mute medieval Church. For quantity and variety the period from the twelfth century to the Reformation must count as one (or several) of the great ages of pulpit activity. In fact, on the eve of the Reformation there was some concern that too much was being preached too often. For example, as a result of complaints by laity and clergy alike, in 1508 the Bishop of Breslau ordered a limit on the number of sermons preached in the city. To be sure, modern judgments concerning the quality of that preaching in both style and content vary with the confessional stance and aesthetic preferences of the individual scholar. But of the late medieval dedication to preaching in season and out there can be no doubt.

Old and New Evidence of the Career of William Melton, O.F.M.

The preaching of William Melton in York in 1426 stands alongside the Wycliffite A Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge as a rare instance in which drama was the subject of a medieval sermon.1 The text of the Wycliffite sermon tells us much about drama of the period, but we do not know the author. By contrast, though we do not have the text of Melton's sermon in York, we have some information about the preacher himself. Yet, scholars of English drama have frequently cited and drawn conclusions from Melton's preaching in York without considering what else is known about him.2 Indeed, I am not aware of any, single, published study which collates all known evidence. I will compare evidence from six sources, which I believe represents all available evidence on Melton. Five of these sources

The David Myth in Western Literature.

This collection of eleven original essays each by a different scholar outlines the rich body of imaginative and devotional literature which has the biblical poet-warrior-king as its subject or primary focus, showing David to have as strong an imaginative appeal for Western writers as such better-known mythic heroes as Orpheus, Oedipus, Samson, and Ulysses. The introduction to the volume surveys the development of the David myth particularly in British and American literature. The essays represent a variety of critical approaches to the myth as literature, treating in detail such works as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Cowley's Davideis, Christopher Smart's A Song to David, and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and examining the complex uses made of David in the Midrash, Talmud, and Patristic writings; medieval sermons and Reformation devotional treatises; and American Puritan sermons.

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

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.

A Collection of Sermons Given in Paris C. 1267, Including a New Text by Saint Bonaventura on the Life of Saint Francis

ALMOST as if it had been contrived by its writer and the weight of centuries to suit the pristine Franciscan spirit, a most unprepossessing manuscript clad as it were in gray contains hidden treasures including a new source for the life of St Francis. Possibly the very unattractiveness of the manuscript explains in part why it has been all but overlooked, for not only is it drably bound, sloppily copied, erased, and marked up, but, what is worse, it is mutilated. Another reason, no doubt, is that it contains only a collection of sermons, a genre that too often has been regarded with indifference by historians. Such indifference is not surprising, for medieval sermons, without question, have their dreadful longueurs. Nonetheless, the cultural historian ignores them at his peril. Thus the sermon collection in the Munich manuscript Cim 23372 not only casts light on the daily life and culture of Paris in the last years of Saint Louis but contains a sermon by St Bonaventura for the feast of the translation of St Francis that proves to be a new source for understanding the two greatest Franciscans of the thirteenth century and probably of all time. As little interested as most scholars of the present age have been in medieval sermons, those of the nineteenth century were even less so. When the Royal Bavarian librarian Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785-1852) came to cataloguing Clm 23372 all he thought it necessary to say was: membr. 4?. S. XIII. 98 fol. [sic actually 99] Sermonum de tempore pars (quaterniones VIII ad XX) cum proverbiis gallicis; f. 64 sermo magistri Johannis de Aurelian.' Had Schmeller merely added the fact that among the authors of the diverse sermons in the MS was St Bonaventura, a circumstance that should have sprung to his eyes from a cursory glance at the opening pages, such a notice would no doubt have attracted the attention of the subsequent editors of Bonaventura's Opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1883-1902), who did their best to include every known sermon of Bonaventura in their collection. The Quaracchi edition, however, ignores Cim 23372, and so it seems to have been ignored except for two passing references to it by the great Charles Homer Haskins (see n. 32 below) for a full century

The Doomsday Mystery Play: An Eschatological Morality

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Doomsday Mystery Play: An Eschatological MoralityDavid J. LeighDavid J. Leigh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 67, Number 3Feb., 1970 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/390168 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright 1970 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.