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Sermo doctorum. Compilers, preachers, and their audiences in the early medieval west . Edited by Maximilian Diesenberger , Yitzhak Hen and Marianne Pollheimer . (Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 9.) Pp. ix + 454 incl. 2 figs and 5 tables. Turnhout : Brepols , 2013. [euro]110. 978 2 503 53515 9
Reviews
Plenty of sermons survive from the early Middle Ages; for example, Thomas Amos has identified some 970 sermons as having been composed in the Frankish kingdoms between 750 and 950 and Diesenberger is confident that others remain to be uncovered. Yet this rich corpus of material has been rather neglected until recently by all except a very few specialists. This is because sermons all too often appear to scholars as unrewarding, dry and derivative texts, made up as most are of compilations of biblical passages and extensive passages from earlier patristric texts or more straightforward adaptations of earlier sermons. Furthermore, they appear curiously ahistorical; explicit references to historical events, such as those in Lupus of Ferrières's sermons on the Vikings' raids in the 840s, remain very rare. Yet, as the authors of this collection of essays demonstrate, careful investigation of the ways in which sermons were produced, adapted and disseminated in the years between the fourth and tenth centuries has much to tell us about how the processes of Christianisation were conceived and played out in the churches of early medieval continental Europe.
In a helpful introduction Maximilian Diesenberger sets out the general problems facing scholars of early medieval sermons as well as introducing the other essays in the collection. He points to the importance of investigating not just their contents but the...