In New Latin Contexts for Old English Homilies, Stephen Pelle demonstrates that “the Old English homiletic corpus will continue to reward richly the attention of scholars, especially when that attention is directed toward exploring the homilies’ essential interconnectedness with contemporary Latin homiletic and exegetical writing and with preaching traditions elsewhere in Europe” (p. 356). The rich rewards offered here take the form of a collection of editions and case studies of ten Latin sources and analogues of Old English homiletic texts and motifs. Pelle focuses on three new Latin contexts – (i) Carolingian homilies and homiliaries, (ii) Hiberno-Latin homilies and homiliaries, and (ii) independent medieval sermons and homilies produced on the Continent – and no fewer than twenty-two Old English homilies. A common methodology and structure govern the treatments of the Latin texts: introductions take up matters of “transmission history, codicological context, literary relations, and (when necessary) linguistic concerns”; parallel-text editions offer a critical apparatus and an apparatus of biblical citations; notes on sources and textual problems follow the editions; case studies detail the texts’ “relevance to various Old English (occasionally also Old Norse or Middle English) homiletic texts and motifs”; and conclusions offer general observations and paths for future research (p. 3).

Texts 1–5 concern the Nativity. With respect to new Latin contexts, Texts 1–3 belong to that of “unedited and lesser studied” (p. 353) Carolingian homilies and homiliaries. Text 1, a Christmas homily from the Bavarian Homiliary, a ninth-century Carolingian sermon collection, Pelle demonstrates to be “the proximate source of most of the Bedan material in [Ælfric’s] First Series Christmas homily” (p. 52), thus revising earlier assumptions about Ælfric’s direct reliance on Bede. Texts 2 and 3, Carolingian sermons on the miracles at Christ’s birth, Pelle shows to have “played an important role in the composition of Vercelli Homily 5” (p. 91) and thus adds Carolingian analogues to established Hiberno-Latin ones for the vernacular Christmas homily. With respect to new Latin contexts, Texts 4 and 5 belong to that of Hiberno-Latin homiliaries, in this case the Catechesis Cracoviensis and Linz homily collection whose Christmas homilies, Pelle argues, “reaffirm” Vercelli Homily 5’s “close connection to Hiberno-Latin exegetical traditions” (p. 141). (A second case study of Texts 4 and 5 extends the reach of those traditions to include an Old Norse Christmas homily in the so-called Icelandic Homily Book.)

Texts 6–10 concern aspects of Christian eschatology. With respect to new Latin contexts, these five independent sermons and homilies belong to “the great mass of unedited medieval Latin preaching material” produced on the Continent (p. 355). Texts 6 and 7, eschatological sermons included in some manuscripts of the homiliaries of Angers and Saint-P ère de Chartres, indicate for Pelle that Old English eschatological motifs such as “A Warning of the Unpredictability of Death,” “The ‘Devil’s Account’ of Heaven,” and “The Pledge of the Soul” likely entered the vernacular homiletic tradition through Latin composite homilies like these. Text 8, a sermon related to an early redaction of the Visio Pauli found in a late ninth-century miscellany (Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, 27 [1195], pt. 3), Pelle shows to preserve evidence of a previously unknown version of the Visio Pauli, the popular apocryphal account of St. Paul’s tour of hell. Because evidence for the lost redaction survives in an early Middle English homily (Lambeth Homily 4) and an early Middle Irish poem Saltair na rann as well as Text 8, itself “composed under Insular influence,” Pelle posits that the now lost version of the Visio “may have been identical with or closely related to an early redaction known to the Old English anonymous homilists” (p. 269). Text 9, a short (now incomplete) Doomsday sermon from a ninth-century Carolingian priest’s handbook (Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, 288), furnishes Pelle evidence that “the concept of a thousand-year Doomsday was known among preachers on the Continent” (p. 317) who, like their counterparts in England and Ireland, apparently found in the explicit millennialist idea condemned by some theologians “a memorable detail that could be used to impress upon readers and listeners the terrifying scope of the Last Judgement” (p. 319). Text 10, a twelfth-century quando volueris sermon in a homiliary whose surviving witnesses are of German, Austrian, and Swiss origin, preserves so free an adaptation of the well-known Insular homiletic exemplum known as the “Three Utterances of the Soul” that Pelle classifies it as a “new version” (p. 349) he designates as Recension IV.

Three appendices follow: (i) a Christmas homily edited from Admont, Benediktinerstift, 65 and 66 (related to Texts 1 and 5); (ii) Latin analogues for Middle Irish and Middle High German lists of miracles at Christ’s birth edited from portent lists in Fribourg, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, L34 (215), and Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 4⁰ 149 (related to Texts 2 and 3); (iii) and an edition of a Vision of a Monk of Rome (related to the Visio Pauli), which Pelle identifies as “the hitherto unidentified source of at least four Middle English sermons, a Middle English poem, an early Middle French exemplum, and an influential description of heaven and purgatory that came to be included in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus da Varagine” (p. 417).

As Pelle notes (p. 2), no single argumentative through line unites the ten principal studies, but his main point is persuasive: scholars of early English preaching traditions do well to look elsewhere in Europe for Latin sources and analogues. Pelle’s persuasiveness is grounded in his deep erudition, his judiciousness in weighing complex evidence, his meticulousness in preparing the editions (confirmed by multiple spot checks of the base-manuscript editions of Texts 1–3), and his elegant arguments couched in clear prose. The work exhibits a notable generosity toward other scholars on whose work he builds and occasionally corrects, though with a humility born of the study of sources wherein “refinement is virtually always possible” (p. 352). With this magisterial volume Pelle joins Malcolm Godden, Thomas N. Hall, Susan Irvine, Winfried Rudolf, Donald Scragg, and Charles D. Wright unearthing treasure-stores of sources and analogues for the study of Old English homilies.