Late Medieval Popular Preaching in Britain and Ireland: Texts, Studies, and Interpretations

Sermons and preaching played a key role in forming the religious mentality of many late-medieval men and women. Yet the practice of preaching depended on many variables: the nature and disposition of the audience, the competence of the preacher, and even the stylistic variations that different Orders developed to distinguish their preachers from others. This study and anthology of late-medieval popular preaching intended for the laity explores this diversity by presenting examples of sermons from each of the major wings of the late-medieval orthodox Church: the friars, the regulars, the canons regular, the secular canons, and the seculars. It also reveals the ways in which this diversity in forms of preaching finds its correlate in the codicological diversity that existed between sermon manuscripts themselves. Late-Medieval Preaching in Great Britain and Ireland demonstrates how formidable and culturally constitutive a force preaching was, and also examines some of the ways in which it impinged on the production of vernacular literature, ultimately revealing the powerful and wide-spread influence of sermon discourse on cultural production in greater British society.