We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2016
The later Middle Ages was the high moment of the popular, vernacular sermon, yet relatively few examples of extraliturgical sermons can be recovered from the written evidence. Latin collections of sermon cycles—those preached in the context of the mass liturgy and saints' days—were produced in large quantities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, functioning more or less directly as exemplars for the actual sermons that would then be preached in the local vernaculars of western Europe. In England, such Latin sermon collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often include some vernacular materials, especially lyrics, and many treatises are extant that provide priests with the materials to make sermons on a wide range of topics and for an indefinite number of occasions. Of the relatively few English sermons and sermon collections extant from the period, however, by far the greatest number are, like the Latin cycles, those keyed to the cycle of Sunday texts and to saints' days, whose very formality militates against a sense of them as representative of the most common forms and themes of vernacular sermons, particularly those earnestly preached on the occasions like that which Chaucer satirically describes in the Summoner's Tale, when “ther wente a lymytour aboute / To preche, and eek to begge, it is no doubte” (3.1711–1712). With so few examples of non-liturgical sermons extant, our sense both of the reality and of the satire is incomplete.
1 Citations of Chaucer are from Benson, Larry D., gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston, 1987).Google Scholar
2 For the vernacular dissemination of Latin sermon cycles, see D. L. D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris Before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), 90–131; more generally, see Bataillon, L. J. “Approaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 11 (1980 for 1979): 19–35. For vernacular materials included in sermons, see Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons: Fasciculus Morum and its Middle English Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric (Princeton, 1986); and “Medieval Sermons,” in Alford, John A. ed., A Companion to Piers Plowman (Berkeley, 1988), 155–72. A number of unedited vernacular sermons not mentioned by Wenzel are discussed in Fletcher, Alan J., “The Preaching of the Pardoner,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 15–35. Fletcher's notes (esp. n. 28) help chart some of the “non-thematic,” non-liturgical vernacular sermons to which Fletcher compares the Pardoner's Tale. Google Scholar
3 For a description of the manuscript, see A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1863), 3: 229–30.Google Scholar
4 See nn. 20, 21, 25, and 26 below.Google Scholar
5 Siegfried Wenzel, ed. and trans., Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher's Handbook (University Park, Penn., and London, 1989), 204–05. For other versions of the story of the Christ-Knight, see Wilbur Gaffney, “The Allegory of the Christ-Knight in Piers Plowman,” PMLA 46 (1931): 155–68, and Rosemary Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature,” Review of English Studies n.s. 13 (1962): 1–16.Google Scholar
6 For the other (Oxford, Bodl. MS Greaves 54, fols. 120–25v), see Fletcher, Alan J., “Chaucer's Norfolk Reeve,” Medium Ævum 52 (1983): 100–03.Google Scholar
7 For discussions of the thirteenth-century decree for annual confession and its promulgation, the essential studies are still Marion Gibbs and Jane Lang, Bishops and Reform, 1215–1272, With Special Reference to the Lateran Council of 1215 (Oxford, 1934), and Cheney, C. R., English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1941). For Lenten sermons, see Owst, G. R., Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350–1450 (Cambridge, 1926), 146–48, and Mark Allen, “Penitential Sermons, the Manciple, and the End of The Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 77–96.Google Scholar
8 Friar Daw's Reply. lines 682–83, cited from Dean, James M., ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991). Such passages as this lead one to suspect that the “defense” of friars in Friar Daw is, indeed, as Dean suggests, “generally anticlerical” (ibid., 145).Google Scholar
9 See OED, s.v. “unkind,” 3a; for ingratus as “unkynde” in the Wyclif Bible, see Sap. 16:29; Sir. 20:21, 29:22, 29:32; Luke 6:35; 2 Tim. 3:2, 4; Esd. 7:124, 8:60; for gratus as “kynde,” see further in the Wyclif Bible (e.g., Col. 3:15), the Promptulus parvolorum of ca. 1440, and two late fifteenth-century manuscripts of the English Imitatio Christi (see MED, s.v. “kinde,” adj., 6a, 5c).Google Scholar
10 BL MS Royal 17 B.1, qtd. in MED, s.v. “kinde,” adj., 6a.Google Scholar
11 Ptd. in Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, 2d ed. rev. Smithers, G. V. (Oxford, 1957), 61–65.Google Scholar
12 I cite from Schmidt, A. V. C. ed., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text (London, 1978).Google Scholar
13 See The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the Somme le Roi of Lorens d'Orléans, ed. Nelson W. Francis, EETS 217 (London, 1942), xxxii–xxxix.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 13.Google Scholar
15 Ibid., 13–14.Google Scholar
16 See for example the extended discussion of gratitudo in John Bromyard's Summa praedicantium (Basel, 1485), and of ingratitudo as a sub-heading of avaricia, art. 7, n.p. I discuss the theme more generally in “The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to ‘Kyndenesse’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 365–83.Google Scholar
17 In David Bevington, ed., Medieval Drama (Boston, 1975), 930–31, 936 (lines 742, 751, 754–55, 861–66).Google Scholar
18 See Fletcher, “The Preaching of the Pardoner” (n. 2 above), for a recent and learned argument for the “demotic” sermon form of The Pardoner's Tale, although not including a discussion of its content or themes. The sermon I print below fits the “demotic” form as Fletcher describes it—that is, it does not systematically unfold a single scriptural text so much as present a series of images and themes. Thus my assertion of the Pardoner's parodic evocation of sermons like the sermon here supports Fletcher's contention.Google Scholar
19 Printed by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Paragraph breaks and modern punctuation and capitalization have been added; suspensions have been silently expanded and word-separation has been modernized. Insertions are indicated in angled brackets.Google Scholar
20 The omission of “joy” may have been caused by the similar appearance in the text's extremely minute hand of the following “by.”Google Scholar
21 The reading is unmistakable but the meaning unlikely. This is possibly a scribal error for “a litle cote or a gown”: a broken descender on a cursive ‘g’ in the exemplar's “gown” could have led the scribe, transcribing the whole phrase from a single glance, to misread accordingly the preceding ‘o’ of “cote” in his original. Cf. Chaucer, General Prologue: “And have a thank, and yet a cote and hood” (1.612). If this error has occurred, it points away from the scribe of Gg 6.26 being the original author of the sermon.Google Scholar
22 Apparently conflated with Ps. 34:12 and Gen. 44:4.Google Scholar
23 In margin.Google Scholar
24 In margin.Google Scholar
25 This, evidently a mistake for “rightwisness” or “justice,” may have been written at first as a modifier or gloss on “prudence,” then been mistaken as the first of four words.Google Scholar
26 Struck out: “be herd of all men.”Google Scholar
