A Mendicant Sermon Collection from Composition to Reception

This study analyzes in detail the Novum opus dominicale of John Waldeby, a member of the convent of the Augustinian friars in York. This unedited collection of some sixty sermons for Sundays and major feasts is extant in two manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford), MSS Laud misc. 77 and Bodley 687. The present study places the work and the preacher within the wider context of mendicant preaching as mass communication in the Middle Ages. In doing so, it focuses on the educational environment which encompasses conventual education and preaching to the laity, and on the library in which this model sermon collection was compiled and used, identifying the role and meticulous design of the mendicant library collection. Through a detailed examination of sermon form in conjunction with Robert of Basevorn's Forma praedicandi, it tries to disentangle the intricate considerations involved in the processes of sermon composition and reveals the strategies of interpretation and communication in the use of exempla and imagery in preaching. It investigates the careful organization of Waldeby's work as a cycle of sermons for an entire year. In this way, it makes possible a deeper understanding of a wide range of complex issues from composition to reception through the prism of this important fourteenth-century sermon collection.

"This book as a whole is well-organized and well signposted. There is a seriousness to the scholarship and an intellectual openness and alertness that make it satisfying to read; also real insight into later medieval modes of thought. Medieval sermons have attracted a lot of fine scholarship from a range of discipline. This ranks with the best of it." --David d'Avray, The Medieval Review, 16.05.01