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  • Chapter 6 - English as a Language for Sermon Writing

  • from Part II - The Affordances of English
  • Mark Faulkner, Trinity College Dublin
  • Book:
    A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century
    Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    28 July 2022, pp 184-224

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that sermons are the one genre where there is a more-or-less continuous tradition of using English through the long twelfth century, a consequence of the pragmatic necessity of communicating with a largely monoglot laity. It begins with an account of twelfth-century preaching and the role of written texts vernacular and Latin in its performance. It then considers the Vespasian Homilies, a booklet of four sermons produced in Kent around 1200, focusing on Vespasian 2, which it argues is a distinctively Middle English text, probably composed around 1150, but which shows substantive debts to Ælfric and pre-Conquest textual culture. The final section of the chapter considers, along with two other related manuscripts, the Lambeth Homilies, copied around 1200 in Worcestershire, showing that similar continuities and developments can be traced there. Sermons, in short, were the primary vehicle for the continuity of practices for writing English in the period.