Latin Anonymous Sermons from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Ad 300-800): Classification, Transmission, Dating

This volume contains the proceedings of the international conference on anonymous sermons funded by the F.R.S-FNRS and held on 16 May 2019 at the Universite de Namur (Belgium), within the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the research centre Pratiques Medievales de l'Ecrit (PraME). It brings together scholars working on late antique and early medieval Latin preaching and considers for the first time anonymous sermons as an object of study in its own right. The sermons here studied are Christian Latin preached texts, thought to date from the period c. 300-800 AD, which are not currently attributed to a known author. Long neglected because of their uncertain attribution, these sermons however offer new material for the study of late antique and early medieval Christianity. The contributions assembled here provide an essential entry point to the study of these little-known sermons: after an introduction which sets the aims of the book, discusses methodological issues and the state of the art and describes main avenues for research, individual papers present future tools to classify sermons and explore their medieval transmission in manuscripts, offer new critical editions of previously unknown sermons, and develop methods and reliable criteria to shed new light on their historical context of composition. Both engaging with current issues and challenges to the study of anonymous sermons and offering innovative case studies, this book opens up new ground for future research on late antique and early medieval Latin Christian preaching in general.