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 varied contexts in which sermons survived, not only in collections of homiletic texts but also in handbooks alongside various other kinds of pastoral texts, for what they can tell us about the expectations and experiences of those who compiled them, those who preached from these texts, and those who listened to them.
It is not possible in this review to do justice to all fourteen contributions in this collection, but it is worth highlighting the common themes which emerge. Several demonstrate how the texts that we have are the product of their compilers as much as their authors. Mark Vessey's study of late fourth- and fifth-century sermones ad populum demonstrates how problematic it is to assume that the sermons delivered orally by preachers such as Augustine were then written down as delivered, and suggests that the written records of these texts as they now survive are the result of a much more collaborative process in which compilers from the fifth century played a vital role in editing and transmitting these texts. Others demonstrate how important it is to understand how and why authorial sermon texts came to be preserved. Ian Wood suggests that the fragmentary sermons in the collection of Avitus of Vienne's works, which now survives in a sixth-century Merovingian papyrus, were preserved not as exemplary sermons but rather as part of a dossier for Avitus' role in the events of late fifth- and early sixth-century Burgundy. Rob Meens investigates Atto of Vercelli's sermon collection, and shows how the parallels with the letters and capitularies in the manuscript which transmitted them tell as much about Atto's ambitions for his own legacy as a reformer, as the issues meriting attention in tenth-century Vercelli. Understanding the purpose behind the compilation of particular collections is another important theme. Yitzhak Hen investigates an eighth-century collection of patristic sermons from the circle of the first bishop of Würzburg and argues that it was compiled to support a missionary priest with an interest in the Last Judgement and paganism. Two contributions focus on different collections composed by Harbanus Maurus. Marianne Pollheimer suggests that the editorial choices which he made from his sources reveal a good deal about how he interpreted and sought to promote the call to correctio. Clare Woods uses one collection to investigate the ways in which Mary and Marian feasts were understood and promoted in the Carolingian period. Other contributions investigate the process of redaction of earlier texts. François Dolbeau gives a helpful account of how to approach texts in this way through his study of how Rather of Verona reworked earlier texts in his own sermons. Rosamond McKitterick makes a careful examination of the earliest surviving copy of Origen's homilies on Luke (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ms 334 [north Frankia, s. viii2]) to show how the works of pastristic authors circulated within the Frankish kingdom, before suggesting that this collection, or one very like it, may have been one of main sources for Paul the Deacon's influential Homiliary. Finally, several contributions focus on the thorny questions of how far it is possible to uncover the audience for sermons, and who constituted them. Karl Brunner suggests that the references to ‘sinful rustici’ in the sermons of Caesarius of Arles should not be taken literally as evidence of a peasant audience, but rather were included to make his middle-class audience feel better about themselves: they were not the worst sinners. James McCune explores the evidence of legislation, inventories, letters and annals, as well as sermons for evidence for the audiences for Carolingian sermons, arguing that the aspirations of Frankish programmes of correctio to reach out to a socially wide audience were indeed fully realised.
But, as Jesse Billett reminds us in a wonderfully clear and careful piece, redacted sermons were not always an opportunity for edification. He gives an account of how patristic sermons came to be read in the Night Office, arguing that their liturgical context stripped them of their homiletic admonitory message and that their recital became instead a form of devotion and meditation rather than edification. Walter Berschin and Bernhard Zeller's analysis and edition of a sermon addressed by a monk of Saint-Gallen to his fellow monks, the Versus Winitharii from c. 760 needs to be viewed in this light.
Billett's salutary reminder that we need to understand how sermons were read in various contexts is based largely on English material. England, however, is otherwise conspicuous by its absence. Yet Anglo-Saxon scholars have done a good deal of work on the rich vernacular corpus from late tenth-century and eleventh-century England. The collection's origins lie in a 2009 Vienna conference, which arose out of a grant-funded project focused on Bavaria; such a lacuna is therefore to be expected. But such a gap also offers an obvious opportunity for another collection in the series to take up the points raised here from the continental material and read them against the Anglo-Saxon material. These caveats notwithstanding, those essays included here provide a very helpful orientation in a difficult field and, it is to be hoped, the collection as a whole will help to promote further work on early medieval sermons.
