Sermons, Saints, and Sources

The corpus of sermons and saints' lives from early medieval England, in English and Latin, is the largest and most varied of its kind from a contemporary European perspective. In recent years this extraordinary body of literature has attracted increasing attention, as witnessed by an efflorescence of new editions, translations, commentaries, essay collections, dissertations, and amply funded research projects such as the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Old English Homilies (ECHOE) project based at the University of Gottingen. The present collection of thirteen essays grew out of a 2022 conference sponsored by the ECHOE project on Old English anonymous homilies and saints' lives and their sources and reflects the best of current scholarship on early medieval homiletic and hagiographic literature from England. This literature is central to an understanding of the spiritual imagination and social practices of non-elite audiences. Together, they introduce new discoveries, identify new sources, edit new texts, make new claims about authors, revisers, and textual relationships, revise previous arguments about aspects of literary history, and provide new interpretations of Old English and Latin sermons and saints' lives. These studies show vividly how European learning influenced the liturgical practices and peripheral education of early medieval England. Contributors include Helen Appleton, Aidan Conti, Claudia Di Sciacca, R. D. Fulk, Thomas N. Hall, Christopher A. Jones, Leslie Lockett, Rosalind Love, Hugh Magennis, Stephen Pelle, Jane Roberts, Winfried Rudolf, and Charles D. Wright.