[Sermo_ Studies on Patristic, Medieval, And Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 11] Martha W. Driver, Veronica O'Mara - Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England_ Essays in Honour of Susan Pow

Preaching the Word
in M anuscript and P rint

in L ate M edieval E ngland
SERMO: STUDIES ON PATRISTIC, MEDIEVAL,
AND REFORMATION SERMONS AND PREACHING
Editor
Roger Andersson, Stockholms universitet
Editorial Board
Jussi Hanska, Tampereen yliopisto (University of Tampere)
Riccardo Quinto, Università degli Studi di Padova
Veronica O’Mara, University of Hull
Thom Mertens, Universiteit Antwerpen
Regina D. Schiewer, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 11
Preaching the Word
in M anuscript and P rint
in L ate M edieval E ngland
Essays in Honour of Susan Powell
Edited by
Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Preaching the word in manuscript and print in late medieval England :

essays in honour of Susan Powell. -- (Sermo ; 11)
1. Sermons, Medieval--England.
2. Sermons, English (Middle)
3. Sermons, Latin--England.
I. Series
II. Powell, Susan, 1948- honouree.
III. Driver, Martha W. editor of compilation.
IV. O'Mara, V. M. (Veronica M.) editor of compilation.
252'.00902-dc23
ISBN-13: 9782503541853
© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2013/0095/150
ISBN: 978-2-503-54185-3
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-54205-8
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements ix
Preface: Susan Powell and the Growing Study

of the Middle English Sermon
Ronald Waldron xiii
Introduction
Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara 1
Studies
G. R. Owst and the Politics of Sermon Studies
Derek Pearsall 11
A Cycle Recycled: Sermons from Carolingian Italy in a

Miscellany for Pastoral Care from Fifteenth-Century England
R. N. Swanson 31
So Far and Yet So Near: Distance or Proximity of Author

and Witness in Manuscripts of John Wyclif ’s Sermons
Anne Hudson 49
The Devil as Narrator of the Life of Christ and the Sermo literarius
William Marx 63
Preaching by Numbers: The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost in

Late Middle English Sermons and Works of Religious Instruction
Margaret Connolly 83
vi Contents
Preaching with a Pen: Audience and Self-Regulation in

the Writing and Reception of John Mirk and Nicholas Love
John J. Thompson 101
Scribal Performance in a Late Middle English Sermon Cycle

Stephen Morrison 117
Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confirmanda est:

The Lections in the Latin Martiloge of the Syon Brethren
Vincent Gillespie 133
Punctuating Mirk’s Festial: A Scottish Text and its Implications

Jeremy J. Smith 161
Dating Wynkyn de Worde’s Devotional,

Homiletic, and Other Texts, 1501–11
Joseph J. Gwara 193
Preachers in Pictures from Manuscript to Print

Martha W. Driver 235
Some Middle English Sermon Verse and

its Transmission in Manuscript and Print
Julia Boffey 259
Texts
Preaching in the South English Legendary:
A Study and Edition of the Text for All Souls’ Day
Oliver Pickering 277
The Syon Pardon Sermon: Contexts and Texts

Kari Anne Rand 317
A Victorian Response to a Fifteenth‑Century Incunabulum:

The ‘Boy Bishop’ Sermon and How It Was First Edited
Veronica O’Mara 351
Susan Powell: List of Publications

Prepared by Ronald Waldron 391
Illustrations
Figure 1, p. 172. John Mirk’s Festial. Cambridge, St John’s College G.19, fol. 1r.
Early sixteenth century.
Figure 2, p. 174. John Mirk’s Festial. Cambridge, St John’s College G.19, fol. 1v.
Early sixteenth century.
Figure 3, p. 194. Letter Forms Referenced in the Present Study.
Figure 4, p. 196. STC 15377 (1503), sig. D3r (reduced), illustrating Duff 4
with s1, early w2, y1, and large w2 (as capital).
Figure 5, p. 198. STC 17971 (11 May 1508), sig. F3r, illustrating Duff 8 with s2,
small w2, y2, foul w1, and foul early w2 sorts.
Figure 6, p. 201. STC 10902, sig. 2a2r, illustrating De Worde’s 91/92 mm tex
tura with s2, y2, and oversized w.
Figure 7, p. 205. STC 14077c.81 [York: Hugh Goes, 1505] (reduced), illustrating
Duff 4 with hooked w2 sorts.
Figure 8, p. 206. STC 6033.5 (1506), sig. A5r, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, early
w2, y2, and foul hooked w2 sorts.
Figure 9, p. 207. STC 5199 (1506), sig. A5v, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, y2, w1,
and early w2 sorts.
Figure 10, p. 208. STC 6034, sig. B2r (mis-signed ‘A2’), illustrating Duff 8 with
s2, small w2, y2, and foul w1 sorts.
Figure 11, p. 210. STC 24878.3 (4 September 1507), sig. O6r (reduced), illus
trating supplemental w5a sorts.
viii ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 12, p. 213. STC 21007, sig. A2r, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, small w2, y2,
foul w1, and foul w5a sorts.
Figure 13, p. 216. STC 708.5, sig C4r, illustrating Duff 8 with foul w3 sort
(l. 18: ‘was’).
Figure 14, p. 220. Grotesque Initials in Some of Wynkyn de Worde’s Books.
Figure 15, p. 239. ‘Christ Preaching from a Canopied Pulpit’. William of Not
tingham, Commentary on the Gospels, Luke 21. 37–38, c. 1375–90. Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 165 (III, 739), fol. 466v.
Figure 16, p. 242. ‘Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites’. Patience, Gawain MS,
c. 1375–1400. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, fol. 82v.
Figure 17, p. 245. ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. The Floure of the Commaundements
of God. London, Wynkyn de Worde, 1510. STC 23876. London, British
Library, Huth 30, fol. xxxvir (sig. F6r).
Figure 18, p. 246. ‘St Nicholas as John Alcock’. John Alcock, Mons perfectionis.
Westminster, Wynkyn de Worde, 1496. STC 278. Title page.
Figure 19, p. 248. ‘John Fisher’s Eulogy for Margaret Beaufort’. John Fisher,
A mornynge remembrau[n]ce. London, Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. STC 10891.
Title page.
Figure 20, p. 251. ‘The Preacher as a Fool’. Sebastian Brant, Shyp of Folys.
London, Wynkyn de Worde, 1517. STC 3547a.
Figure 21, p. 252. ‘Mohammed Preaching’. A Lytell Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe
Called Alcaron. London, Wynkyn de Worde, c. 1519. STC 15084.
Figure 22, p. 321. ‘The Syon Pardon Sermon’, London, British Library, MS
Harley 2321, fol. 34v. Mid-fifteenth century.
Figure 23, p. 327. ‘The Syon Pardon Sermon’, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College,
MS 156, fol. 60v. Late fifteenth century.
Figure 24, p. 335. ‘Palimpsested Handbill about Pardons at Syon’, Cambridge,
Trinity College, MS B.14.54, p. 184. Late fifteenth century.
Acknowledgements
I
n the production of this Festschrift the editors and contributors have
incurred various debts. First of all, we should like to acknowledge the help
of various librarians and archivists who have gone out of their way to facili-
tate access to their materials, provide photographs, answer queries, or deal with
various difficulties. In particular, Kari Anne Rand is grateful to Gill Cannell
and Suzanne Paul, both at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Sandy Paul at
Trinity College, Cambridge; Julian Reid at Corpus Christi College, Oxford;
and Mary Robertson at the Huntington Library. Veronica O’Mara is thankful
to Christian Algar and John Goldfinch at the British Library; Joanna Snelling
at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Steve Tabor at the Huntington Library;
and Mary Cordiner at Senate House Library, University of London. Jeremy
J. Smith would like to thank Kathryn McKee of St John’s College, Cambridge.
Our thanks are also due to the various libraries and persons who have allowed
us to edit or reproduce material in their care: the Bodleian Library; the British
Library; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; the Folger Shakespeare Library;
the Huntington Library; the Morgan Library & Museum; St John’s College,
Cambridge; Trinity College, Cambridge; John Wolfson; and other private
copyright owners. In addition, Veronica O’Mara would like to thank the
Huntington Library for granting her a short-term fellowship in 2011 during
which the initial research for her essay was undertaken. Kari Anne Rand was a
visiting scholar at the School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania,
while she wrote part of her essay and wishes to record her gratitude to them.
John J. Thompson is grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council
for funding the collaborative research project, ‘Geographies of Orthodoxy:
Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 1350–1550’, which
offers a comprehensive investigation of the texts and manuscripts belonging to
the tradition that he discusses in his essay.
x Acknowledgements
The editors are thankful to Guy Carney and Simon Forde at Brepols for the
interest they have taken in the work and for all their help in seeing it to press.
Special thanks are also owed to the Board of Sermo, and in particular, the chair,
Roger Andersson, who dealt with the submission of the volume with exemplary
care and much speed. The very perceptive comments of the readers improved
the individual contributions and were greatly appreciated by all concerned.
In compiling their individual essays the editors and contributors have
received various types of specialized help that is all fully acknowledged in the
relevant notes; to all of these scholars we are most grateful. Otherwise the edi-
tors wish to commend Ron Waldron in particular for his kindness in compiling
the list of publications at the end of the volume, Ann Hutchison for a superb
piece of sleuthing with regard to the same list, Jonathan Boffey for check-
ing some references, and Oliver Pickering for casting a careful eye over the
Introduction and making various helpful suggestions. To all the contributors
the editors offer gratitude for their enthusiastic commitment to the volume.
The final acknowledgement must inevitably go to the person to whom these
essays are dedicated, Professor Susan Powell, or, as she is always known, Sue.
Most of us represented in this volume have known her for several decades. In
that time we have benefited greatly from her friendship, her kindness, and her
scholarship. As a fully trained medievalist and language specialist in every sense
of the term, Sue has demanding standards — for herself in particular; she never
shirks from the difficult or the challenging. What impresses most about Sue’s
published work is the way it touches so profoundly on such a range of issues,
literary, philological, and historical. In her teaching career at the University of
Salford this integrated yet expansive knowledge was manifested not only in her
primary responsibility for medieval and Renaissance literature and language
but in courses on everything from Old English epic to the Victorian Gothic.
Sue is a serious scholar much respected by her peers, which is evident from
the learned societies of which she is a member, the academic boards on which
she serves, and her incisiveness as an external examiner, but she is also some-
one who combines intellectual rigour with an immediate generosity and who
enjoys the company of her fellows. Colleagues in the field of medieval English
studies and beyond know Sue as a witty, sharply intelligent woman who bright-
ens up conferences with her distinctive mix of informality and style, liveliness
and elegance. Sue is never afraid to speak her mind, but beneath this surface is a
warm compassion for her colleagues. Those of us who have known her over the
years always look forward to meeting her again, whether to engage in banter
or help us solve our latest medieval textual crux or linguistic conundrum. As a
person Sue is such fun; one cannot be bored in her company but is always guar-
Acknowledgements xi
anteed entertaining, thought-provoking, and (mildly) subversive conversation.

The contributors to this volume — and many more not represented here —
hold Sue’s scholarly work in the highest esteem and have the greatest affection
for Sue herself. We trust that she will accept these essays put together by a few
of her friends on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Salford,
a retirement that looks guaranteed to be most productive, judging from her list
of publications in progress.
15 August 2012
Preface:
Susan Powell and the Growing Study
of the Middle English Sermon
Ronald Waldron
I
t is tempting to refer to Susan Powell as a ‘born medievalist’ — certainly,
a very determined career path is discernible in her scholarly progress, from
the solid grounding in languages and history of her high school education
through her brilliant undergraduate and graduate years as a student at King’s
College, London (where I am proud to have been her tutor and postgraduate
supervisor), to the eminent position she currently holds in university teach-
ing and research, as an internationally recognized authority in the field of the
medieval sermon. While an undergraduate at King’s in the late 1960s, when the
London B.A. English syllabus was already leaning towards the Virginia Woolf
end of the spectrum and away from Beowulf and its associated ‘grammar grind’,
she eagerly adopted all the medieval and language-based options she could
(with teachers such as George Kane and Jane Roberts) and graduated with a
brilliant first-class degree and the Early English Text Society Prize for work in
Old and Middle English. She then continued studying at King’s for the London
Ph.D., which she completed in 1980, after a period of work ‘in the field’.
As the present volume testifies, her varied career as a university researcher
and teacher has brought her into contact with a wide range of scholars in the
field of medieval and modern language and literature. Between 1972 and 1975
she was a research assistant in the University of Leeds Institute of Dialect and
Folk Life Studies; from 1975 to 1982, spells of university teaching at Newcastle,
Leeds, Manchester, and Belfast no doubt equipped her for the responsibility
Ronald Waldron (ronald.waldron@btinternet.com) is emeritus reader in English Language
and Literature at King’s College, University of London.
xiv Ronald Waldron
she carried in the last three decades for much of the teaching of English medi-
eval and Renaissance language and literature at the University of Salford. In the
same period, in addition to many reviews, she has authored a stream of articles
and books on a wide range of topics in medieval literature and history. While
wide-ranging, however, the focal point of these studies has been the medieval
sermon — its function in its social context and its transmission and preserva-
tion in manuscript and print.
Sue’s first acquaintance with the medieval sermon would have been the
reading of set extracts from Dan Michael or Wyclif in undergraduate Middle
English courses, but her serious study of the subject began with her work for
the Ph.D. on two fifteenth-century British Museum (now British Library)
manuscripts, Harley 2247 and Royal 18.B.xxv. Subsequently, in collaboration
with Alan J. Fletcher, she identified the sermon collection copied in these two
manuscripts (and also incompletely in two others) as a restructured and aug-
mented fifteenth-century version of Mirk’s Festial, a version which was itself
based on an earlier recension found in the Group B manuscripts of that widely
copied sermon cycle. Her work on this latest revision of the Festial has led,
through many years of devoted labour, to the study of all the manuscripts of the
Festial and finally to the two-volume edition of Mirk’s original sermon book
which was published by the Early English Text Society as o.s. 334 and 335.
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this edition for the
study of the medieval sermon and of Middle English language and literature
in general. In building on the earlier uncompleted edition by Theodor Erbe
and on published and unpublished research by the late Martyn F. Wakelin, it
brings the Festial for the first time into the full light of modern sermon scholar-
ship. For copy text, she rejected Erbe’s choice (described as ‘eccentric’ by Helen
Spencer) of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Ecclesiastical Topography 4,
and chose instead the late fourteenth-/early fifteenth-century London, British
Library, MS Cotton Claudius A.ii, a composite manuscript which includes
Mirk’s other vernacular work, his rhyming Instructions for Parish Priests, and
which is, Sue convincingly argues, the most authoritative witness to Mirk’s
original intention for the Festial. Sue’s masterly handling of relationships
among the twenty manuscripts of the complete, or once-complete, text, and of
the numerous manuscripts of partial and related texts, makes it an enterprise
comparable, if not to editions of Chaucer and Piers Plowman, then to editions
of other works of Middle English prose such as the translations of John Trevisa,
the Brut chronicle, or the Wycliffite sermons.
What makes Sue’s work especially important to Middle English scholarship
in general is that, as the most popular orthodox sermon cycle in the vernacular,
Preface xv
Mirk’s Festial brings back into focus the importance of the vernacular homily
in the continuing use of English by the educated during the Anglo-Norman
period — a major theme in the surveys of those two giants of Middle English
scholarship, R. W. Chambers and G. R. Owst. While Chambers emphasized the
part played by the instruction of female religious in the continuous tradition of
Middle English prose between the Old English and the Tudor period, Owst’s
principal concern was the vernacular sermon: both scholars attribute singular
importance to Mirk. Sue’s edition now paves the way to a more detailed assess-
ment of Mirk’s place in the development of English in the fourteenth century.
The text is edited and punctuated with sensitivity for the meaning of every
sentence, giving the modern reader a new opportunity of appreciating Mirk’s
skill in putting into the preacher’s mouth a form of English that rings true as
authentic speech. Indeed, what is most striking about the sermons of the Festial
in this new edition — in spite of the rebarbative nature of much of the content
to modern tastes — is their readability. In his avoidance of Latinate vocabulary
and his ability to record the speaking voice, Mirk stands apart from most con-
temporary writers of prose, though he does remind one (as might be expected)
of John Trevisa’s occasional interpolations into his translated texts, where he
addresses the reader in his own person, pulpit fashion, as a secular cleric. The
introduction in Volume i and the generous notes in Volume ii also emphasize
Mirk’s creativeness and freedom in his use of his principal source, the Legenda
aurea, and here one finds a web of associations linking the sermon cycle with
other genres of literature, such as the drama, verse narrative, and romance.
Sue continues to play a pivotal role in medieval manuscript studies by giving
conference papers and as associate editor (reviews) of the Journal of the Early
Book Society (a position she has filled to great effect since 1999). It is to be
hoped that she will continue to enhance our knowledge and appreciation of the
Middle English sermon for many years to come.
Introduction
A
schort sermon nedful to techyn and to lerne’ is how John Mirk described
his Festial, the Middle English sermon collection that outclassed all
others in medieval England in terms of extent and longevity. Taking
its cue from Mirk’s description, the focus of this volume, on Middle English
and Latin material in prose and verse in late medieval England, is how homil-
ists and teachers in the Middle Ages preached the word of God in the widest
possible sense. Unlike other collections devoted to sermon studies that restrict
themselves solely to the actual sermon texts, this one explores the multiple ways
in which the sermon in England in the later Middle Ages both influenced and
was influenced by other devotional and didactic material, both implicitly and
explicitly. The essays pay special attention to examples of textual complexity
in the sermon as manifested in the manuscript and early printed traditions. By
examining sermon technique and methodology, contributors present related
material that either travels alongside sermons, such as Middle English verse, or
obviously shares the same preaching or teaching milieu. While analysing ser-
mons and other homiletic material, the essays also explore areas, such as the
dating and illustration of incunabula, which have an important bearing on the
sermons and devotional literature of the period but are normally studied in an
isolated fashion. These fit in well with the particular emphasis in the collec-
tion on the sermon in the early printed period. In addition, attention is paid
to some of the ways in which sermon study was first brought to the fore by
late nineteenth-century editors and early twentieth-century commentators. In
this way various threads are brought together, new texts and ideas presented,
and potential future avenues for research suggested that will continue to be
important for an understanding of sermons and related religious literature in
late medieval England.
Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Susan Powell,
ed. by Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) SERMO 11
pp. 1–9 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.SERMO.1.101582
2 Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara
Following the preface by Ronald Waldron on ‘Susan Powell and the Grow
ing Study of the Middle English Sermon’, the collection of essays is divided
into two sections, ‘Studies’ and ‘Texts’. This mode of division serves to sepa-
rate the more detailed editorial work from the more discursive essays. Each
section is in turn arranged broadly along chronological lines — to the extent
that this is possible — so that in the first the essays range from Carolingian
sermon material discussed in Robert Swanson’s essay to mid-sixteenth-century
English printed works in Julia Boffey’s study, and the second section extends
from Oliver Pickering’s discussion of thirteenth-century verse composition to
Veronica O’Mara’s analysis of a late fifteenth-century incunabulum. However,
set apart from these sections, as it were, it is only proper that the volume should
begin with Derek Pearsall’s background essay, ‘G. R. Owst and the Politics of
Sermon Studies’. Through his single-minded and at first single-handed work
among the manuscript sources of the popular English sermon, G. R. Owst
(1894–1961), the acknowledged founder of medieval English sermon studies,
established what has become a thriving academic discipline. As Pearsall demon-
strates in his essay, all who write on the subject acknowledge Owst’s pioneering
work, and his emphasis on the importance of the use of primary sources has
been a model for later scholars. At the same time, there is what one might call
the ‘ideological framework’ of his two books, most prominently in the second
of them, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (to which most attention
is devoted in Pearsall’s essay). Having explained something of the extent and
importance of Owst’s studies, Pearsall goes on to show that Owst’s work is
at times characterized by intellectual naïveté and amateurishness. Owst takes
from his ‘beloved master’, G. G. Coulton, who generally exercised upon him
a baneful influence, a hostile and narrowly Protestant view of the established
Church of the Middle Ages, and he sees the Reformation as a happy rescue
from the Roman Church. The particular contribution of the popular sermons
was in their closeness to the actuality of everyday life, their ‘Realism’, in which
they anticipated not only Protestant good sense and down-to-earth under-
standing of reality but also the glories of Shakespeare and the triumph of a spe-
cifically English national consciousness. As Pearsall demonstrates, the absence
of the customary scholarly restraint, balance, and sense of propriety in some
of Owst’s general remarks may be associated with his position as an ‘outsider’
in the academic world and his dependence for his governing ideas on a fiercely
polemical scholar of narrow intellectual sympathies.
In the ‘first’ essay in the ‘Studies’ category, ‘A Cycle Recycled: Sermons from
Carolingian Italy in a Miscellany for Pastoral Care from Fifteenth-Century
England’, R. N. Swanson focuses on one of the few manuscripts that did not
Introduction 3
figure in Owst’s work: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 123. This is a fif-
teenth-century miscellany mainly for pastoral care owned, and probably com-
piled, by Thomas Urmeston, which reflects aspects of his career as a parochial
chaplain and incumbent. Very little study has been carried out on this manu-
script, apart from earlier detective work by Swanson which brought to light
the fact that the compiler uses some previously unrecognized exempla from
John Mirk’s Festial. The manuscript incorporates a booklet containing a cycle
of fifty-two short Latin sermons, mainly a temporale series from Advent to the
first Sundays after Pentecost. On investigation, Swanson has discovered that
these are for the most part extracted from a larger Carolingian cycle, the so-
called Italian Homiliary. Other surviving English manuscripts show that this
cycle had some popularity among preachers in late medieval England, as well as
being known to some users of Mirk’s Festial. The booklet containing the cycle
in Bodley 123 (along with some additional interpolated texts) is analysed by
Swanson. The implications of the reuse of the cycle in contexts very different
from those of Carolingian Italy are also considered. Such consideration helps to
cast some light on how one might understand Urmeston’s own use of the mate-
rial and its contribution to his pastoral activity, as well as on the wider factors
and forces that potentially shaped English parochial preaching in the fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries.
Anne Hudson’s essay, ‘So Far and Yet so Near: Distance or Proximity of
Author and Witness in Manuscripts of John Wyclif ’s Sermons’, concentrates
on another collection of Latin sermons but this time one that is far better
known than that in Urmeston’s volume. Hudson shows that the textual situa-
tion is often far more complicated than may at first seem to be the case. While
it is often assumed that a copy’s proximity of time and place to its author is
likely to favour the accuracy of its text, this assumption is thrown into doubt
by the evidence of three manuscripts of John Wyclif ’s Sunday epistle sermons.
One manuscript with a lavish layout derives from England around 1400 and
was the sole witness known to the sermons’ early twentieth-century editor,
Johann Loserth; two copies more recently discovered derive from Bohemia
and were made slightly later. It may be said that the Bohemian copies repeat-
edly solve the problems noticed by the editor in the English copy and often
provide better readings. Notably, also, references in the sermons to English
affairs, many of them affairs seemingly of limited interest to anyone distant
from the immediate circumstances of Wyclif ’s life, are carefully retained in the
Bohemian copies.
With William Marx’s essay, ‘The Devil as Narrator of the Life of Christ and
the Sermo literarius’, we move from prose sermons in Latin to vernacular verse
influenced by Latin traditions and homiletic procedures. The B-version of the

Middle English verse text The Devils’ Parliament survives in one manuscript
from the first half of the fifteenth century and in three sixteenth-century printed
editions. The penultimate stanza of the B-version identifies the text as intended
for oral presentation on the first Sunday of Lent. This aligns the poem with
what is generally understood as a tradition of verse sermons. However, there are
reasons to question this view of the text, and this forms one of the arguments of
Marx’s essay. The other line of argument, which informs the first, concerns the
implications of the central narrative device of The Devils’ Parliament: the figure
of the Devil or Satan serves as narrator of the life of Christ. The essay traces the
evolution of this type of narrative in Latin and Middle English and argues that
The Devils’ Parliament contains one of the most carefully controlled and fully
developed treatments of this type of narrative. Marx then examines the didactic
purpose of this narrative form and sets it against treatments of the Devil in the
life of Christ in sermons. The essay argues finally that The Devils’ Parliament
needs to be seen primarily as a sermo literarius, that is, a type of literary sermon
that bears all the hallmarks of sermon writing but was designed for private, not
public, reading.
There is much medieval devotional instruction in Middle English on the
topic of the Holy Ghost, one of the most challenging aspects of Christian doc-
trine. The instruction provided on this topic by medieval preachers is examined
by Margaret Connolly in ‘Preaching by Numbers: The Seven Gifts of the Holy
Ghost in Late Middle English Sermons and Works of Religious Instruction’
through an analysis of sermons preached in the post-Easter period leading
up to Pentecost, the natural point in the liturgical year for this doctrine to be
addressed. Several major later Middle English sermon cycles are considered in
this regard, including the Middle English Mirror, the Festial, the Filius matris
cycle, and the Wycliffite sermon cycle. This pulpit-focused instruction is com-
pared with teaching on the Holy Ghost found in other literary contexts, such as
the verses composed by John Audelay, other anonymous Middle English verse,
and prose treatments of the same topic. The context of these non-preaching
texts is often the vernacular devotional manual, of which numerous examples
survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The need to pay closer
attention to this type of medieval book, very widespread in its own day but
now less accessible to modern readers, and the range of questions which might
be addressed by a concentrated study of this genre, are topics raised in the
essay’s conclusion.
In focusing on another sort of dissemination, John J. Thompson’s study,
‘Preaching with a Pen: Audience and Self-Regulation in the Writing and
Introduction 5
Reception of John Mirk and Nicholas Love’, explores how John Mirk’s Festial
and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ exemplify the
diverse challenges and opportunities offered to English authors/translators and
also English vernacular audiences in the manuscript and early print culture of
the pre-Reformation period. Both Mirk’s sermon collection and Love’s medita-
tive life of Christ demonstrate how vernacular English writers capitalized on the
memory and impact of pastoral teaching and oral performance as they engaged
with issues relating directly to the religious experience and scriptural under-
standing of their audiences. They produced vernacular writings that enjoyed
prolonged and wide circulation in both manuscript and printed versions dur-
ing a particularly complicated period in English religious history. In his essay
Thompson shows how both writers in their own very distinctive ways seek to
promote self-regulating devotional and meditative scriptural understanding.
In Stephen Morrison’s ‘Scribal Performance in a Late Middle English
Sermon Cycle’ the scribes are the ones under scrutiny for the distinctive meth-
ods they use in their compilation. Making use of a most unusual test case, a col-
lection of prose sermons extant in four manuscripts and produced commercially
by the same scribe: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 180 (the copy-text
used in Morrison’s published edition), Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 50 and
51 (one manuscript preserved in two bindings), Gloucester, Cathedral Library,
MS 22, and Durham, Durham University Library, MS Cosin V. iv. 3, Morrison
proceeds to show the subtle changes that were made by the earlier compilers/
scribes of this collection. By analysing a range of examples from this late fif-
teenth-century collection, Morrison is able to draw out the ways in which the
earlier scribes were willing to change their exemplar at various levels of com-
plexity. What Barry Windeatt calls ‘literary intelligence and feel’ is obvious in
the ways these reproduce the texts of their exemplars. Morrison shows that the
MS e Musaeo 180 sermon collection was transmitted by a succession of scribes
who involved themselves actively in the linguistic fabric of their texts. This
active involvement ironically made the reconstitution of the ur-text (whether
desirable or feasible) virtually impossible. The sermons in this collection lack
‘fixity’ which may or may not be reflected in the practice of other scribe-preach-
ers. As Morrison argues, only when considerably more of the sermon corpus
has had proper editorial treatment will a balanced assessment of scribal activity
in this genre be possible.
Whereas Morrison’s essay is concerned with vernacular scribal decisions
underlying a commercial production, in ‘Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confir-
manda est: The Lections in the Latin Martiloge of the Syon Brethren’, Vincent
Gillespie focuses on a key — in-house — Latin record of the Birgittines at Syon
Abbey (1415–1539), the Martiloge of the brethren (London, British Library,

MS Additional 22285). This unpublished manuscript preserves a record of
community decisions, special liturgical observances, and lists of benefactors,
obits, and places of burial of deceased members of the community. At the heart
of the manuscript is a commercially produced martyrology for the entire litur-
gical year which was read daily in chapter or refectory. As Gillespie demon-
strates, to this standard liturgical book, somebody at Syon added, around the
middle of the fifteenth century — and in a different hand from that of the main
scribe — a series of short Latin lections designed to be read daily alongside the
Martiloge entries. Although these lections are keyed by letter to a particular
day’s martyrology, they are often clumsily added and frequently written over
the pen flourishing and decoration of the para-liturgical text. They are grouped
together thematically and are unrelated to the day’s martyrological informa-
tion. In the lections, sound doctrine and good living are inextricably linked
together. These readings set exceptionally high standards for clerical behaviour,
discussing topics such as the duties of a bishop; the duties of a rector; the role
and duties of a preacher; sound teaching and heresy; clerical poverty, sin, and
confession; prayer and contemplation; virtues and temptations; and prepara-
tion for death. In the course of considering these lections Gillespie seeks to
isolate the potential times at which they were read.
With Jeremy J. Smith’s study ‘Punctuating Mirk’s Festial: A Scottish Text
and its Implications’, we move forward in time and concentrate again on the
vernacular. In his essay Smith argues that John Mirk’s Festial, surviving as it does
in numerous manuscripts and early printed versions, makes possible detailed
examination of the processes that the negotiation from script to print entailed,
especially in relation to other emerging shifts in the uses of literacy with which
printing correlated. In this essay a close qualitative examination is made of (in
particular) punctuation in passages from the version of the Festial surviving in
Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.19, and this usage is compared with that
in the base manuscript for Susan Powell’s new edition, London, British Library,
MS Cotton Claudius A.ii. The text in this early sixteenth-century manuscript
was copied, in Scotland, from an early printed edition published in Rouen in
1499. Smith argues that, while remaining ‘speech-like’ (with all that notion
implies), the kinds of punctuation evidenced in the Rouen edition and MS
G.19 correlate with the emergence of more extensive reading practices, and that
the close study of such features has considerable potential for future research.
Staying with the early printed period and concentrating on the early printer
whose output particularly focused on religious material such as sermons,
in ‘Dating Wynkyn de Worde’s Devotional, Homiletic, and Other Texts,
Introduction 7
1501–11’, Joseph J. Gwara reassesses the evidence for dating the undated out-
put of Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5), heir to the printing business of William
Caxton, between 1501 and 1511. Focusing on STC items printed in De Worde’s
two main textura (Gothic) fonts, Duff 4 and Duff 8 (so named on account of
their first description by E. Gordon Duff ), Gwara refines previous methodolo-
gies and proposes new dating techniques. First, he discusses the dating implica-
tions of font subsets, discrete texturas that have been misidentified as the same
owing to their superficial similarities. Second, he analyses more fully the evolu-
tion of Duff 4 and Duff 8, tracking the emergence and disappearance of foul
sorts (individual pieces of cast-metal type which do not belong to a given font
or which stand out as anomalies in a given type case) in approximately 175
books, broadsides, and fragments. These sorts serve as reliable discriminants
for the fonts and cases that De Worde used over an extended period of time.
Finally, he discusses the dating evidence provided by the characteristic set of
five-line grotesque initials that De Worde used in the items printed at his Fleet
Street shop. A more accurate calendar of De Worde’s early London output, a
reflection of his newly established operation, helps determine how effectively
he responded to the ebb and flow of consumer demand for reading material in
the second decade after Caxton’s death. In this way Gwara’s study helps to con-
textualize the homiletic and devotional material being produced at the time.
Another aspect of manuscript and early printed productions is examined by
Martha W. Driver. In her essay, ‘Preachers in Pictures from Manuscript to Print’,
Driver explores images of preachers and preaching in English manuscripts and
printed books in the late medieval and early Tudor periods. Beginning with
seminal preaching scenes, manuscript miniatures of Christ preaching, she traces
the ways in which preachers and preaching are presented, whether generically
or more specifically intended as author portraits as in the example of Petrus
de Aureolis, archbishop of Aix (1321–22). Driver shows how preaching and
performance become conflated in manuscripts in more secular contexts, and
how a similar trajectory occurs in printed illustrations of preachers. As there
are in manuscripts, there are generic preaching scenes in print along with depic-
tions of historical preachers, including John Alcock (d. 1500), bishop of Ely,
and John Fisher (d. 1535), bishop of Rochester and cardinal. Other depictions
in print are perhaps satirical. The title page of A Lytell Treatyse of the Turkes
Lawe Called Alcaron, printed before the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth
century by De Worde, illustrates the prophet Mohammed, for example. In this
discussion of sermons and pictures of their makers from manuscript to print,
Driver looks more generally at the intersections of fiction and history, book
history and politics.
The last essay in the ‘Studies’ section explores the use of English and Latin
verse in sermons and related texts from late fourteenth-century manuscript
material to mid-sixteenth-century printed books. Julia Boffey argues in ‘Some
Middle English Sermon Verse and its Transmission in Manuscript and Print’
that the incorporation of verse in some Middle English prose sermons raises a
number of questions. Some of these questions relate to the claims this mate-
rial has to be considered as verse rather than as emphatic sententiae or flour-
ished prose; others relate to its transmission and the roles it played for preachers,
scribes, and the audiences or readers of sermons. In her essay Boffey compares
the disposition and nature of the verse in three different bodies of sermons
and sermon-related material from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-
turies: in a cycle of sermons surviving uniquely in Warminster, Longleat House
MS 4; in the prose dialogue Dives and Pauper, probably the work of the same
anonymous author as the Longleat sermons; and in the sermon preached on a
text from Luke’s gospel by Thomas Wimbledon at Paul’s Cross in London in
the late 1380s. The mixture of Latin and English verse in these three bodies of
material came from a variety of sources and seems to have had a diverse range of
functions. The transmission of Dives and Pauper and Wimbledon’s sermon in a
number of fifteenth-century manuscript copies makes it possible to compare the
handling of the verse by a number of scribes and the extent of its textual stability.
Furthermore, the eventual printing of these two works, and the handling of their
verse in various editions, reflects later trends in the reception of sermon verse
The three essays in the ‘Texts’ section begin with Oliver Pickering’s study,
‘Preaching in the South English Legendary: A Study and Edition of the Text
for All Souls’ Day’. As with the rest of the late thirteenth-century South English
Legendary collection, the poem for All Souls’ Day is not a verse sermon but a
mixture of instruction and entertainment produced for a non-preaching occa-
sion. Its preaching characteristics are nevertheless very marked. The text can
be attributed with some confidence to the so-called outspoken South English
Legendary poet, who was a major reviser of the whole collection and whose
stylistic markers include personal appeals to his real or supposed audience, sar-
castic comments on ‘bad’ characters, anecdotes of contemporary medieval life,
and fluently written verse paragraphs. Pickering begins with a detailed synopsis
of the contents of the 384-line poem, whose subject is purgatory, and then anal-
yses its make-up in terms of both style and content, paying particular attention
to its preaching elements, including its lively exempla. He presents evidence
that some sections of the text may comprise pre-existing material incorporated
and adapted by the outspoken poet and also demonstrates that many of the
scribes transmitting the poem abridged it in various ways, often (it seems) to
Introduction 9
reduce its outspokenness — in consequence modifying the effectiveness of its

preaching style. The essay concludes with a new edition of All Souls’ Day, based
on the earliest South English Legendary manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Laud misc. 108. The text is supplied with frequent glosses to assist with the
understanding of what is often difficult Middle English and is supplemented by
textual notes.
The subject of Kari Anne Rand’s essay, ‘The Syon Pardon Sermon: Contexts
and Texts’, is a very complicated web of textual affiliations. The full text of
the so-called Syon Pardon sermon is found in one manuscript only, London,
British Library, MS Harley 2321, and has never been published. Because of
its length and its detailed lists of the pardons to be had at the Birgittine house
of Syon, the text is unlikely ever to have been preached, but it gives intriguing
insights into the practice and doctrine of indulgences in late medieval England.
Rand examines the context in which the Pardon sermon occurs in the Harley
manuscript and identifies a second, unfinished copy in Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College, MS 156. Some of the contents of the sermon were spread by
means of extracts which served as advertisements for the Syon indulgences. The
texts of all such advertisements known to be extant are printed here, including
some from Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.54 which appear to be parts
of actual handbills.
Finally, in ‘A Victorian Response to a Fifteenth-Century Incunabulum: The
‘Boy Bishop’ Sermon and How It Was First Edited’, Veronica O’Mara discusses
another involved textual situation, John Gough Nichols’s 1875 edition of the
sermon known officially as ‘In die innocencium’ but popularly called the ‘Boy
Bishop’ sermon, one of two extant ‘Boy Bishop’ sermons from medieval and
Renaissance England (the other being a Tudor sermon from 1558 also edited
by Nichols). Found in two editions from c. 1496 and c. 1497–98 and extant
in one copy of the first edition and three of the second, this sermon, which is
(incorrectly) attributed to Bishop John Alcock (1430–1500), was preached at
St Paul’s at some point between 1489 and 1496. In the essay O’Mara traces the
genesis of Nichols’s work, showing how he changed copy-text midway through
his edition. In presenting a new edition of the text displaying the sort of changes
made, or not made, by Nichols, she uncovers not only Nichols’s editorial proce-
dure but also casts some light on the habits of the earliest editors, the fifteenth-
century compositors. With O’Mara’s essay we return almost full-circle because
the work of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scholars laid the
foundations that were subsequently built on so thoroughly by the subject of
the first essay in the volume, G. R. Owst, when he effectively established the
discipline of Middle English sermon studies.
Studies
G. R. Owst and the Politics
of Sermon Studies
Derek Pearsall
G
. R. Owst is widely recognized as the first founder of English sermon
studies. Of the two books upon which his reputation rests, the first,
Preaching in Medieval England, was published in 1926.1 It marked
an epoch in the study of the medieval sermon in England and the opening of
Owst’s single-minded campaign to have the importance of the medieval ser-
mon recognized and also its role in the development of English national con-
sciousness. It was followed in 1933 by the same author’s Literature and Pulpit in
Medieval England, and the two volumes together initiate the history of English
sermon studies.2 Preaching in Medieval England is not a historical study of its
subject but an enormously valuable descriptive survey of fourteenth- and fif-
teenth-century preaching: who the preachers were (secular clergy, monks and
friars, ‘wandering stars’), on what occasions they preached, and what form their
preaching took, with the sermon manuals that supported it. Literature and
1
Owst, Preaching in Medieval England. The book is dedicated to His Imperial Highness
Prince Chichibu of Japan as a memento of his studies with the author in 1925–26. An unex-
pected pleasure for those who know only the later book is the inclusion of a number of skilful
sketches, by the author, of pulpits and of preaching scenes in manuscript illustrations.
2
Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. A second edition appeared in 1961, just
before Owst’s death, with ‘corrections and additions’ (p. vii). They are hard to find. It is a page-
for-page reprint, with the Preface omitted, and also the Appendix (on the influence of sermons
in Church art), so that a few additions can be made to the original ‘Additional Notes’ without
disturbing the original pagination.
Derek Pearsall (derekapearsall@btinternet.com) lives in York. He retired from Harvard
University in 2000.
12 Derek Pearsall
Pulpit, which is much better known to literary scholars and to which I shall
pay most attention, is the first attempt to establish firm links between medieval
English literature, especially Chaucer and Langland, and contemporary vernac-
ular preaching. It uses much of the same material as the earlier book but in a dif-
ferent way. I think no medieval scholar, trained up in our literary schools, ever
forgets or recovers from the impact of Owst’s most startling pronouncement:
Half a century and more of learned criticism have been expended on Langland’s
famous Vision. But the one complete clue to the poem is still persistently ignored.
In reality, it represents nothing more nor less than the quintessence of English
medieval preaching gathered into a single metrical piece of unusual charm and
vivacity.3
This gives a somewhat distorted view of the poem as a whole, but there is no
doubt that Owst’s opinion was a salutary rebuke to those who had neglected
the importance of the popular sermon in Langland’s poem.
References to Owst’s work were once almost obligatory in any writing on
the subject. He is cited less often these days, his work to some extent having
been superseded and his manner grown obsolete, but the distance that has
grown up between him and his modern readers enables us to see him in sharper
perspective. What emerges is that the inspiration of his work was not primar-
ily in terms of his ambition to communicate to his readers his wide knowledge
of medieval English sermons, though that may be the benefit we perceive and
value. For Owst was inspired by a primarily political or national motive — to
demonstrate the importance of the popular vernacular preaching of the Middle
Ages in shaping the English nation. A fierce Protestant, like his mentor, G. G.
Coulton (whose influence will be discussed in detail later), he writes of the
Middle Ages with passion and vivacity, his purpose being to find light amidst
the darkness. He found it by concentrating in his later book above all on popu-
lar preaching against the corruption of the Church and its priesthood and the
associated sinfulness of its people. Nearly half of Literature and Pulpit consists
of three linked chapters called ‘The Preaching of Satire and Complaint’, and
the conclusions are drawn in the final chapter, called ‘A Literary Echo of the
Social Gospel’. Owst’s views, in so far as they circle insistently upon Langland’s
Piers Plowman, at all times his principal literary text and resource, are akin to
those of many of his predecessors, including F. J. Furnivall, W. W. Skeat, and
3
Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 295; repeated in Literature and Pulpit in
Medieval England, p. 549.
G. R. Owst and the Politics of Sermon Studies 13
J. J. Jusserand.4 It is a specifically English kind of ‘social gospel’, and Owst looks

forward always to Shakespeare as its great exemplar and as the great beneficiary
of the stored wisdom of the vernacular preachers.
The subtitle of Owst’s second book is important. He has chosen, he tells
us, neither the approach of the social nor that of the ecclesiastical historian
but that of the literary historian. His book is ‘the first attempt to estimate
comprehensively the debt of English literature to the message of her medieval
Church’.5 There is thus very little on the structure and development of the ser-
mons, and very little on their historical context, subjects which were to some
extent covered in the earlier book. The book is in effect a vast mosaic of quota-
tions from the vernacular sermons, a few of them from printed sources but most
from previously unstudied manuscripts, and from Latin preaching manuals.
Amongst the latter, the Dominican John Bromyard’s Summa praedicantium,
a compendium of 189 sermon topics arranged alphabetically, is Owst’s major
single source, providing him with over three hundred citations, all translated
in a highly successful English preacher’s idiom.6 There are also many other cita-
tions from Latin sermons and pulpit manuals, in both manuscript and print,
including the works of William of Rymyngton, prior of the Cistercian abbey
of Sawley and a fierce opponent of Wyclif; the Manuale sacerdotis of John
Mirk, prior of the Austin canons at Lilleshall in Shropshire, and author also
of the widely disseminated sermon cycle in English known as the Festial, sev-
4
F. J. Furnivall (1825–1910) was the founder and great upholder of the Early English Text
Society, and a prolific editor; see the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter
ODNB) <http://www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 23 May 2013]. W. W. Skeat (1835–1912),
professor at Cambridge, is still a towering figure in Middle English scholarship, his edition of
Piers Plowman only recently superseded; see ODNB. J. J. Jusserand, a French scholar of English
literature, was a contemporary of Furnivall and Skeat; his book, English Wayfaring Life in the
Middle Ages, first published in English in 1888, pioneered the approach to Langland as a ‘poet
of the people’.
5
Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, Preface, p. vii.
6
There are sixty, for instance, in a single run (Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England,
pp. 247–66). Owst, who quotes Bromyard from an unspecified source, twice discusses the date
of the Summa (Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, pp. 224, 596), which had earlier been
dated about 1410. Owst’s revised date (c. 1360–68) is derived from other scholars. W. A. Pantin
makes it clear that the actual date of composition must be considerably earlier, since the Summa
is quoted in the Sermons of John Sheppey, dated 1336–53. See Pantin, The English Church in
the Fourteenth Century, p. 147. Leonard E. Boyle, in ‘The Date of the Summa Praedicantium of
John Bromyard’, comes to the firm conclusion that the Summa was completed towards the end
of 1348 (p. 537).
14 Derek Pearsall
eral manuscripts of which Owst used; the Florarium Bartholomei of John of

Mirfield, another Austin canon; John Waldeby, Austin friar of York; Robert
Rypon, subprior of Durham, another enemy of the Lollards; the sermons of
Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester, well known to Langland scholars and a
particular favourite of Owst’s; and the sermons of Philip of Repingdon, bishop
of Lincoln, an ex-Lollard.7
Owst also quotes liberally from pulpit manuals and penitential treatises
in English, such as the Ayenbite of Inwyt, the Prick of Conscience, Jacob’s Well,
and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, as well as from collections of exem-
pla for preachers in both Latin (the Gesta Romanorum, the exempla of Jacques
de Vitry) and Anglo-French (the exempla and story-collections of Odo of
Cheriton and Nicholas Bozon). Many of these works already existed in printed
editions, but Owst often prefers to quote from a manuscript, as with Jacob’s
Well (of which the second half still awaits publication). There are also citations
from the English sermons of known English preachers, such as John Mirk’s
Festial and the famous sermon by Thomas of Wimbledon preached at Paul’s
Cross in c. 1387 on the theme Redde rationem villicacionis tue. There is little
from continental sources. The ‘literature’ of Owst’s title is represented by a
plethora of citations from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works including
Piers Plowman, many others from Chaucer, and others still from fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century poets such as John Gower, John Audelay, John Lydgate,
Alexander Barclay, and Robert Henryson, and from the many anonymous
poems from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies and
compilations printed by Thomas Wright and by the Early English Text Society.
Owst’s greatest achievement, however, and perhaps his most permanent
contribution to the subject, was his scouring of the libraries for material from
their collections of popular English sermons. These were virtually unknown
before, their great importance, in themselves, and for social and religious his-
tory, unrecognized. One of them, London, British Library, MS Royal 18.B.xxiii,
provided Owst with well over a hundred citations. Seven years after his book
was published, this collection was published in its entirety by W. O. Ross. 8
The twelve sermons that make up the contents of London, British Library, MS
Additional 41321, another of Owst’s favourite sources, have also now been
7
Owst gives further details on these writers, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England,
for example, pp. 269, 273, 275. Throughout the book, the sources of all quotations are scru-
pulously (and rather repetitively) cited, and there is a full and accurate index (but no index of
manuscripts).
8
Middle English Sermons, ed. by Ross.
published in full by Gloria Cigman.9 The latter sermons are particularly sharp
in their rebuke of the sins of the clergy and the people, and remarkable for their
lively and satirical detail, which makes them a rich source for illustrative quo-
tation. There are suggestions of a Lollard association, but Owst seems not to
have noticed. He shows little interest in Lollardy or in Wyclif, whom he calls ‘a
pulpit purist’, though he quotes on occasion from the English works attributed
to him at the time.10 Owst perhaps thought that Wyclif had stolen the thunder
of the popular vernacular homilists, having played for so long among Whiggish
historians the role of the great denouncer of the Church’s corruptions and the
proto-hero of the coming Reformation. Owst was campaigning for precisely
this role to be reserved for the English popular sermons. He never quotes from
the Wycliffite sermons, and his interest in theology stopped at the denuncia-
tion of its tortured logic, as in his chapter ‘Scripture and Allegory’.
The list of other vernacular sermon manuscripts that Owst plundered should
also include those that contain homiletic treatises such as the tractates on the
Decalogue found in London, British Library, MS Harley 2398 and in a manu-
script in St Albans Cathedral Library, and another written by ‘Jon Lacy, ancor’,
in 1434, now in Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 94. 11 As for the sermon
manuscripts themselves, the list is long, though perhaps it looks longer than it
actually is because of Owst’s habit of quoting full references for every succes-
sive use of a manuscript and because of the absence of an index of manuscripts
used. In addition to the two manuscripts already cited (Royal 18.B.xxiii and
Additional 41321) there should be further mentioned, in order of frequency of
citation — and the most frequently used yield scores of quotations — London,
British Library, MS Harley 45; London, British Library, MS Additional 24202;
Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.10; London, British Library, MS Harley
9
Lollard Sermons, ed. by Cigman. Cigman also prints sermons from Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Rawlinson C.751 and Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng. 412 in which
she recognizes traces of Lollardy and explains the complex relationship among these three man-
uscripts. Owst does not refer to either of the latter manuscripts.
10
For the quotation, see Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, p. 207. With regard
to what might be perceived as a ‘neglect’ of Lollardy, one has to remember that it had a com-
paratively low profile before the pioneering work of such scholars as K. B. McFarlane, Margaret
Aston, and Anne Hudson in the 1950s and 1960s.
11
See Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, pp. 415–16, 440. St Albans
Cathedral Library was one of Owst’s old hunting-grounds. He wrote a series of short pieces on
its holdings, including especially the Stoneham Register, housed there, for the Transactions of
the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, 1924, 1925, 1926, and
1928. See Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, pp. 456, 531.
16 Derek Pearsall
2247; and Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS A.6.2. The last two manucripts are
connected with Mirk’s Festial, the first (Harley 2247) being one of the four
manuscripts of the substantial revision of the cycle made about 1434, after
Mirk’s death, while the Lincoln manuscript is a compilation of sermons, also
found in four manuscripts, with a complicated relationship to the Festial.12
A book so much made up of quotations, some of them very long, up to
three pages solid, comes to have a certain character. The vernacular material
is so lively and written in such an excellent informal kind of prose, and there
is so much of it, that the book has a persistent vicarious vitality that makes it
stimulating to read. All the Latin, furthermore, is translated in an effective rhe-
torical idiom. In its dedication to the overriding importance of everyday real-
ity, the book cannot help but be appealing. However, the inevitable selectivity
means that there is an overwhelming homogeneity in the attitudes and values
expressed and very little opportunity for counter-indication or counter-argu-
ment. Indeed, there is very little room or inclination for argument at all, in the
sense of building up a case, and not just shouting down favourite bêtes noires.
In so far as there is an argument, it may be summarized thus. The vernacular
medieval sermons portray Life as it really is, in contrast to the negativeness and
sterility of the Catholic Church’s prohibitions. It provides the foundation, with
some help from Chaucer and Langland, of the literary Realism (Owst is fond of
capital letters) which was what truly transformed England in the sixteenth cen-
tury. The vernacular sermons led directly, through their healthy and wholesome
realism and sanity, to Shakespeare and thus to the ascent of the English peo-
ple.13 There seems a total lack of connection between Owst’s use of the sermons
for anecdotal evidence of ‘Realism’ and his general ideological framework. That
the crude summary given above of that ‘ideological framework’ is not an abso-
lute travesty of Owst’s argument it will be the business of the next pages to
demonstrate, mostly using Owst’s own words.
In his Preface Owst makes an unanswerable case for the value of the vernac-
ular sermons as an entry into the real social life of people in history. He argues
that the sermons, with their attention to the realities of everyday existence, are
12
For full discussion of the Festial-related texts, see Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. li–lv.
For the Lincoln manuscript (now Lincoln 50, with the second half of the collection in Lincoln
51, formerly A.7.1) and related manuscripts see A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon
Cycle, ed. by Morrison, and his essay in the current volume.
13
‘As we plunge farther into the plays, the reappearance of other pulpit themes becomes
almost as startling as the ghost of Denmark’s king’ (Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval
England, p. 593).
closer to the common man, his pains and pleasures, than the usual stuff of the
professional historian — account rolls, bishops’ registers, and such. Official
records, he continues, are in any case a limited resource. Maurice Powicke’s
assertion that the manorial courts dealt successfully with most local problems
does not take account of the fact that the manorial records were written in
order to give precisely that impression. Sermons, however, give us the reality of
how such courts actually worked as the tool of great lords. The production of
clergy, again, was not a smooth system for promoting excellence, as the records
would have us believe, but often the work of jobbery and nepotism. Records are
drawn up for other purposes than to transmit the truth to later ages. Study of
the sermons helps to correct the tendency of ecclesiastical and other historians
to favour institutional history. Owst rises to an antique eloquence in his praise
of the pastors of the medieval Church and their sermons, and their attempt
to reunite a discordant society in brotherly love and common service, to establish,
according to its lights, a city of God upon earth, in every home and community,
warning, pleading, arguing, now with a show of learning, now with a quaint sym-
bolism, now with threats, now with pathos, now with humour, a very human as
well as a very formidable Church.14
Owst respects the achievements of the medieval pastors and their preach-
ing, which he isolates completely from the corruptions and exactions of the
Church. He laments the decline of religion in more recent times and the lack
of understanding of and sympathy for the work it once did. What the sermons
more immediately did was to prepare the way for the glories of the sixteenth
century, for in them lurked ‘the germs of a future Protestantism, the germs
of artistic realism, germs of satire and literary humour, germs of the popular
drama itself, and of the Englishman’s solid independence and love of compro-
mise in social affairs’.15 In sermons originated that Realism, that return to life
and nature, to which
is due not a little in the development of the national consciousness and wellnigh all
in the characteristic Reformation and Renaissance temper of the sixteenth century
[…]. The pulpit, and not the revival of classical studies, will thus prove itself to be
the true parent of a revived literary Realism. (p. 23)
14
Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, p. xiv.
15
Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, p. 9. Subsequent page-references (to
this book only) will be in parentheses in the text.
18 Derek Pearsall
He ridicules those who trace the beginning of this Realism to Chaucer. It was
the sermons: religion was decayed at the root, but ‘the brighter fruit and flow-
ers of its branches bore with them the seed of a new, vigorous life for both liter-
ature and society’ (p. 55). ‘The spring of a new Renaissance’, says Owst, seeming
to lose consciousness as another grand Nature-metaphor sweeps over him, ‘had
already blown upon the Church, making the old sap of moral purpose rise once
again within her’ (p. 55). The mocking account of fourfold exegesis in the next
chapter, ‘Scripture and Allegory’, comes as a welcome astringent. The Bible was
being wrenched this way and that. ‘Its living historic continuity of thought and
action was being ruthlessly ignored’ (p. 66), he says, rather finely, anticipating
the criticisms of modern anti-exegetics scholars.16
The imagery of Nature, conveying a sense of inevitability about historical
processes, appeals strongly to Owst, as often to those who want to look no
harder for explanations. Sermons are ‘a rude mountain torrent rushing half-
concealed in its rocky bed which ceaselessly feeds and links up the grander
lakes of our medieval literature’ (p. 211). Whatever the grandeur of those ear-
lier lake-poets, though, it all degenerates in Skelton, and the backbone of moral
purpose collapses into coarse ribaldry. Such was the last bequest of the Catholic
Church, ‘the bitter harvest reaped by those who had chosen to implant a gospel
of denunciation and fear […]. Such was the last great battle to be won by medi-
eval Catholicism on English soil’ (p. 233). Amidst all the Reformers’ rhetoric
it is often difficult to know precisely what Owst is talking about. Sometimes
the picture becomes clearer, and unfortunately so, as when he asks ‘wherein lies
the peculiar crime of those old Protestant reformers, who saw in the Woman
of Babylon, “Mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth”, an unerring
prophecy of the medieval Romish Ecclesia’ (p. 286), or when he speaks of ‘the
hideous doctrine of Aquinas’ that the bliss of those in heaven is the greater
that they see the torments of those in hell (p. 295). 17 Owst makes safer sense
when he returns to the plight of the poor, crying out against their oppressors
on Judgment Day in Bromyard’s memorable tirade, ‘O just God, mighty judge,
16
See, for example, Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory, pp. 20–32, and his com-
ments there on the dissolution of history and the neglect of historical context in traditional
exegesis.
17
Perhaps Owst would not have said this if he had actually read Aquinas and not merely
Dean Inge’s diatribe against him, to which he refers. Elsewhere he speaks of the religion of fear
inherited from ‘Augustan Dualism’ and ‘what Dr Coulton has rightly called “the high ancestry
of Puritanism”’ (p. 384). Again, one is embarrassed to look too closely at what Owst, under the
spell of his ‘beloved master’, might have meant.
the game was not evenly divided between them and us. Their satiety was our
famine; their merriment was our wretchedness’ and so on, and on, unstoppa-
bly (p. 301). The plea on their behalf in the famous sermon preached at Paul’s
Cross in c. 1387 by Thomas Wimbledon is the more effective by contrast:
How farre will ye ritch men stretch your covetise? will ye dwell alone upon the earth,
and have no poore man with you? Why put ye out your fellowe by kind, and chal-
lenge to your selfe the possession comen by kinde? In commune to all, rich and poore,
the earth was made. Why will ye ritch challenge proper right herein? (p. 305)18
The sermon is ‘impassioned’ as Owst rightly says, but does not succumb to the
lure of the rhetorical purple, as does Bromyard, and Owst in his translation.
In his peroration at the end of the third of the long chapters on ‘Satire and
Complaint’, Owst shows signs of wanting to climb into his own pulpit. Poems
like Piers Plowman, he says, are ‘eloquent of mighty stirrings and pregnant
resolves at the nation’s heart’ (p. 469). A new and ruthless realism will follow,
and ‘“the first recognisable steps on the road of political and religious liberty”’,
will be made, with a purpose inspired by Shakespeare and Cromwell. ‘A “mir-
ror” indeed had been lifted up to nature: and men looked and pondered freely’
(pp. 469–70). Again, the connections between all these things are hard to see,
but the whole long paragraph is an interesting exercise in the imitation of a
certain kind of sixteenth-century Protestant rhetoric.
One of the recurrent topics of Owst’s commentary is the idea of an emergent
national consciousness and an emergent national Church, of England and of
the people. He seizes upon any incidental support for such a view. He quotes at
length (pp. 70–75) from the powerful macaronic sermon in Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Bodley 649 of a monk of Henry V’s time which transforms the
familiar image of the Ship of the Church into the Ship of the English Church:
‘The Ship, it will be observed, refers no longer to mankind in general, nor to
the universal Church: it is now the realm of England’ (p. 72). A Latin sermon
from Hereford Cathedral on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket is also quoted
at length (pp. 126–31) for its emphasis on a national Church. It shows ‘the
18
The spurious medley of early and modern English derives from the printed text which
Owst is quoting second-hand, ‘for convenience’, as he explains (p. 279 n. 3), from Foxe’s Acts and
Monuments. Owst always quotes the English sermon from this edition but much more often uses
the Latin version of the sermon in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.8. For
an edition see Wimbledon’s Sermon: Redde rationem villicacionis tue, ed. by Knight. The passage
quoted (which is derived ultimately from Ambrose) appears on p. 94 of this edition. There are
seventeen English and four Latin manuscripts of the text (not all noted in Knight’s edition).
20 Derek Pearsall
English pulpit as the mouthpiece of the new national spirit […]. St Thomas,
troubler of his king, is yet lauded here as the special head and protector of the
clergy of England’ (p. 131). A vernacular sermon on Becket in MS Harley 2247
speaks of him likewise as a defender of English liberties who took ‘his deth
full mekely, for right of holy chirche and the welfare of yngelonde’ (p. 133).19
A simpler kind of patriotic feeling is remarked upon in a sermon preached by
a royal chaplain in the field before Calais in 1346 (p. 221), and Owst notes
generally in the sermons ‘a note of strong national feeling against the particular
enemies of England’ (p. 225), though again this is not peculiar to the sermons.
He finds in the sermons of Thomas Brinton in particular ‘a more national, a
more definitely English appeal’ (p. 586).
Brinton is identified by Owst as Conscience, the preacher to the people in
Piers Plowman A.v (it is Resoun in B and C), and it is from Langland’s poem
that any coherence in Owst’s final chapter on the ‘Social Gospel’ derives. It is
of Langland’s ‘constructive social gospel’ that he speaks, the responsibility of all
estates and crafts to work hard in their status for the good of all. Wimbledon’s
sermon is quoted at length (pp. 550–51), but Owst makes no reference to
Langland’s eloquent exposition of the same theme.20 Society must always be
made ‘to realize its corporate nature’. So with rich and poor: ‘The rich man has
been created for the benefit of the poor, and the poor man for the benefit of the
rich’ (p. 560). ‘The poor are allowed to exist in order that God may test the love
of the rich’ (p. 561). God could have made all men strong, wise, and rich, but
then no one would have learnt patience nor experienced the joy of helping oth-
ers. This is not by any means a travesty of Piers Plowman, and indeed, though
he draws here immediately upon Brinton and other Latin homilists, he could as
easily have cited Piers Plowman:
For al myhtest thou haue ymad men of gret welthe
And yliche witty and wys and lyue withoute nede —
Ac for the beste, as Y hope, aren som pore and ryche.21
19
Such remarks were in fact commonplace in lives of Becket, and of other English-born
saints, in the fourteenth century, as well as in other writings. See Turville-Petre, England the
Nation, pp. 62–65.
20
Piers Plowman, C.xxi.221–69; see Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition,
ed. by Pearsall. In fact, Owst makes very few references to anything in the poem after the Visio,
following most readers in contenting himself with Skeat’s popular students’ edition of the B
Prologue and Passūs i–vii and ignoring the ‘theological subtleties’ (p. 575) of the later passūs.
21
Piers Plowman, C.xv.19–21, cited from Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated
Edition, ed. by Pearsall. In the discussion of the poor, Owst has an unaccustomed spat with his
‘beloved’ mentor, G. G. Coulton, taking issue with his cynicism about the ‘virtuous poor’ (p. 566).
Later, he falls into ecstasies about ‘the invisible hero of the sermons, our immor-
tal PIERS THE PLOWMAN […] the chosen prophet of the Gospel of Truth and
Reconciliation’ (p. 574). It is he who bears Langland’s message of ‘common-
sense’ (which is also that of the preachers):
His championship of justice for the oppressed, his sane admixture of respect for
institutions with his rebuke for those who defile them, his gospel of mutual sympa-
thy and work as contrasted with revolution, his stress upon good deeds and moral
reform without theological subtlety. (p. 575)
All these sentiments were dear to the tastes of early Langland scholars. Some
would have approved too the prophetic extension of Piers’s social gospel. The
emphasis on the need of all estates to work for the common good is conso-
nant with ‘the honoured place which Work has continued to hold in Protestant
faith and practice […]. The gulf of the Reformation is thus bridged once more’
(p. 557). Looking further forward to his own day, Owst grows gloomy. The
bond between the classes eulogized in Piers Plowman and the sermons is one of
the ideals from which ‘have sprung in subsequent centuries the finest traditions
of English manorial life, now alas! wellnigh perished from the countryside’
(p. 562). Probably most of the middle-class population of England at the time,
as well as the newspapers they read, would have echoed Owst’s vacuous nostal-
gia, as also his vague swipe at ‘socialism’ and those who ‘put their trust in the
instrument of social legislation and a general levelling of humanity to bring in
the New Jerusalem […]. But men cannot be made good by Acts of Parliament’
(p. 589). Langland would have agreed, I suppose.
Amidst the mass of summary and quotation from sermons and sermon-
manuals in Literature and Pulpit, the linking ‘argument’ is limited, as I have
said, to a hollow rhetoric extolling the glorious destiny of England in the age of
the Reformation and of Shakespeare, and the vital contribution made to that
destiny by the preachers. Is there any more to be gleaned of his political atti-
tudes, if one can call them that, from his passing comments on contemporary
society? His view of that society is not hopeful.
For good or ill, the rising tide of democracy and education in modern times, the
bursting of the barriers between knowledge secular and sacred, the free and the
forbidden, the common concerns of the laity and the taboos of the priesthood was
bound to come sooner or later. (p. 189)
There is an alarming banality or naivety about Owst’s contemporary parallels.22

22
There are few such allusions in the earlier book, where the tone and rhetoric are more
restrained, and the ‘ideological framework’ barely alluded to.
22 Derek Pearsall
He compares the excitement of a medieval congregation at the bestiary exempla

of the sermons to ‘the childish excitement which the modern rustic still feels
when the travelling menagerie enters his village’ (p. 197). The use of folk-tales
and fables in the Gesta Romanorum anticipates ‘the modern “Sunday-school”
teacher, with her elaborate devices for the attraction of her charges’ (pp. 208–09).
Such infantilization of the medieval audience is not a great strategy, one might
think, for making the sermons seem important. The pillorying of the vices of
society in the sermons provokes a flood of modern parallels, some of them obvi-
ous, as when medieval merchants are compared to ‘the swindlers of modern
business’ (p. 353), some of them now strangely dated and archaic, like the com-
parison he makes with the outrage expressed in the sermons at the way servants
abscond to better-paid employment: ‘Verily, is not this our modern housewife’s
cry?’ (p. 365). Sometimes the huffing and puffing makes Owst sound as if he is
echoing something he has read about in reactionary English newspapers like the
Daily Mail or the Daily Express, as when he remarks that the extravagances of
the tavern denounced in the sermons may remind ‘our anxious generation that
the modern “night-club” and “cabaret” are but a reminiscence of the habits of
yesterday’ (p. 443), or when he compares the homilists’ denunciation of the plays
and the people who go to watch them with the ‘modern homilists’ who similarly
decry ‘the “gay week-end” habit’ (p. 481). Contemporary parallels of this kind
are a form of self-indulgence never well advised. The ‘scare-quotes’ are a histori-
cal education in themselves.
As to the literary context, the ‘History of English Letters’, it will be found
to consist of constant reiteration of the message that sermons are the source
or mode of transmission of almost everything and of rebuke to those scholars
who have failed to acknowledge this. Every lapse is punished, and one by one
the members of the literary establishment are summoned for reprimand.23 The
attribution of any of the poetry of complaint to the people, as by W. P. Ker or
A. R. Waller, who called it ‘the speech of the land-slave’, ‘the poetry of the peo-
ple’ (p. 216), is scornfully rejected: it was all from the sermons.24 The chapter
23
Dorothy Everett, in her generally favourable review of Literature and Pulpit in Medieval
England in The Year’s Work in English Studies, deplores the ‘running fire of satirical comment
against some of the finest medieval scholars living and dead’ (p. 139). She also suggests that
Owst sometimes claims too much for the influence of sermons (especially in the famous pas-
sage about Piers Plowman) and that his resentment at the neglect of his subject leads him into
exaggeration.
24
Waller was one of the contributors to the then-authoritative Cambridge History of English
Literature; Ker (see ODNB) will be discussed at length later.
on sermon and drama makes short work of the then most eminent scholars in
the field: Allardyce Nicoll for suggesting that the medieval drama was ‘a form
of art springing fundamentally from the lives of the people’ (p. 475), and E. K.
Chambers for completely missing the influence of the sermons (p. 478).25 Even
the writings of Chaucer and Langland are not ‘original’ (Skeat) or ‘Langland’s
own conception’ (W. J. Courthope) (p. 208): all their ‘Realism’ derives from
the sermons. It is no good appealing to Nature: J. M. Manly’s attempt to assert
Langland’s originality by calling Glutton’s tavern ‘the veritable interior of an
English ale-house in the fourteenth century’ is scornfully dismissed.26 Those
who, like Courthope again, attribute the realism of Chaucer and Langland
to the ‘direct imitation of nature’ are wrong : they got it from the sermons
(p. 208).27 All of those scholars who are accustomed to acclaim some lit-
erary innovation that they admire as the first example of its kind have to be
reminded of the ubiquity of the sermons. Owst administers a rebuke which
many will feel well deserved, and not only on this occasion, where the unfor-
tunate Courthope is in the pillory again for his claim that the English poets
were original in their observations: ‘He means, of course, what every historian
of our literature means, namely — first among the writers of his own particular
acquaintance’ (p. 86). Owst could be enjoyably tart on occasions. But the fact
that he is usually right in his assertions about the influence of sermons (though
with little enough explicit demonstration, such as the citing of parallels) does
not always endear him to us.
25
Allardyce Nicoll (1894–1976) was for forty years the doyen of drama scholarship; he
wrote the exhaustive six-volume History of the English Drama, 1660–1900 (1952–59). E. K.
Chambers (1866–1954) was a distinguished historian of medieval and Shakespearean drama
(The Medieval Stage, 1903; The Elizabethan Stage, 1923), and also a prominent educationist and
member of the London literary establishment. See ODNB for both scholars.
26
See Piers Plowman, C.vi.351–414, in Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated
Edition, ed. by Pearsall. Owst of course is right when he says that Manly is merely conforming to
the lazy habit of associating vivid local realism with eye-witness observation. Manly is rebuked
again later for calling Piers Plowman ‘original’, and Skeat and Ker with him (pp. 575–76).
J. M. Manly (1865–1940) was the major Middle English scholar of the first decades of the twen-
tieth century in the United States. His questioning of the single authorship of Piers Plowman
provoked a fierce debate and the invitation to contribute what became the highly controversial
chapter on Langland in the Cambridge History of English Literature. He also initiated renewed
inquiry into the historical origins of Chaucer’s pilgrims (New Light on Chaucer, 1926).
27
The regular appearance in the dock of W. J. Courthope is due the fact that he was the
author of the then-standard History of English Poetry.
24 Derek Pearsall
There is a problem. How could such original scholarship, brought so suc-

cessfully to fruition, such assiduity and attention to detail, such energetic rang-
ing through a mass of unwelcoming sources, exist side by side with such embar-
rassing banality, such amateurish and unscholarly lapses of taste, such com-
monplaceness of mind — and with such resentment of the academic world?
Leonard E. Boyle, in a review of the 1961 reissue of Literature and Pulpit (the
year of Owst’s death), gives a measured assessment of Owst’s work, lamenting
the stubborn refusal to provide a bibliography but not falling in with the opin-
ion of Owst as what he calls ‘a cantankerous dabbler’. 28 His main fault, Boyle
says, was his failure to examine the nature of his sources, especially the Summa,
which he used simply as a quarry for the kind of picturesque detail he wanted.
With Bromyard, he mistook ‘a goldmine for a quarry’. Boyle detects therefore
a straightforward failure of scholarship. But there is something deeper at work,
something that still leaves us with questions. Any approach to answering these
questions must begin with Owst’s life and background.
Gerald Robert Owst was born in 1894, the son of R. C. Owst (1856–1931),
to whom he dedicated Literature and Pulpit, together with a number of other
Owsts, holders of possessions in the seigniory of Holderness in the East Riding
of Yorkshire, and to particular Owsts of the fifteenth century, holders of
minor religious offices in the same area. 29 He went up to Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, in 1913 and after an absence for war service returned and took
his degree in 1920. He taught in South Africa for the next two years and then
returned to England and began to work under the Reverend Professor Claude
Jenkins at King’s College, London, on the subject of medieval preaching. This
work and the studies arising from it were later recognized by the award of a
Ph.D. London and D.Litt. Cambridge. From 1928 Owst was an inspector of
elementary and secondary schools and later became a staff inspector for his-
tory. He speaks in the Preface to his second book of the difficulty of bringing
it to completion, because of ‘the ever-increasing labours of a busy civil servant’
(p. xx). In 1938 he was elected to the newly created professorship of education
at the University of Cambridge.30 He died in 1961.
28
Boyle, review of Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 228.
29
There has been difference of opinion about the pronunciation of the name. The best con-
sensus is that it is ‘Owst’ as in ‘boast’ and not ‘Owst’ as in ‘oust’ or ‘Owst’ as in ‘boost’.
30
The information in this paragraph is derived from the journal Nature, 141 (1938), 885,
where Owst’s appointment is recorded.
What these bare facts tell us is that Owst was something of an outsider. It is
this that may help to explain the naïveté of his organizing ideas and the neglect
of the usual scholarly proprieties and restraints. That he felt resentment can
plausibly be deduced from the fact that he never held a university or college
post until he was made a professor of education, and that this chair, though
presumably a recognition of his scholarly work, was made in the field in which
he had worked professionally, but not as a scholar.31 It was an odd situation. His
resentment is further clear from the tone of his comments on other scholars
in Literature and Pulpit, which suggest a feeling of exclusion, even though he
expresses himself gratified at the ‘warm welcome’ given to his first book (by
‘Catholic as well as Protestant’), as he takes care to tell us, in another amateur-
ish lapse of scholarly propriety (Preface, p. vii). He still felt that his work on
his subject had not been fully recognized, as we see from his pillorying of the
English academic establishment; only R. W. Chambers (Preface, p. ix) and a few
continental scholars are spared.32 His resentment is most persistently directed
against W. P. Ker, long the doyen of English medieval literary studies and a
representative of the London literary establishment — a much more organ-
ized group, with its awards and societies and closeness to the seats of academic
power, than could be found amid the collegiate disorder of the older universi-
ties. In his Preface he immediately targets those whom he associates with Ker.
His book, he says, will be sure to ‘rouse the indignant scorn of professional lit-
térateurs’ (p. 8), those whose job is to sift — by modern standards — the good
from the bad. They ignore the vast mass of vernacular writing in concentrating
on a small and congenial and easily digestible sample which they will declare to
be representative.33 ‘The late Professor W. P. Ker’ (he died in 1923) is singled
out as one of those who poured scorn upon the Ayenbite of Inwyt, declaring
it unworthy to be called a book at all, adding that there was ‘no evidence that
31
It is touching that the title-page of his first book bears, as his academic title, ‘Assistant
Editorial Secretary to the Mediaeval-Latin Dictionary Committee’; in the second he is ‘Late
Assistant Editorial Secretary … etc.’
32
R. W. Chambers (1874–1942) was a distinguished Langland scholar (see ODNB),
warmly admired by Owst for his essay On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More
and his School, in which he praises Owst for recognizing the importance of ‘the living tradition
of the English pulpit’ (Preface, p. ix) in the development of English prose.
33
One recognizes the aptness of Owst’s characterization of the school of ‘belles lettres’,
though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch would have made a much better representative than Ker, who
had a high reputation in early Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse fields that Owst knew nothing about.
It must be admitted that the disagreements of ‘formalist’ and ‘historical’ scholars are still with us.
26 Derek Pearsall
it was ever read by anyone’ but the writer himself (Preface, p. ix). One knows
how Ker felt, but Owst, to his credit, had made valuable and extensive use of
the treatise. He felt a kind of loyalty to it. On one occasion, more generously,
he contrasts Ker, ‘the literary purist who seeks to educate our taste and quicken
our powers of appreciation’, with the ‘literary historian’ (p. 211).
Owst’s reputation rests on the two books. He had written short notes in
journals, and some letters to The Times, all of which he assiduously footnotes,
and a useful essay on Piers Plowman, but his only other published book is the
printed version of a lecture he gave at Durham in 1951 on a fifteenth-century
treatise on the sins, which he saw as an extension of his work in Literature and
Pulpit.34 The narrowness of his scholarly interests is reflected in the range of
his secondary reading. He had read everything about sermons, and what had
a bearing on sermon studies, but not much about anything else, not even sub-
jects to which he himself alludes. Only one scholarly work is cited that deals
with the nature of a Christian society and with the historical relation between
Church and state, matters to which he makes oblique reference in speaking
of Langland’s ‘constructive social gospel’ (p. 549). It is to a work in German,
translated into English as The Social Teaching of the Christian Church.35 Owst
makes no claim to have made use of this work, and no influence from it can be
detected. It is a spacious, Europe-wide, primarily historical account of the pos-
sibility of a Christian social order, and is from a different intellectual world.
The second generalization one might make about the problematic nature
of Owst as a scholar has to do with his mentor. At the end of the Preface to
Literature and Pulpit, Owst offers a ‘grateful tribute to his well-beloved former
masters’, Dr G. G. Coulton and the Rev. Claude Jenkins. There is no further
trace of Jenkins, his supervisor at King’s, professor of ecclesiastical history, who
had the reputation of an amiable eccentric, exercised chiefly by the determi-
nation to hang on to his several preferments as well as his chairs. 36 Coulton,
however, is frequently mentioned in the most affectionate terms. He was an
immensely erudite scholar of European religious and social history but also
34
Owst, ‘The Destructorium viciorum of Alexander Carpenter’. This forty-page book has
been found useful by, for example, Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 371 and 436.
35
‘Those unfamiliar with the broad outline of this doctrine [the relations between Church
and State] in its academic (Thomist, etc.) form should consult Ernest Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren
der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen’ (p. 549 n. 4), trans. by Wyon. Olive Wyon was a profes-
sional translator of German theology and also published a number of short books herself for the
Student Christian Movement. This was her first publication.
36
See the entry in the ODNB.
a fierce polemicist, famously contentious, who made his public reputation as

a controversialist in his running battles, fought in the columns of the jour-
nals, with prominent Roman Catholic scholars, particularly Cardinal Francis
Gasquet and Catholic apologists such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Though primarily a medieval religious historian, he was a harsh and often con-
temptuous critic of medieval Catholicism. His Protestantism is rancorous, and
he lacked Owst’s piety. His vast output of books is little regarded by historians
and rarely quoted, since nothing he says can be relied upon to be free of bias. 37
Born in 1858, Coulton spent several years training for the ministry, which
his doubts forced him to abandon, and many years in the running of a coach-
ing establishment and was fifty-three before he was given an academic post, his
career eerily anticipating that of Owst. He became at last a fellow of St John’s
College, Cambridge, in 1911 and began to turn out his volumes on the Middle
Ages, while exercising an influence on his students that was not always baneful.
Eileen Power was one of these students, and she published her first book, as
did Owst, in the series of Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought of
which he was editor.38
But his influence on Owst, who admired his erudition and whose loyalty to
his master made it difficult for him to detach himself from Coulton’s extrem-
ism, was very considerable and largely malign. Sometimes, with the greatest
hesitation, Owst dares to disagree. He opposes Coulton’s view that there was
a deep detestation of artistic beauty in the Middle Ages. Despite all his ‘love
and admiration for its author’, he says (p. 49), he has failed to find any recogni-
tion in Coulton’s book on Art and the Reformation of the medieval homilists’
frequently expressed admiration for the beauty of churches or of figural rep-
resentations, or of their view of the value of images for the inspiration of lay
devotion (p. 137). Owst declares that medieval teaching on images was just as
‘lofty and spiritual as that of subsequent Protestantism’ (p. 49), a fair-minded-
ness that would have come hard for Coulton and that sits oddly with Owst’s
fulminations against Catholicism elsewhere. While lavishing unstinting praise
37
Among Coulton’s scores of books, the heaviest is Five Centuries of Religion, in four vol-
umes, and the best-known Medieval Panorama. There is a once-popular book, Chaucer and his
England. Owst refers specifically only to Art and the Reformation. For his career, see the essay
by Henry Summerson in ODNB. A more sympathetic and personal account is provided by
Powicke, ‘Three Cambridge Scholars’.
38
Power, Medieval English Nunneries. In her Preface Power makes due acknowledgement
of her debt to Coulton but reserves her warmest thanks for A. Hamilton-Thompson, who it
appears actually read her work.
28 Derek Pearsall
on Coulton as ‘an unrivalled master in the European field’ (p. 566), he takes
issue with his opinion that the ‘egalitarian rhetoric’ of the preachers was mere
lip-service given the clergy’s ‘innate class-snobbery’. He refuses to believe that
medieval Catholics, despite being Catholic, would be so insincere.
Thus Owst sometimes finds himself defending the Middle Ages against the
more extreme and unreasonable of Coulton’s attacks, but at the same time (and
perhaps as a form of compensation, if one may venture a little psychology), in
following his master’s Protestant view of history, he sometimes renders it in
a naïve and over-enthusiastic manner. What was manipulative and cynical in
Coulton, part of the controversialist’s game, became real for Owst. It would
not take much subtlety to recognize in Owst’s pained and conflicted response
to these excesses in his ‘beloved master’ the sources of his scholarly unease and
disequilibium. Fortunately, the good work of his two books is not undone.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.8
Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 94
Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 50 and 51 (one manuscript in two bindings)
London, British Library, MS Additional 24202
—— , MS Additional 41321
—— , MS Harley 45
—— , MS Royal 18.B.xxiii
Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng. 412
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649
—— , MS Rawlinson C.751
St Albans, Cathedral Library, MS (no shelfmark)
Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.10
Primary Sources
A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, ed. by Stephen Morrison, EETS, o.s.,
337–38, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Langland, William, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. by Derek
Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008)
Lollard Sermons, ed. by Gloria Cigman, EETS, o.s., 294 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989)
Middle English Sermons: Edited from British Museum MS Royal 18.B.xxiii, ed. by Wood
burn O. Ross, EETS, o.s., 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940)
Mirk, John, John Mirk’s ‘Festial’: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II.,
ed. by Susan Powell, EETS, o.s., 334–35, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009–11)
Wimbledon, Thomas, Wimbledon’s Sermon, Redde rationem villicacionis tue: A Middle
English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Ione Kemp Knight, Duquesne Studies,
Philological ser., 9 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967)
Secondary Studies
Aers, David, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (London: Arnold, 1975)
Boyle, Leonard E., ‘The Date of the Summa praedicantium of John Bromyard’, Speculum,
48 (1973), 533–37
—— , review of G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, in Medium Ævum,
33 (1964), 227–30
30 Derek Pearsall
Chambers, R. W., On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School,
EETS, o.s., 191A (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932; repr. 1966)
Coulton, G. G., Art and the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1928)
—— , Chaucer and his England (London: Methuen, 1921)
—— , Five Centuries of Religion, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923–50)
—— , Medieval Panorama: The English Scene from Conquest to Reformation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1938)
Everett, Dorothy, review of G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, in The
Year’s Work in English Studies, 14 (1933), 136–39
Hudson, Anne, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988)
Owst, G. R., The ‘Destructorium viciorum’ of Alexander Carpenter: A Fifteenth-Century
Sequel to ‘Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England’, Church Historical Society, n.s.,
52 (London: SPCK, 1952)
—— , Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of
English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1933; 2nd rev. edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1961)
—— , Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the
Period, c. 1350–1450, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Cambridge:
Pantin, W. A., The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1955)
Power, Eileen, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1922)
Powicke, Maurice, ‘Three Cambridge Scholars: C. W. Previté-Orton, Z. N. Brooke and G.
G. Coulton’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 9 (1947), 106–16
Troeltsch, Ernst, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. by Olive Wyon, 2
vols (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931)
Turville-Petre, Thorlac, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity,
1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
A Cycle Recycled:
Sermons from Carolingian Italy
in a Miscellany for Pastoral Care
from Fifteenth-Century England
R. N. Swanson
A
s a parish priest Thomas Urmeston, the fifteenth-century compiler of
the manuscript which is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley
123, remains an obscure figure.1 His name links him to Urmston in
southern Lancashire; he served as a parochial chaplain at Lymm and elsewhere
in northern Cheshire in the 1470s and at some point was ‘manens in Essex’.2
A note in the manuscript almost certainly allows him to be identified as the
vicar of Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, from 1481 to 1501.3 English texts
1
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 123 (hereafter ‘Bodley 123’); brief descrip-
tions in Madan and Craster, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford, ii. 1 (1922), p. 147, no. 1986; Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 582–83. Also
described in the University of Birmingham/Arts and Humanities Research Council database,
Manuscripts of the West Midlands: A Catalogue of Vernacular Manuscript Books of the English
West Midlands, c. 1300–c. 1475, at <http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/mwm/> [accessed 2 April
2013]. Susan Powell is more circumspect about Urmeston’s relationship with the volume,
merely recording that ‘In the last thirty years of the 15th c., the manuscript was in [his] hands’
(Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 583), but his connection with it seems to me to be more active
and positive than that.
2
Bodley 123, fols 1v, 6v, 97v.
3
Bodley 123, fol. 205v; Lipscomb, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham,
iv, 286 (he was also master of the hospital at Newport, p. 285).
R. N. Swanson (r.n.swanson@bham.ac.uk) is professor of Medieval Ecclesiastical History at

the University of Birmingham.
32 R. N. Swanson
in Bodley 123 have been linguistically located to Cheshire and Staffordshire,

which match his locale.4 At present no sermons can be directly attributed to
Urmeston, but the contents of the volume throw some light on his ministry,
allowing him to be put forward as an active preacher on the basis not of what
he said, but what he read.
Bodley 123 can perhaps best be described as a parish priest’s anthology
of material for pastoral purposes.5 Its contents include assorted texts to aid a
priest’s provision of appropriate pastoral care and discipline for parishioners,
including a copy of the great curse and sentence of excommunication, a tract on
the sacraments, and a complex ecclesiastical ordinal.6 Much of the material was
seemingly acquired, or created, as booklets, segments of an evolving and essen-
tially shapeless volume.7 Other components were potentially tools or resources
for sermon preparation, as part of Urmeston’s obligation to instruct and teach
his parishioners — a teaching intention also demonstrated by the inclusion of
verses to aid memory in the tract on the sacraments.8 Urmeston accumulated
material which he expected to be useful, but the possibility of his active author-
ship cannot be completely excluded. 9 The provenance of the material is not
usually indicated, though some of his sources can be identified. Several pieces
are extracts, among them a number of miracles of the Virgin and a few extracts
from De gestis Romanorum to provide moral tales and exempla.10 A group of
exempla in English with obvious uses for sermons is taken from John Mirk’s
4
See the database Manuscripts of the West Midlands (cited in n. 1).
5
For the problematic terminology for such collections, see Wenzel, ‘Sermon Collections
and their Taxonomy’.
6
Bodley 123, fols 2r–6v, 7r–51r, 103r–148v. For a discussion of the great curse see Pickering,
‘Notes on the Sentence of Cursing in Middle English’; further examples in Middle English may
be found in the various volumes of the Index of Middle English Prose, gen. ed. A. S. G. Edwards.
7
On booklets, Robinson, ‘The “Booklet”: A Self-Contained Unit in Composite
Manuscripts’; Hanna, Pursuing History, pp. 21–34 and 284–87. Space fillers and the current
tight (post-medieval) binding prevent full analysis of the quiring and individual components,
but changes in script, format, and language help to identify units within the volume.
8
Bodley 123, fols 28v, 29v, 32r, 34r, 38r, 38v, 41v, 45v, 46r, 48r. On the obligation to preach,
see Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, pp. 237–79.
9
The heading to a tract on the seven sacraments, completed on 29 September 1489 (Bodley
123, fol. 7r), suggests that the scribe and author were the same person; but whether that person
was actually Urmeston cannot be determined.
10
Bodley 123, fols 52r–86r (De gestis Romanorum), 98r–101v (miracles).
A Cycle Recycled 33
Festial, providing firm evidence of the exploitation of that popular sermon col-
lection by an identifiable parish priest.11
Urmeston presumably took his extracts from Mirk from a manuscript copy
of his work. With only a few exempla transcribed, that copy need not have con-
tained the full Festial — if it did, Urmeston was very selective. Several exempla
relate to Marian feasts, while the tale of the Mass of St Gregory would easily
enhance a eucharistic sermon.12 It is notable that Urmeston copies only Mirk’s
exempla and no more of his text. While the Festial can be treated as a compila-
tion that parish priests read out, here Urmeston appears more discriminating,
selecting in order to use the text for other purposes, perhaps composing his
own sermons and incorporating the exempla as appropriate.
Probably the most interesting and intriguing component of the potential
preaching aids in Bodley 123 is an incomplete cycle of Latin sermons. This
is now the final section of the volume, at fols 151 r–204v (the volume ends at
fol. 205v), and seems to have originated as a separate booklet. The post-medi-
eval (re)binding of the manuscript means that this could be a later addition
to the volume, but the reference to Newport [Pagnell] at fol. 205v makes that
unlikely. Even if the cycle is a late addition, that does not affect the core of the
following comments.
Written in an uneven hand, the booklet contains a series of (usually)
short sermons, for the most part a temporale sequence running from the first
Sunday in Advent to the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost. In addition to the
run of Sundays (broken only by the omission of Palm Sunday),13 there are four
sermons for Christmas Eve and Day and others for a scattering of feasts (St
Stephen, St John the Evangelist, Holy Innocent, Circumcision, Purification,
Annunciation), for the sixth day after Christmas, in capite ieiunii and the fol-
lowing Friday, and ferial sermons for the week after Easter. The script is rough
and unremarkable, similar (but not assuredly identical) to that found elsewhere
in the volume. Despite its overall roughness, there are signs that the booklet
was meant to be a more elaborate unit than it looks. Guide-letters at the start
of each sermon are probably intended as guides to rubrication, but this has not
been added.
11
Bodley 123, fols 86v–97v.
12
Bodley 123, fols 86v–97v. For the concordance of these exempla with the material in
Mirk’s Festial, see Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 582–83 (although the texts do not exactly
match that edition).
13
See below, n. 25.
34 R. N. Swanson
Apart from the ascription of two of the sermons to Gregory the Great,14
the collection is presented as an anonymous series, with no indicators of date
or place of origin. Ostensibly, they are just a set of sermons and can be taken at
face value simply as material available for someone like Urmeston to exploit for
his own sermon composition (and leaving aside here the possibility — or prob-
ability — that he saw their content as useful for his own personal development
as a pastor). The booklet was probably already damaged when he acquired it:
at least its first folio (to fit between the existing fols 150 and 151) has been
lost, and with it the start of the cycle’s first sermon — whose remainder (cover-
ing all of fol. 151r) is now heavily crossed out. Significant errors occur at two
points in the text, to suggest that this copy derives from a defective original.
At fol. 155v, a chunk of text has been omitted, so that almost all of the ser-
mon for Christmas Day is lost. This does not coincide with a page break; the
obvious explanation is that a folio was lost from the exemplar. However, the
missing text does not seem enough to cover a full folio (it might be enough
for one page), and a convincing explanation for the loss is elusive. A similar
jump occurs at fols 192v–193r, losing much of the text for the sermon for the
fourth Sunday after Easter. This break does coincide with a page break, and the
amount of lost text is perhaps sufficient for a full folio, but it is unclear whether
the loss is from Urmeston’s own manuscript or from the exemplar. However it
is to be explained, there is nothing to indicate that the loss was registered.
Almost every sermon addresses ‘fratres karissimi’, which immediately chal-
lenges their utility for a parish audience.15 They are generally short, rarely more
than two or three pages of text (although some are longer). Despite the almost
uniform address, the texts on initial reading appear to reflect two different sets
of sources and possibly two different collections. Ignoring the incomplete-
ness of 1 Advent, the next twenty-four sermons (2 Advent to Quinquagesima,
fols 151v–177r) lack pericopes and can be identified only by their place within
the liturgical cycle — the Sunday or other date to which they are allocated.
The sermon text consists solely of the exposition. The sermons in the second
run, from in capite ieiunii to 12 Pentecost (fols 177r–204v), are headed by the
pericope with the exposition following.16 At two points in this second run a
few other texts are interpolated, perhaps sermon-related but not in themselves
14
See below, n. 27.
15
Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, p. 9; see also Hall, ‘The
Early Medieval Sermon’, p. 207.
16
The gospel source is only occasionally identified, in a marginal note: Bodley 123,
fols 157v, 158v, 177r, 177v, 178r, 179v, 180r, 181v, 183r.
A Cycle Recycled 35
sermons, yet certainly capable of being used to provide material for use in a
sermon, and will merit further comment below.
The paucity of contextual information provided for these sermons is prob-
lematic; yet they are in a fifteenth-century hand, in a fifteenth-century manu-
script (even if no longer in its original binding), and were seemingly deliber-
ately acquired by a fifteenth-century parish priest to assist him in his duties. It
is natural to assume that they were relevant to the fifteenth century and to read
them — despite the seemingly limited and limiting audience of fratres — as
indicative of material which might feed into contemporary sermons. While the
texts have some oddities, they do not seem a particularly distinctive or remark-
able series — and certainly have not been hitherto considered as either.
Yet the series is much more intriguing than Urmeston probably appreci-
ated. On closer inspection and analysis, most of it actually derives from a set
of homilies which circulated widely in continental Europe from the eleventh
century, as a compilation which some of the surviving manuscripts entitle Flos
evangeliorum in circulo anni.17 This was a fairly popular cycle, now known from
at least forty-one extant English and continental manuscripts dating from the
eleventh through to the fifteenth centuries. 18 The texts are even older, being
accepted as Carolingian, with a suggested point of origin in northern Italy —
hence their scholarly designation as the Italian Homiliary. It has been argued
that the sermons depend on, or derive from, the homiliary of Haymo of Auxerre
(or of Halberstadt); but an alternative view is that they predate his work as an
independent composition which drew on almost identical sources.19
As pastoralia, these sermons maintain a clear moral and spiritual imperative.
A frequent motif is exhortation to good works, with the biblical text on which
each is built serving ‘as a basis for launching short expositions on the need for
good conduct, proper belief and the correction of sins in order to receive eter-
17
Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’; Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary: Texts and Contexts’,
which contains a ‘working edition’ of the whole cycle in Chapter 5 (I am extremely grateful to
Dr Martin for supplying a copy of his thesis at short notice; to avoid confusion between the arti-
cle and the thesis, the latter title is cited in full in the notes to this essay); Barré, Les Homéliaires
carolingiens, pp. 27–29 (his siglum ‘I’: p. 212).
18
Listed at Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, pp. 264–70. The list is provisional, and incom-
plete. Additions are London, British Library, MS Royal 18.B.xxiii, fols 1r–20v (see n. 45), and
Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 133 (not seen; there is a relatively uninformative descrip-
tion in James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College,
Cambridge, p. 168): see comment in Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval
England, pp. 173–74.
19
Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, pp. 280–84.
36 R. N. Swanson
nal peace with God, Christ, the angels, and the saints’.20 This ties them into the
agenda for Carolingian reform and the aspiration for an expansion of popular
preaching suggested by the Admonitio generalis of 798.21 There is also a strong
thread of exhortation to preachers, indicating a possibly more precise audience
(again specifically gendered as fratres) of potential preachers, almost preachers
in training.22 Following the exegetical pattern of Carolingian homilies, each
sermon develops a spiritualized reading of the biblical text, thereby making it
applicable to the contemporary world (whenever ‘contemporary’ might be)
through generalized moralizations which encouraged members of the audience
to amend their lives and enhance their chances of salvation.23
While the derivation of the material in Bodley 123 from the Italian
Homiliary series is clear, the Bodley cycle is not a full clone. The full set con-
tains 114 sermons; here there are only fifty-two. Most correspond to those
noted elsewhere, but two appear to be insertions. One, for in capite ieiunii
(fols 177r–v), has not yet been traced elsewhere; the other (immediately follow-
ing, at fols 177v–178r, for the Friday in capite ieiunii) appears to derive from a
variant Carolingian homiliary tradition. 24 The omission of the Palm Sunday
sermon seems not to be unusual among manuscripts of the cycle, presumably
reflecting a particular stemmatic transmission.25 The specific textual genealogy
which has Bodley 123 as its end product is not yet known, but the resulting
text has been described as ‘very corrupt and of a problematic nature’.26 There is
clearly some reshaping within the cycle, in additions and exclusions, and within
the sermons, which almost totally fail to identify their sources (unlike at least
some of the other manuscripts).27
20
21
Printed in Capitularia regum Francorum i, ed. by Boretius, pp. 53–62. For a basic discus-
sion and contextualization see Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe, ed. by Frassetto, pp. 1–2; there
is a more detailed analysis in Buck, Admonitio und Praedicatio, pp. 67–156. The radical chal-
lenge to the authenticity of the received text offered by Magnou-Nortier, ‘L’Admonitio generalis:
étude critique’, does not threaten the context of a programme of pastoral reform (see especially
the ‘reconstructed’ text at pp. 236–42). See further below, n. 32.
22
23
Hall, ‘The Early Medieval Sermon’, pp. 206–11.
24
Barré, Les Homéliaires carolingiens, p. 184 (Q I, 22). (The cross-reference from p. 250 is
incorrect.)
25
Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, p. 299 n. 80.
26
Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, p. 269 n. 32.
27
The additions are noted above. The omissions (apart from Palm Sunday) occur between
A Cycle Recycled 37
Additional texts occur at two points in the booklet, almost all of them
traceable elsewhere. These interpolations are integral to the transcription,
not late space-fillers.28 How, when, and why they were intruded into the cycle
cannot be recovered, and there seems to be no rationale for their placing. At
fol. 178r three short entries, placed between the sermons for the first Friday
and the first Sunday of Lent, list the seven criminal sins (‘criminalia peccata’)
of Cain, with the seven sufferings which he encountered during his life, and
a brief discussion of the sign which preserved him from being killed by those
whom he met (Genesis 4. 14–15). Identified as a kiss (‘ut doctores dicunt’), it
is associated with the traitor’s kiss offered to Christ by Judas. Two longer pieces
appear between the sermons for the Octave of and second Sunday after Easter,
at fols 190v–191r. The first, lacking a title but intended to have a rubricated
opening initial, has the incipit ‘Gallus stans in pinnaculum templi’. It starts by
taking the cockerel as an analogy for preachers and then offers further analo-
gies which elide into a set of similitudes between parts of a church building
and members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the church windows as the
five senses, the stones of the walls as the priests and clergy, and the door — pre-
dictably — as Christ. While the Cain texts have not yet been noted elsewhere,
5 Easter and 2 Pentecost (so omitting Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, pp. 316–19, nos 46–56)
and at 4–5 Pentecost (omitting Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, pp. 320–22, nos 59–64).
Martin’s listing of the individual sermons, derived from a Portuguese manuscript, includes the
identification of the original authors, although the texts are in fact often edited, and some ascrip-
tions are incorrect (Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, pp. 303–38, and comment at pp. 279–82,
285). For another listing, see Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters,
pp. 150–56 (which cites Bodley 123 as a related manuscript at p. 156). For a partial concord-
ance of Schneyer and Barré listings, see Bibliothèque nationale: catalogue général des manu-
scrits latins, vii: (Nos 3776 à 3835), Homéliaires (1988), pp. 220–26. The text in Shrewsbury,
Shrewsbury School, MS 13 (see n. 41) acknowledges that the material derives from other
authors, but apparently does not name them. In Bodley 123 the only sermons with a named
author are 2–3 Pentecost, ascribed to Gregory the Great (fols 194v, 195r).
28
Added texts follow the last sermon, at Bodley 123, fols 203 v–204r. At fol. 203v the
clauses of the Apostles’ Creed as ascribed to the individual apostles occur with a note about
taking an oath on the Bible (among other known examples of this see Historic and Municipal
Documents of Ireland, ed. by Gilbert, p. xxii n. 2). Fol. 204r offers paired listings of positive and
negative qualities equivalent to the seven curialitates and seven rusticitates which Johannes de
Garlandia attributed to Thales at Rome — cf. John of Garland, Morale scolarium, ed. by Paetow,
pp. 231–32, and for an edited version from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 171,
fol. 167rb, almost matching the Bodley 123 text, Gieben, ‘Robert Grosseteste and Medieval
Courtesy-Books’, pp. 54–55. These may all be additions to the original booklet but could have
been already present when Urmeston acquired it.
38 R. N. Swanson
this one (or one very similar) appears in manuscripts of both continental and
English origin from the thirteenth century.29
The second inserted piece, at fol. 191r, carries the title ‘De ieiunia die veneris’,
and begins with a question, ‘why is it fitting more to fast on and keep Fridays
than other days?’ The response is a list of statements pointing out miracula
associated with Fridays, from the creation of Adam through to the anticipated
battle of Antichrist against Elias and Enoch. This is a variant of a text recorded
in at least one other manuscript, probably dating from Italy c. 1300–20.30
That this series of Latin sermons actually consists of Carolingian sermons
exploited in an English parochial context has not hitherto been noticed or
appreciated by scholars working on preaching in late medieval England.31
The centuries since their original composition saw significant changes in the
Church, with doctrinal evolution and the emergence of many new practices.
Most importantly, the fifteenth-century Church was no longer the somewhat
missionary Church of the eighth and ninth centuries. While the pastoral aspi-
rations of Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis of 798 shared some of the ambi-
tions of the later ‘pastoral revolution’ of the thirteenth century which stimu-
lated the massive explosion of pastoral texts in late medieval Europe (including
England), the full contexts were very different.32 A pressing issue arising from
29
This may have been a fluid text: the incipit is distinctive, but explicits seem to vary. For
other copies see Ker and Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, iv: Paisley–York
(1992), p. 491 (in Taunton, Somerset County Record Office, DD/SAS C/1193/74 — thir-
teenth century); Bibliothèque nationale: catalogue général des manuscrits latins, i, 199 (Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 567), with cross-references to notices of others.
30
Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, MS D. XXVI.1; see Catalogus manuscriptorum
Malatestianæ Cæsanatis bibliothecæ fratrum minorum conventualium, ed. by Mucciolo, i, 90. The
text is there ascribed to a Pope Clement, editorially specified as Clement V (r. 1309–14), yet
dating the manuscript to the thirteenth century, which creates a contradiction. Another descrip-
tion in Zazzeri, Sui codici e libri a stampa della Biblioteca Malatestiana di Cesena, pp. 215–20,
also ascribing the Fridays text to Clement V at p. 219 but retaining the manuscript’s thirteenth-
century date at p. 218.
31
The manuscript and sermons are mentioned in Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from
Later Medieval England, p. 173 n. 173, p. 214, although the comments seem to be incompatible.
As other references in this essay demonstrate, scholars working on the Italian Homiliary itself,
and earlier sermon manuscripts, had already noted the connection between the Carolingian
cycle and Bodley 123.
32
For the Carolingian pastoral context see McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the
Carolingian Reforms, pp. 4–9, 11–14, and 81–114 (the Italian sermon tradition noted briefly
at pp. 110–11); see also Amos, ‘Preaching and the Sermon in the Carolingian World’. For the
pastoral revolution and its aftermath, Morris, The Papal Monarchy, pp. 489–96; Boyle, ‘The
A Cycle Recycled 39
the presence of this version of the Italian Homiliary in Bodley 123 is how the
sermons were actually used as a preaching aid in fifteenth-century England. It
seems highly unlikely that they were simply read out in translation: the address
to ‘fratres karissimi’ would be too limiting, and comments on preaching and
preachers would make them inappropriate for a parish setting.33
Basic points here derive from the collection’s structure and the layout of the
individual sermons. While the absence of pericopes for the first half of the series
is not in itself problematic, if identification of the Sunday would provide suffi-
cient guidance, a minor difficulty arises towards the end. The Sarum Use of the
fifteenth century identified the Sundays of the latter half of the Church year as
Sundays after Trinity. The Bodley 123 sermons retain the original Carolingian
liturgical sequence, ascribing the final sermons to Sundays after Pentecost. This
creates a numerical disjunction, requiring the number of the ‘Sunday after’ to
be reduced by one (Trinity Sunday being the first Sunday after Pentecost). A
further nuisance is that two of these Sundays are misnumbered: two succes-
sive sermons are allocated to the ‘4th Sunday’ (after Pentecost), then one for
the fifth, followed by one for the seventh (although the pericopes maintain the
correct sequence for the fourth to seventh Sundays). That this error was not
corrected may indicate that the sermons were not directly exploited for their
associated days but were instead treated as texts to be quarried.34
How this material fits into analyses of Carolingian preaching and pastoral
care is not something to address here.35 Their style challenges the stereotype of
late medieval English preaching: the standard interpretative tool is the analogy,
the spiritual and moral exegesis of the biblical text, with none of the exempla or
anecdotes frequently found in the sermons composed in the late Middle Ages
(although there is an extended similitude at fol. 159v). These sermons generally
appear old-fashioned for the fifteenth century, although they could also add
Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’; Spencer, English Preaching in the
Late Middle Ages, chap. 5.
33
For references to preachers and instructors see especially Bodley 123, fols 194v (‘ordi-
nem predicatorum’), 198v, 199v. For one twelfth-century Latin sermon series translated into
fifteenth-century English, see Spencer, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Translation’; see also Spencer,
‘Middle English Sermons’, pp. 626–29.
34
The identifications of the sermons are adjusted for post-Trinity numbering in Wisbech,
Town Library MS 3B: Ker and Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, iv: Paisley–York
(1992), p. 653.
35
Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’, pp. 296–97; fuller analysis (dealing with the whole
cycle) in Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary: Texts and Contexts’, chap. 6.
40 R. N. Swanson
to evidence for a revival of such homiletic preaching at that time. They might
be approved by Wycliffites as better pastoral tools than the divided, complex,
and diverting sermons of the time.36 With his transcriptions elsewhere of exem-
pla and similar sermon illustrations, Urmeston cannot be classed as a Lollard
preacher (he probably also distributed papal crusading indulgences), 37 but
aspects of the sermons of the Italian Homiliary might sometimes slip into that
ever-expanding ‘grey area’ on the boundary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy
in fifteenth-century England.38
Integrating these texts into fifteenth-century preachers’ concerns is largely a
matter of interpretation. Changes in theological understandings and doctrinal
priorities since the Carolingian period would affect how they could be treated
and their sense of contemporary relevance in Yorkist and early Tudor England.
Such change is immediately discernible in the sermons’ silences, the late medi-
eval issues unknown to the ninth century. There is, for instance, nothing touch-
ing explicitly on transubstantiation, which only became a central element of
eucharistic doctrine after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (and even there-
after took some time to become dogmatic).39 While there are references to the
fate of souls after death, purgatory is never mentioned, despite its prominence
in late medieval religious and devotional practices. Indeed, the possibility of
offering post mortem satisfaction for sin is actually denied, making the need to
complete penance whilst living all the more urgent.40
If these sermons were used by Thomas Urmeston to inform his preaching,
their contents must have been adapted to address fifteenth-century concerns:
deliberately incorporated into his priestly anthology (and also found in other
manuscripts from late medieval England), they were not there simply as curi-
36
For Wyclif ’s and Lollard views of preaching, Dolnikowski, ‘The Encouragement of Lay
Preaching as an Ecclesiastical Critique’; Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 268–73. On
sermon form, Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 231–47; for comments on
use of homilies pp. 230, 366. For users of ‘ancient’ form in pre-Reformation decades, Blench,
Preaching in England, pp. 73–78.
37
See Swanson, ‘Crusade Administration in Fifteenth-Century England’. An absolution
formula for a papal indulgence is at Bodley 123, fol. 205v.
38
For the ‘grey area’ see Havens, ‘Shading the Grey Area’, esp. pp. 337–39 and references. I
have also benefited from conversations with Fiona Somerset on this issue.
39
Macy, ‘The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages’. Transubstantiation might
be extrapolated from a reference to Christ as ‘cibus noster’: Bodley 123, fol. 156v.
40
Bodley 123, fol. 200v: ‘post mortem nostram nullam penitentiam habere poterimus de
peccatis nostris’, ‘post mortem nullus locus est nobis penitendi’.
A Cycle Recycled 41
osities.41 Nevertheless, why Urmeston chose to incorporate them into his mis-
cellany, and how they contributed to his preaching alongside and in addition to
the influences derived from Mirk and other available sources, are matters which
elude analysis even as they might invite speculation. Most of the content of
the Latin texts has the timelessness of biblical exegesis: the concern for moral-
ity, belief, and salvation which underpins a religion whose fundamental task is
unchanging through to the day of Judgement. They could therefore be appro-
priated for sermons at almost any time — as they presumably had been ear-
lier, as implied in the continuous and continuously reshaped textual transmis-
sion. Obvious fifteenth-century boxes which could be ticked include reference
to the active and contemplative lives (fols 172v–173r), concern for the poor
(fol. 201r — also fol. 194r), preparation for the Apocalypse and Last Judgement
(fols 151v–152v, 153r, 159r–v, 162r), criticism of those who prefer fables to reli-
gious instruction (fol. 163r), and the Corporal Acts of Mercy (fol. 197r).
How these texts and their contents moved from manuscript to pulpit can
only be imagined, but their straightforward construction is perhaps their most
significant feature, enhancing their potential malleability for parochial preach-
ing. Urmeston doubtless acquired them for their utility, not for their style. He
is likely to have quarried them — or been influenced by them — to provide
ideas for customary moral and spiritual guidance, developing the spiritualized
readings from the biblical texts to provide analogies and exhortations for his
own parishioners. Despite their being addressed to ‘fratres’, it would have been
easy to lift segments from the texts and incorporate them into his own preach-
ing, a multiple translatio across time, space, and language, perhaps exploiting
the repetition and stability of the message across the texts to decouple the
interpretation and the spiritual message from the context of a specific sermon.
These scruffy pages in a scruffy anthology which moved around with its
owner offer potentially significant challenges to approaches to medieval ser-
mons while reflecting major but sometimes neglected fundamentals of medieval
textual culture. It is tempting to contrast ‘model sermons’ and ‘others’ — the
texts widely disseminated in consequence of the rise of the mendicants and the
41
Other manuscripts are Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 133 (above, n. 18); London,
British Library, MS Royal 18.B.xxiii (see next note); Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury School, MS 13;
Wisbech, Town Library, MS 3B (see Ker and Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries
Libraries, iv: Paisley–York (1992), pp. 303–04, 653–54). Martin, ‘The Italian Homiliary’,
pp. 269 and 270 n. 35, implies that Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canonici Pat. Lat. 24 is an
English manuscript, but I suspect a continental origin. Unfortunately, it has no indication of
provenance.
42 R. N. Swanson
pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century, and the later collections (among
them Mirk’s Festial), which ungifted or lazy preachers could crib, are set against
the ‘ordinary’, or perhaps ‘unique’, sermons which were preached across Europe.42
But what makes a sermon a ‘model sermon’? The intention of the author or series
compiler certainly counts, and the deliberate dissemination of a text as a model,
if not a template, sets it in a different category from one meant only for a single
occasion and retained as a private possession. Yet dissemination, and reception,
could not always be controlled by authors, and models need not be widely dis-
tributed.43 Preachers might well want models, but in a manuscript culture the
basic mechanics of production and distribution were vital elements: texts had to
be available to be copied; what users could use depended on what they could get
hold of.44 Urmeston acquired these sermons incomplete, damaged, unattributed
(and so with no means of knowing the authorial intention), but they were ser-
mons which he could use; and as such for him, and for unknown previous (and
possibly later) users, they became ‘model sermons’.45
They are, though, sermons utterly decontextualized and so also atemporal.
While Urmeston would probably have recognized an obviously earlier manu-
script as such, the existing booklet floats without attribution of time or space.
If Urmeston did not in fact copy it himself from an obviously earlier manu-
script, but acquired it ready-made, then with its handwriting as his only guide
to dating, he would probably have approached the texts as ‘current’ sermons, or
at least as currently applicable in terms of their content. He may have noticed
oddities in the doctrine, the omissions of changes derived from the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215, but these sermons could easily be read through a fif-
teenth-century mind without seeming too strange.
The issue of mentality matters. How was Urmeston to know that these were
not contemporary texts? He would not have engaged with them as ‘period
pieces’, with the cultural baggage imposed on texts consciously perceived as
‘old’ and an awareness (confirmed by testing internal evidence) of change over
42
This sense of polarization is strong (but possibly unintentional) in Hanska, ‘Recon
structing the Mental Calendar of Medieval Preaching’.
43
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 511 has been identified as ‘a model sermon
collection, in an edition of one’: O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, p. 34.
44
Hanna, Pursuing History, p. 31.
45
Cf. Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, pp. 3–4; see also
Hall, ‘The Early Medieval Sermon’, p. 206. This approach to ‘model sermons’ expands beyond
the more restricted and technical identification advocated in d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars,
pp. 104–31, especially pp. 106–10.
A Cycle Recycled 43
time. Urmeston (as far as we can tell) saw these texts as part of his contempo-
rary culture. This, though, raises a point about textual cultures in general; for,
provided that texts are not actually lost and continue to have (or be accessible
to) readers, a textual culture is necessarily a cumulative culture, constantly aug-
mented rather than constantly replacing itself while maintaining a steady state.
It is natural, thinking historically, to locate texts chronologically by their dates
of composition: sermons ‘of the thirteenth century’, sermons of ‘the fifteenth
century’. It is also rational to compare across time, to assess change. Yet to do
that and then identify changes over time on the basis solely of that comparison
is misguided, because such direct comparison ignores the cumulative nature of
the textual culture. The sermons ‘of the thirteenth century’ were written then
but were still being read in the fifteenth, making them as validly ‘fifteenth-cen-
tury sermons’ as those generated between 1400 and 1500. So with Urmeston’s
sermons: regardless of when they were written, he was using them in the fif-
teenth century; they were fifteenth-century sermons. Indeed, if the evidence
of the English manuscripts is any guide, these ‘old’ sermons were novelties to
textual culture in late medieval England.
For Thomas Urmeston, presumably unaware of the Carolingian origins
of his Latin sermon cycle, the material was immediately available and poten-
tially useful. Its identification for modern scholarly purposes as a version of the
Italian Homiliary transforms the cycle’s place in the records of preaching in late
medieval England, raising questions which Urmeston would not have thought
of, or perhaps not have thought worth asking, and with implications and rami-
fications which cannot be followed through here. Urmeston’s copy of the cycle
is not the sole extant manuscript from England. The available evidence rather
suggests that England saw an efflorescence in late copying of Italian Homiliary
sermons in differing combinations after 1350, indicating reasonable popularity
as a source and as a series of ‘model’ sermons. While there is so far no evidence
(or none noticed) to show that these sermons fed into surviving sermons in
English, they clearly circulated alongside the English products. The presence
of the exempla from Mirk’s Festial in Urmeston’s anthology is one indicator of
this. Far more suggestive is the presence of sermons from the cycle in BL, MS
Royal 18.B.xxiii, a manuscript much better known for its numerous vernacular
sermons (including three from the Festial), which have considerably overshad-
owed its Latin contents.46
46
Printed in Middle English Sermons, ed. by Ross; see also O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium
of Middle English Prose Sermons, iii, 1373–1474; Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 580. In Martin’s
44 R. N. Swanson
The broader English afterlife of this Carolingian cycle clearly demands more
investigation and comment. For now the enigmatic and problematic booklet in
Bodley 123 highlights some of the gaps in our knowledge of the actualities of
fifteenth-century English parochial preaching. Thomas Urmeston’s anthology
offers glimpses of potential sermons, but we will never know exactly what he
told his parishioners or how they reacted to his message. The identification of
the Italian Homiliary as the source for the series of Latin sermons incorporated
into Bodley 123, and the evidence which indicates even more extensive knowl-
edge and use of these Carolingian sermons in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
England, adds yet another ingredient to the mixture of forces and influences
which produced the sermons preached in English parishes in the era of Eamon
Duffy’s ‘traditional religion’.47
listing (above, n. 27) the sermons from the Italian Homiliary (at fols 1r–20v) in order equate to
(without precisely matching) nos 1–4, 7–8, 5 (variant ending), 10–12, 13 (reduced), 14, 16, 17
(incomplete).
47
See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars.
A Cycle Recycled 45
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, MS D. XXVI.1
London, British Library, MS Royal 18.B.xxiii
—— , MS Canonici Pat. Lat. 24
—— , MS Laud misc. 171
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 567
Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury School, MS 13
Taunton, Somerset County Record Office, DD/SAS C/1193/74
Wisbech, Town Library, MS 3B
Primary Sources
Capitularia regum Francorum, i, ed. by Alfred Boretius, in Monumenta Germaniae His
torica, Legum, Sectio II (Hannover: Hahn, 1883)
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, a.d. 1172–1320, from the Archives of the
City of Dublin, etc., ed. by John Thomas Gilbert (London: Longmans, Green, 1870)
John of Garland, ‘Morale scolarium’ of John of Garland ( Johannes de Garlandia), a Professor
in the Universities of Paris and Toulouse in the Thirteenth Century, ed. by Louis John
Paetow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927)
Magnou-Nortier, Elisabeth, ‘L’Admonitio generalis: étude critique’, in Jornades internac-
ionals d’estudi sobre el Bisbe Feliu d’Urgel: la Seu d’Urgell, 28–30 de setembre de 1999.
crònica i estudis, ed. by Josep Perarnau, Studia, Textus, Subsidia, 9 (Barcelona: Facultat
de Teologiía de Catalunya Societat Cultural Urgel·litana, 2000), pp. 195–242
Martin, Michael Thomas, ‘The Italian Homiliary: Texts and Contexts’ (unpublished doc-
toral dissertation, Western Michigan University, 2005)
Middle English Sermons: Edited from British Museum MS Royal 18.B.xxiii, ed. by
Woodburn O. Ross, EETS, o.s., 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940)
2009–11)
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Amos, Thomas L., ‘Preaching and the Sermon in the Carolingian World’, in De ore domini:
Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages, ed. by Thomas L. Amos, Eugene A. Green,
and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Studies in Medieval Culture, 27 (Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute, 1989), pp. 41–60
46 R. N. Swanson
Barré, Henri, Les Homéliaires carolingiens de l’école d’Auxerre, Studi e Testi, 225 (Città del
Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1962)
Bibliothèque nationale: catalogue général des manuscrits latins, 7 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque
nationale, 1939–88)
Blench, John Wheatley, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries:
A Study of English Sermons, 1450–c. 1600 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964)
Boyle, Leonard E., ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in
The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan, Tennessee
Studies in Literature, 28 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 30–44
Buck, Thomas Martin, Admonitio und Praedicatio: zur religiös-pastoralen Dimension von
Kapitularien und kapitulariennahen Texten (507–814), Freiburger Beiträge zur mit-
telalterlichen Geschichte, 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997)
d’Avray, David L., The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Dolnikowski, Edith W., ‘The Encouragement of Lay Preaching as an Ecclesiastical Critique
in Wyclif ’s Latin Sermons’, in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons: Proceedings
of the International Symposium (Kalamazoo, 4–7 May 1995), ed. by Beverly Mayne
Kienzle and others, Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales: textes
et études du moyen âge, 5 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération internationale des instituts
d’études médiévales, 1996), pp. 194–207
Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580,
2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)
Edwards, A. S. G., gen. ed., Index of Middle English Prose, 20 vols to date (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1984–)
Frassetto, Michael, ed., Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe: Society in Transformation (Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003)
Gieben, Servlis, ‘Robert Grosseteste and Medieval Courtesy-Books’, Vivarium, 5 (1967),
47–74
Hall, Thomas N., ‘The Early Medieval Sermon’, in The Sermon, ed. by Beverly Mayne
Kienzle, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 81–83 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2000), pp. 203–69
Hanna, Ralph, III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (Stan
ford: Stanford University Press, 1996)
Hanska, Jussi, ‘Reconstructing the Mental Calendar of Medieval Preaching: A Method
and its Limits — An Analysis of Sunday Sermons’, in Preacher, Sermon and Audience
in the Middle Ages, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, New History of the Sermon, 3 (Leiden:
Brill, 2002), pp. 293–315
Havens, Jill C., ‘Shading the Grey Area: Determining Heresy in Middle English Texts’,
in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. by
Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison, Medieval Church Studies, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2005), pp. 337–52
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A Cycle Recycled 47
James, Montague Rhodes, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St

John’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913)
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Clarendon Press, 1969–92)
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(London: Robins, 1847)
Macy, Gary, ‘The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 45 (1994), 11–41
Madan, Falconer, H. H. E. Craster, and others, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manu
scripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, 7 vols in 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
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ibus Produced According to the “New” Carolingian Homiletic Genre and Reform
Measures’, Sacris Erudiri, 49 (2010), 261–338
McKitterick, Rosamond, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms, 789–895
(London: Royal Historical Society, 1977)
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Mucciolo, Josephus Maria, ed., Catalogus manuscriptorum Malatestianæ Cæsanatis biblio
thecæ fratrum minorum conventualium, 2 vols (Cesena: Typis Gregorii Blasinii sub
signo Palladis superiorum facultate, 1780–84)
O’Carroll, Mary Elizabeth, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook: Studies in MS
Laud Misc. 511, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts, 128
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997)
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Sermo, 1, 4 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007)
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the Index of Middle English Prose’, Leeds Studies in English: Essays in Honour of A. C.
Cawley, ed. by Peter Meredith, n.s., 12 (1981), 229–44
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in Codicologica, ed. by Albert Gruys and J. Peter Gumbert, 5 vols (Leiden: Brill,
1976–80), iii: Essais typologiques (1980), pp. 46–69
Schneyer, Johannes Baptist, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters,
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelaters: Texte und
Untersuchungen, 43, 11 vols (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973–90)
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1993)
—— , ‘A Fifteenth-Century Translation of a Late Twelfth-Century Sermon Collection’,
Review of English Studies, n.s., 28 (1977), 257–67
—— , ‘Middle English Sermons’, in The Sermon, ed. by Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Typologie
des sources du moyen âge occidental, 81–83 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 597–660
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the Distribution of Indulgences in 1489’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 183–88
48 R. N. Swanson
Wenzel, Siegfried, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox
Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
—— , ‘Sermon Collections and their Taxonomy’, in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives
on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 7–21
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ricerche e osservazioni (Cesena: Vignuzzi, 1887)
So Far and Yet So Near:
Distance or Proximity of Author
and Witness in Manuscripts
of John Wyclif’s Sermons
Anne Hudson
J
ohn Wyclif left around 250 Latin sermons at his death in December 1384, a
fact alone that would justify his medieval byname, Doctor euangelicus. When
Johann Loserth came to edit them in four volumes for the Wyclif Society
between 1887 and 1890, he knew a rather restricted number of manuscripts for
them.1 For all the sermons, Loserth used as base text, both for its material read-
ings and its order, the handsome manuscript that is now Cambridge, Trinity
College, MS B.16.2 (hereafter Trinity); in that copy the sermons follow a long
1
All the Wyclif texts here discussed were, unless otherwise stated, edited for the Wyclif
Society (London) between 1880 and 1923; none of the texts there found has been re-edited
more recently. Texts are cited by page and line number, separated by a slash. Invaluable as a list-
ing of the manuscripts for the individual items is Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclif;
this was based in part on the notes assembled by his father, S. Harrison Thomson. Some cor-
rections and additions are listed in my book, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings,
Appendix II — the items in the volume are numbered, but the pagination of the reprinted
papers is retained; the numbers are given here and pagination only when a particular detail
is in question. Thomson’s items are numbered, and I have here included those numbers fol-
lowing ‘T’ in parentheses. After the first instance Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
is abbreviated as Wo.; Praha, Narodní Knihovna (formerly Praha, Universitní Knihovna) as
PUK; Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapitulý as PMK; and Wien, Österreichische National
bibliothek as ÖNB.
Anne Hudson (anne.hudson@lmh.ox.ac.uk) is emeritus professor of Medieval English at the

University of Oxford.
50 Anne Hudson
sequence of Wyclif ’s earlier philosophical tracts and precede the late and unfin-
ished work in four books, the Opus evangelicum.2 The Trinity manuscript groups
the sermons into four sections: the first, those based on the Sunday gospel lec-
tions (T54–114); the second on the sanctorale gospel lections (T115–75, a very
reduced Proprium, followed by a fuller Commune sanctorum); the third on the
Sunday epistle lections, all of them according to the Sarum rite (T176–234);
the fourth section (T235–98) is less clearly organized and combines two sets
in non-chronological order, the so-called Sermones viginti and Sermones quad-
raginta (the first a late written collection dating from after 1381, the second
preached early in Wyclif ’s career), with a few miscellaneous sermons.3 Although
the position is still that no copy can rival Trinity’s coverage, for a number of
its sermons further manuscripts have come to light since 1890: three of these
contain a complete set, others a brief selection, and in rare cases only a single
sermon is found along with other works.4 Loserth recognized in his editions
that, whilst Trinity’s coverage made it the obvious choice for a base text, its
readings were by no means so pre-eminent as its physical splendour with richly
illuminated capitals might lead one to expect; he also realized that the series in
which Trinity’s accuracy was most seriously in question was the third, for the
Sunday epistle sequence: here, Trinity was the only copy known to Loserth.5
Since 1889 three important further witnesses have come to light for this set
of sermons. Two of these are now in the Guelf collection at the Wolfenbüttel
Herzog August Bibliothek where they are numbered respectively MSS
Helmstedt 306 and 565; they contain the whole set together, in the case of
the second, with the set for the Sunday gospels.6 The third is less extensive in
2
I have described this manuscript in more detail in the paper reprinted in Hudson, Studies
in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. viii; this includes six plates, the first the contempo-
rary list of contents.
3
The arrangement of the sermons, and especially the disposition of a few that do not read-
ily fit the main set descriptions, are discussed in my paper reprinted in Hudson, Studies in the
Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. vi.
4
Apart from the manuscripts central here, the main addition unknown to Thomson, The
Latin Writings of John Wyclif, is of his nos 257–96, the Sermones quadraginta, discovered by
Siegfried Wenzel in Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 199, fols 142ra–221vb (see his article ‘A
New Version of Wyclif ’s Sermones quadraginta’). For additional manuscripts of small groups or
single sermons see Thomson’s lists, and Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings,
Appendix II.
5
See his edition of the epistle sermons, iii, pp. iii–iv, resuming comments in his earlier
volume, i, p. xxxv.
6
Both were described in Katalog der Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, 1: Die Helm
So Far and Yet So Near 51
coverage: it is now Praha, Narodní Knihovna (formerly Praha, Universitní

Knihovna), MS III.B.19, and contains substantial parts of Wyclif ’s epistle ser-
mons mainly from Easter to the end of the set, each used as a protheme to Jan
Hus’s gospel sermons for the same occasion in his Leccionarium bipartitum. 7
This last, whilst of considerable interest in relation to the handling of Wyclif ’s
works in Hussite Bohemia, has less value for the editor of Wyclif, since the texts
are not all complete; for the most part, where it offers readings they agree with
the two Wolfenbüttel copies. The same incompleteness, and the same fidel-
ity to those two, is also found in the few relevant sermons found in Herrnhut,
Archiv der Brüder-Unität, MS ABII.R.1.16a.8 In order to confine the evidence
to a comprehensible quantity, I shall concentrate here on the two complete
manuscripts.
As will emerge, the two Wolfenbüttel copies are textually very close to each
other.9 But their origins and other content make it less than self-evident that
they should have shared a close textual history. Wo. 306 is the more varied
volume, though apart from flyleaves all the works are by Wyclif: following the
sermons there are a further ten items, the longest of them the last (fols 268rb–
369vb), the De apostasia, the penultimate book of Wyclif ’s twelve part Summa
theologie and, since it deals with the Eucharist, one of the most contentious.
Thomson describes the manuscript as Polish: this is borne out by the Polish
eulogy of Wyclif, ‘edita ab Andrea de Dobschino, olim magistro artium stu-
dii Cracowiensis’ (compiled by Andrew of Doschin, formerly master of arts at
stedter Handschriften, i, 251, and ii, 45–46.

7
This copy, henceforward P, was not known to Thomson, The Latin Writings of John
Wyclif, and hence does not appear in his listing; the details are given in Hudson, Studies in the
Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, Appendix II, pp. 6–8. The source of the material was rec-
ognized by Truhlář, Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum latinorum (in the library now Praha,
Narodní Knihovna (formerly Praha, Universitní Knihovna)), i, 165–66.
8
The sermons are fols 35r–38r (T200), 41r–42v (parts of T201), 48r–51v (T202), 55r–56v
(part of T203), 145r–147r (part of T208).
9
This emerges particularly clearly in the last sermon in these copies, T236 (printed in
Sermones, ed. by Loserth, iv, 11–24). It is immediately obvious that the scribe of Wo. 565 had
problems in reading his exemplar here (fols 299va–303rb): there are many brief gaps where words
are missing, a defect almost unknown up to that point. Looking at Wo. 306, fols 205rb–209va,
there is not at first sight any problem apart from the same gap at p. 18/10 (where crocus is omit-
ted). But looking more closely it becomes clear that where Wo. 565 has a gap the word(s) in
Wo. 306 have been neatly supplied where a gap had previously been left (for instance, pp. 12/22
iunctis, 13/2 secundo, 13/7 ypostatice, 13/8 insinuativa, etc.). In all instances the correction in
Wo. 306 agrees with the reading in T.
52 Anne Hudson
Krakow university), found on an opening flyleaf; the name is that of Andrzej

Gaľka, a Polish cleric and historian active between 1420 and 1449 and a sup-
porter of Wyclif.10 It is credible that the whole volume may have belonged to
him, and that it came to Wolfenbüttel from a Polish or German source through
Flacius Illyricus, the reformer, polemicist, and compiler of the Magdeburger
Centurien.11 Doubtless, however, the transmission of the works from England
to the scribe and owners was through the medium of Bohemia. Wo. 565 is the
simpler volume, containing only the sets of Sunday gospel followed by Sunday
epistle sermons; it is a smaller volume than 306 and is on parchment rather than
the usual Bohemian paper (as 306). Again, it came into the Wolfenbüttel col-
lection from Flacius Illyricus but in this case certainly ultimately from Bohemia.
The manuscript belongs with seven other volumes of identical format, layout,
and comparable script and decoration as the larger part of a ‘collected works of
Wyclif ’; the other seven are now in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in
Vienna as numbers 1337–43, but this was in all probability sent by Kaspar von
Niedbruck to Flacius shortly before 1557. Niedbruck seems to have obtained
the set on loan from the Bohemian small town of Nymburk, but his untimely
and intestate death on 26 September 1557 meant that all the materials he held
were forfeit to the emperor and entered the latter’s collections.12
From these two Bohemian copies, Loserth would have been able to improve
his text of the Sunday epistle sermons very significantly. In the first place many
scriptural references which are incomplete in Trinity are provided by these two;
this may not indicate a superior tradition, since it is obviously credible that a
scribe somewhere in the post-authorial transmission could have supplied these
to remedy archetypal incompleteness.13 That this may not be the right explana-
tion is perhaps suggested by less frequent cases where the biblical reference is
incorrect in Trinity but correct in the other two.14 Much more helpful are the
quite numerous places where Trinity leaves a gap in the text, space for one word
or more and sometimes for a whole line. Thus p. 486/35 Trinity reads:
10
Schlauch, ‘A Polish Vernacular Eulogy of Wycliff ’, pp. 71–72, printed from a Göttingen
manuscript a poem by Gaľka in praise of Wyclif that is also found on the front flyleaf of
Wo. 306. For more recent discussion of Gaľka’s career and views see Kras, ‘Wycliffe’s Tradition
in Fifteenth-Century Poland’.
11
For references, see Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. xvi, p. 35.
12
See Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. xvi, pp. 29–35.
13
For examples of Trinity’s gaps, all of which are completed in the two Bohemian copies,
see Sermones, ed. by Loserth, iii, 80/11, 86/34, 94/10–11, 103/10, 104/26, and so on.
14
For instance, pp. 106/15 where there is a gap, p. 111/12.
Sine carie crimine in se ipsis et sine offensa [gap of a line and a half] Nam […]
(Without the rot, the crime in themselves and without offence […] For)
but the other two have:

Sine carie criminum in seipsis et sine offensa quo ad proximos quia iuxta declarata
superius illa dies iudicii finalis est singulariter dies Christi. Finis autem huius ius-
ticie laboriose provia foret fructus uel fruicio sempiternus post hunc diem in patria
nam […]
(Without the rot of crimes in themselves and without offence in regard to their
neighbours since it is declared above that this day of final judgment is the day of
Christ. The end of this justice laboriously provided will be the fruit, or eternal frui-
tion, after this day in the native land, for […]). 15
Not every incompleteness in Trinity’s text is marked by a gap: often the fault
was probably the result of usual scribal errors such as eyeskip: at p. 89/20
Loserth notes that some words seem to have been omitted from Trinity, though
his conjecture placed the gap a few words too late. Trinity reads:
Videtur multis quod vendentes hoc donum vite necessitatem exigentibus
(It seems to many that those selling this gift of life to those that use up need (?)
[Loserth then marks a gap but there is none]
but the two continental copies have:

Uidetur multis quod vendentes hoc donum spirituale peccunia sese damnant ut
creditur quo ad primum de fratribus, quoad secundum de superbis adulantibus
ultra uita necessitatem exigentibus.
(It seems to many that those selling this spiritual gift for money damn themselves,
as it is believed concerning the first about the friars, and as about the second con-
cerning those praising the proud beyond those lacking what is necessary for life.)
The Trinity scribe not infrequently writes nonsense, or has an incomprehensi-

ble reading. Thus at p. 212/23, ‘Joseph Genes. XI qui ordinavit ad elidendum
[so Loserth, actually Trinity reads eligendum] egi peccatorum […]’ ( Joseph,
Genesis 11, who commanded to choose ? of sinners); here the Bohemian cop-
15
Other instances which can be completed from the Wolfenbüttel copies include
pp. 95/14, 114/9, 313/33, 337/35, 407/16. Translation of the passages which appear to be cor-
rupt is hazardous and can only be approximate: where it seems impossible, a question mark has
been added.
54 Anne Hudson
ies have the biblical reference correctly as Genesis 47 [.24], and then read ‘qui
ordinauit ad elidendum Egipciorum superbiam’ (who commanded to crush the
pride of the Egyptians).16
The preface that is prefixed to the Sunday gospel set (but not included in
Trinity) describes how the author had written the sermons ‘in illo ocio quo a
scolasticis ociamur’ (in that leisure that we have taken from academic affairs)
and describes them as ‘sermones rudes ad populum’ (simple sermons directed
to the people);17 though the remainder of the preface relates to the organiza-
tion of this one set, the allusion to Wyclif ’s congregation at Lutterworth as
the original intended audience is usually held to apply to the sanctorale and the
Sunday epistle sets also. But throughout these three sets frequent allusions are
found to contemporary events in the larger world of England, its civil and even
more its ecclesiastical rulers, as well as to academic disagreements in Oxford.
In the Sunday epistle set, the last are particularly frequent in the first half,18
whilst the events of the Blackfriars Council in London in June and July 1382
evidently preoccupy the writer throughout the second half.19 Both types of
reference might be expected to interest little the scribes working several hun-
dred miles east of England and some twenty or more years after the events con-
cerned — these comments, often extending to a paragraph in the modern edi-
tion, would antecedently seem prime targets for omission or, if retained, for
corruption. But, so far as I have been able to see, there is no sign of either in the
two Wolfenbüttel copies: at eight places, references to the Blackfriars Council,
alluded to as ‘Terremotus’ because of the earthquake felt during its session, and
the issues discussed there are retained with no significant differences from the
Trinity text; six of these are found, again without change, in the Prague copy
where some Wyclif material prefixes Hus sermons.20 Only at the first refer-
ence in the set does an allusion seem to have produced some rewriting: Trinity
16
Wo. 565, fol. 182rb; Wo. 306, fol. 78vb. Comparable, though not involving biblical refer-
ences, are the numerous cases where Loserth perceptively assumed that Trinity lacked some-
thing even when no gap appears in the manuscript: cases are at pp. 89/21, 115/21, 121/2, or
417/35 and can all be filled out from the Wolfenbüttel copies.
17
See i, Praefatio i/9–12; the preface is found in Wo. 565, fol. 1 ra–b; ÖNB, MS 3934,
fol. 1 ; MS 4529, fol. 1r, in all of which it is immediately followed by the set on the Sunday
ra–b
gospels.
18
See notably pp. 37/3, 59/2, 219/36, 247/20, 251/10, 263/6, etc.
19
See pp. 380/6, 390/25, 398/33, 435/40, 440/37, 467/38, 471/25.
20
These are pp. 380/6 (P, fol. 136r), 390/25, 36 (P, fol. 143r), 398/33 (P, fol. 149r), 440/37
(P, fol. 182v), 467/38 (P, fol. 201r), and 471/25 (P, fol. 202v).
(p. 292/14) speaks of the Earthquake Council, at which twenty-four theses

from Wyclif ’s works were condemned without naming him. The Wolfenbüttel
copies substitute terrena (‘worldly’) for Trinity’s Terremotum (‘earthquake’).
However, it seems at least arguable that here Trinity has wrongly anticipated a
later subject, and that its reading is corrupt.
It is worth looking at a longer passage to exemplify how frequently the
Bohemian copies offer a better text than Trinity. In sermon 24 there is a lengthy
section apparently dealing with Wyclif ’s controversies in the university: the
terms are obscure and could doubtless have been interpreted by a contempo-
rary Oxford audience, though hardly by a Lutterworth congregation, nor, one
would have thought, of much interest to a reader in far-off Bohemia. Trinity
describes the opponents as isti philosophi (these philosophers) (p. 188/39), the
Bohemian scribes much more probably as isti pharisei (these pharisees). After
pointing out the discrepancy between Christ’s words in John 2. 19 and those
reported of him by detractors in Matthew 27. 40, Trinity continues (as printed
without comment by Loserth):
Correspondenter dictus tolstanus vel sui catuli dicuntur reportasse usque ad curiam
Romanam sed nimis ydiotice […] et sic emerunt quod conclusio quam nescierunt
construere foret tamquam heretica condempnata. Sic autem dicitur hic doctor
facere proclamacionem mendacem quod ad destruccionem scole terminabit veri-
tates catholicas tali die.
(Equally the said Tolstan or his minions are said to have reported right up to the
Roman curia but entirely foolishly […] and so they purchased that the conclusion
which they did not know how to explain should be condemned as heretical. So
indeed it is said that this doctor made a lying proclamation that it will end to the
destruction of the school ? the catholic/universal truths on that day.)
The variants to this in the Wolfenbüttel copies are in entire agreement with
each other: they are line 1, tolstanus] Colstanus; line 2, emerunt] euenit; line 4,
destruccionem] instruccionem; line 4, terminabit] determinabit; line 5 catholi-
cas] theologicas. Accepting those readings, the passage runs:
Equally the said Colstan or his minions are said to have reported right up to the
Roman curia very foolishly […] and so it came about that the conclusion which
they did not know how to explain will make conclusions on theological truths to
the instruction of the university on that day.
The only reading that remains obscure here is the first case where a personal
name or pseudonym is required, but neither form is immediately interpret-
able. The section as a whole seems to relate to accusations made against Wyclif
56 Anne Hudson
in the papal curia and thus to be connected with the bulls of Gregory XI sent
to England in 1377 urging both secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies to sup-
press him, his followers, and their writings.21 Tolstanus or Colstanus is described
as canis niger, to be interpreted as a ‘black monk’, that is, a Benedictine; the
Benedictine who indeed seems to have been responsible for alerting the pope
against Wyclif was Adam Easton, and either form attested here is a comprehen-
sible misinterpretation of that name.22
The majority of the numerous cases where the Bohemian copies improve
upon Trinity’s text affect single words or short phrases, even if these can make
a considerable difference to the sense of a passage. For the most part the overall
dimensions of the text are unchanged. There is, however, one place where this
generalization is not true. Thomson’s listing of manuscripts for sermon 27 (his
202) makes it immediately clear that something unusual is in question here:
instead of the foliation for three copies usual in the majority of sermons of the
set (Trinity and the two Wolfenbüttel manuscripts, Thomson was not aware of
PUK, MS III.B.19), nine copies are listed. The reason for this is that a section
of the sermon (pp. 209/11–212/40), the end — the section not marked in any
way in Trinity — is attested in a number of Bohemian manuscripts as a separate
tract, with the title either De prelatis contencionum or De incarcerandis fidelibus
(‘Concerning the Warring Prelates’ or ‘Concerning the Imprisonment of the
Faithful’).23 Thomson plainly thought that the tract form did not originate from
Wyclif himself but was a secondary extract from the sermon made in Bohemia;
hence he did not give this tract a separate number. The short text was recognized
by the Hussite catalogue as a separate text, there with the title Epistola;24 on the
other hand without this material sermon 27 would be considerably briefer than
21
The bulls are conveniently collected and translated in Dahmus, The Prosecution of John
Wyclyf, pp. 38–52.
22
For Easton’s part in bringing about the condemnation see Harvey, ‘Adam Easton and the
Condemnation of John Wyclif, 1377’. Bohemian misinterpretation of an insular T as C is found
in the form of William Thorpe’s name found in, for instance, PUK, MS III.G.11, fol. 99r and
PMK, MS D.49, fol. 179v.
23
The copies are Olomouc, Kapitolni Knihovna, MS C.O.118, fols 202v–204r; PMK, MS
D.123, fols 23v–28v; PUK, MS III.G.11, fols 69v–72r; ÖNB, MS 1337, fols 168va–170rb; ÖNB,
MS 1387, fols 110va–111va; in addition to the two Wolfenbüttel copies, the sermon in the form
found in them is also in PUK, MS III.B.19, fols 17v–20r and the Herrnhut manuscript, fols 48r–
51v. The independent text was printed by Loserth in Opera minora, pp. 92–97, using ÖNB,
MSS 1337 and 1387 and PUK MS III.G.11 (it is not clear which is the base text).
24
For this catalogue and its evidence see Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s
Writings, no. iii; it is no. 23 in the edition there.
any other sermon. My own suspicion is that Wyclif himself was incorporating
into the sermon a text which he had previously written, but that this independ-
ent text (quite credibly a letter) either never circulated in England or has been
lost there.25 However, within this larger question there is a second which neither
Thomson nor Loserth (who edited both the sermon and later in 1913 the tract
version) draw sufficiently to the reader’s attention:26 towards the end of the ser-
mon section that overlaps with the tract occur in the latter almost two pages
(in the print of the latter, pp. 95/26–97/9) that do not appear in Trinity, nor
consequently in Loserth’s edition of the sermon. But this material does occur in
all Bohemian copies of the sermon (the Wolfenbüttel manuscripts, PUK, MS
III.B.19 and Herrnhut), with no sign that a different source is recognized.27
Indeed there seems absolutely no reason to think that this passage is extrane-
ous to the sermon: the argument follows on through it without interruption or
break at either end, the English origin of it is certain from the reference (p. 96/9)
‘sic enim fertur Innocencium III regnum Anglie usque ad nongentas marcas
solvendas annuatim sue curie simoniace obligasse’ (as indeed did Innocent III
impose by symony on the realm of England a fine of ninety marks to be paid to
his curia every year), an imposition to which Wyclif refers elsewhere.28 It seems
much more likely that Trinity is in error in omitting the material; it could well
have occupied a single folio of his exemplar and have been accidentally skipped.
The immediate conclusion from these details seems obvious: when a new edi-
tion of Wyclif ’s epistle sermons is made, the readings of the two Wolfenbüttel
manuscripts must be checked against Trinity, and usually preferred, even if the
early date and English origin of Trinity persuades an editor to retain it as copy
text. But some other points are worth making. In the first place, the remark-
able fidelity of the Bohemian copies reinforces all the other evidence for the
importance which was attached to Wyclif ’s works in central Europe between
1390 and 1420 or later.29 As the quotations here have indicated, these sermons
25
See Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. vi, pp. 232–33.
26
Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclif, p. 154 claims that the sermon and tract ver-
sions differ ‘only in a few words, and in the insertion of an obviously later diatribe against the
“disciples of Antichrist”’.
27
Wo. 565, fols 181 va–182ra; Wo. 306, fol. 78 ra–vb; PUK, MS III.B.19, fols 18 v–20r;
Herrnhut, fols 50v–51v.
28
Other references to papal impositions on John appear in De civili dominio, ii, 33/33,
iii, 100/8, De ecclesia 354/3, and most extensively in the tract against Binham, Opus minora,
426/27–430/5.
29
I have surveyed this in Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. ii (originally
58 Anne Hudson
are full of discussion and allusion to strictly English matters, to Oxford debates,
even to ‘parish pump’ grudges — but all are faithfully retained without deliber-
ate change or updating. Marginal notes throughout both Wolfenbüttel manu-
scripts may relate to indexing endeavours (for which the subdividing marginal
letters also attest), and certainly point to readers’ interest in the contents. 30
Compared with these two the Trinity text, seriously in need of correction, and
its usually blank margins, seems perfunctory and unused.31 This may be a hand-
some piece of book presentation, of a size that must imply use on a lectern,
but here, as editors of its varied texts almost unanimously attest, appearance
may belie reality. Wolfenbüttel 565, though smaller and indeed a more usable
format, is comparably well presented; the set of which it forms a part looks like
a collection of opera omnia of the doctor euangelicus super omnes evangelistas.
The second point resumes some of these claims but relates to a more general
issue. Long ago it was recognized in regard to classical texts that access was often
only through copies made long after the work was written; more recently schol-
ars have come to urge that it is not inevitable that the earliest copy is the most
reliable, or even that earlier manuscripts are necessarily to be trusted in prefer-
ence to later copies.32 To take a simple point: if transmission of a later copy is
direct from an author’s holograph, it is likely that that copy will be more reliable
than the early version which derives from a more complex sequence of scribal
intermediaries. In terms of date, the present medieval example is less striking:
Trinity is probably to be dated about twenty-five years earlier than either of the
Wolfenbüttel copies, not a great gap even if the strictly contemporary refer-
ences noted above might be expected to lead to omission or at least to revision
or distortion. Trinity’s texts for the many other Wyclif works contained in it
are similarly problematic. S. Harrison Thomson, in his 1930 edition of Wyclif ’s
Summa de ente, gave a review of comments about the poor quality of Trinity up
to his time, an opinion which he did not share in regard to the two treatises he
published in 1997) and more recently in ‘From Oxford to Bohemia’.

30
Wo. 565 has particularly consistent marginal notes. No index for these sermons survives
either in England (where only the Sermones quadraginta were indexed in London, Lambeth
Palace Library, MS 23) or in Bohemia (see Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s
Writings, no. vii, pp. 342–43).
31
From epistle sermon 47 onwards Trinity has more and longer marginal notes, most of
which are not reproduced by Loserth.
32
Cf. Reynolds, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters, pp. 66–80 and the same author’s
comments in Texts and Transmission, ed. by Reynolds, pp. 369–75 on the same text, and more
generally pp. xxvi–xliii.
edited from it; he regarded ÖNB, MS 4307, in which alone those two texts are
elsewhere preserved, as decidedly inferior (it is scribally dated 1433).33 The final
work in Trinity is the Opus evangelicum, found in one other English copy, now
Dublin, Trinity College, MS 242, and two Bohemian manuscripts (now ÖNB,
MS 1622 and PMK, MS C.38). Loserth’s edition reveals here again a number
of places where Trinity’s readings have to be rejected in favour of those of the
other manuscripts (for instance, i. 52/31, 53/22, 220/9, 221/37, ii. 258/38,
291/34).34 At best Trinity’s value is variable. Unfortunately, at the present time
it is hard to establish other cases not involving Trinity where a comparison of
English and Bohemian texts can readily be demonstrated: the early editors
of works in the Wyclif Society, on which necessarily we are still reliant, were
often themselves central Europeans and their knowledge of the manuscripts of
English origin was not always complete. It was particularly unfortunate that
the volume now Firenze, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Plut.XIX.33, an English
manuscript containing the Trialogus, Wyclif ’s late account of his views, in addi-
tion to nine other shorter Wyclif texts and extracts from two major works, was
not available to any of those editors.35 One of its texts is T413, De citacioni-
bus frivolis, whose editor, Rudolf Buddensieg, only knowing Manchester, John
Rylands Library, MS Eng. 86 as a representative of the English tradition, gave
it as his view that the Bohemian copies in ÖNB, MSS 3929 and 4527 provided
preferable readings in a considerable number of places.36
Less frequently observed is that the issue of locality parallels that of time:
that the copy made far from the proven place of origination can have better
readings than that made close to the author’s home. Much more complex than
the transmission of the sermons was that of Wyclif ’s brief Dialogus, and the
matter is not helped by the fact that the only edition, that by A. W. Pollard for
the Wyclif Society in 1886, is a conflated text that was unsatisfactory even as a
representation of the nine copies then known (as compared with twenty-three
now identified). Pollard presented a text of thirty-six chapters plus an epilogue
— but none of his manuscripts had all of this, and indeed only one copy, itself
33
Thomson, Johannis Wyclif Summa de ente, pp. x–xiii.
34
See Wyclif, Johannis Wycliffe: Dialogus sive Speculum ecclesie militantis, ed. by Pollard.
35
See Thomson’s, The Latin Writings of John Wyclif, Index, p. 312, for a listing of the items
in order of their appearance in the manuscript. It was drawn to attention by Stein, ‘The Wyclif
Manuscript in Florence’, noting that Rudolf Buddensieg mentioned it in his preface to John
Wyclif ’s Polemical Works in Latin, i, pp. vii–viii, but had not used it.
36
Buddensieg, John Wyclif ’s Polemical Works in Latin, ii, 542–45.
60 Anne Hudson
unknown to Pollard, does have all though in a different order from that of the
edition.37 He knew only one of the two English manuscripts, and (so far as it
is possible to discover from his inadequate explanations) used it as the basis for
his text; this is Manchester, John Rylands, MS Eng. 86, fols 97r–121v, a scruffy
little anthology of Latin and English materials, all of them Wycliffite or, in the
case of the Latin texts, by Wyclif himself. The major divergences between the
copies occur in the presence and ordering of the last eight chapters and epi-
logue. Rylands is unlikely to remain as the base text of choice for a new edition
of the text; whether the other copy of English origin, now Firenze, Biblioteca
Laurentiana, MS Plut.XIX.33, fols 38r–57 r, should take priority over the
Bohemian witnesses seems doubtful.38 But the Florence copy is only distant by
virtue of later migration — it was written in England.
Many questions concerning the Bohemian copies of Wyclif ’s writings
remain to be fully answered: from where in England, when and by whose insti-
gation and effort did their exemplars come? The number of those exemplars’
progeny, the high quality of many of their texts, the labour that went in to
indexing, cataloguing, and annotating them, attest to the importance that was
attached to the texts far from their original home. More generally these distant
copies should remind us that in textual matters geographical distance need not
imply degeneration.
37
The manuscript is ÖNB, MS 3932, fols 72vb–89vb; see my discusssion in Studies in the
Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings, no. i, 9–12.
38
The Florence manuscript in common with fourteen Bohemian manuscripts lacks, using
Pollard’s numeration, chaps 31–32, and the epilogue.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 199
Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.16.2
Dublin, Trinity College, MS 242
Firenze, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Plut.XIX.33
Herrnhut, Archiv der Brüder-Unität, MS ABII.R.1.16a
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 23
Olomouc, Kapitolni Knihovna, MS C.O.118
Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapitulý, MS C.38
—— , MS D.49
—— , MS D.123
Praha, Narodní Knihovna (formerly Praha, Universitní Knihovna), MS III.B.19
—— , MS III.G.11
Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MSS 1337–43
—— , MS 1387
—— , MS 1622
—— , MS 3929
—— , MS 3932
—— , MS 3934
—— , MS 4307
—— , MS 4527
—— , MS 4529
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, MS Helmstedt 306
—— , MS Helmstedt 565
Primary Sources
Wyclif, John, Johannis Wyclif, Opera minora, ed. by Johann Loserth (London: Paul, 1913)
—— , Johannis Wyclif, Sermones, ed. by Johann Loserth, 4 vols (London: Trübner for the
Wyclif Society, 1887–90)
—— , Johannis Wyclif, Summa de ente, libri primi, tractatus primus et secundus, ed. by S.
Harrison Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930)
—— , Johannis Wycliffe, Dialogus sive Speculum ecclesie militantis, ed. by Alfred W. Pollard
(London: Trübner for the Wyclif Society, 1896)
—— , John Wyclif ’s Polemical Works in Latin, ed. by Rudolf Buddensieg, 2 vols (London:
Trübner for the Wyclif Society, 1882–83)
62 Anne Hudson
Secondary Studies
Dahmus, Joseph H., The Prosecution of John Wyclyf (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952)
Harvey, M., ‘Adam Easton and the Condemnation of John Wyclif, 1377’, English Historical
Review, 113 (1998), 321–34
Hudson, Anne, ‘From Oxford to Bohemia: Reflections on the Transmission of Wycliffite
Texts’, Studia mediaevalia Bohemica, 2 (2010), 25–37
—— , Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)
Katalog der Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, 1: Die Helmstedter Handschriften, 3
vols (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1965)
Kras, Paweł, ‘Wycliffe’s Tradition in Fifteenth-Century Poland: The Heresy of Andrzej
Gaľka of Dobczyn’, in The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice, ed. by
Zdeněk V. David and David R. Holeton, 5 vols to date (Praha: Academy of Sciences of
the Czech Republic, 1996–), v: Papers from the Fifth International Symposium on the
Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice Sponsored by the Philosophical Institute
of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic held at Vila Lanna, Prague 19–22 June
2002 (2004), pp. 191–210
Reynolds, L. D., The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters (London: Oxford University
Press, 1965)
—— , ed., Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983)
Schlauch, Margaret, ‘A Polish Vernacular Eulogy of Wycliff ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 8 (1957), 53–73
Stein, I. H., ‘The Wyclif Manuscript in Florence’, Speculum, 5 (1930), 95–97
Thomson, Williell R., The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf: An Annotated Catalog, Subsidia
Mediaevalia, 14 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983)
Truhlář, J., Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum latinorum, 2 vols (Praha: Regia Societas
Scientiarum Bohemica, 1905–06)
Wenzel, Siegfried, ‘A New Version of Wyclif ’s Sermones quadraginta’, Journal of Theological
Studies, n.s., 49 (1998), 155–61
The Devil as Narrator of the Life
of Christ and the Sermo literarius
William Marx
T
he penultimate stanza of the B-version of the fifteenth-century Middle
English poem The Devils’ Parliament identifies the text as one that is to
be read aloud on a specific day in the Church’s liturgical year:
Þis song þat Y haue sunge ȝou heere
Is clepid Þe Deuelis Perlament;
Þerof is red in tyme of ȝeere
On þe first Sunday of Clene Lent.
Whoso wole haue heuen to his hire
Kepe he him from þe deuelis combirment;
In heuene his soule may þere be sure
Wiþ aungils to pleie verament. (stanza B62, ll. 489–96)1
1
‘The Devils’ Parliament’, ed. by Marx, p. 87. References are to version (A or B), stanza
number(s), and line number(s) in this edition. Both versions of The Devils’ Parliament can
be dated no more precisely than to the first half of the fifteenth century (p. 25). On linguis-
tic evidence the original version can be located tentatively to the East Midlands (pp. 19–25).
The base manuscript of the A-version (London, British Library, MS Additional 37492) may
have originated at the Austin friary of Clare in south Suffolk, while the base manuscript of
the B-version (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 853) is from the general region of south
Huntingdonshire, east Northamptonshire, north Bedfordshire, and north Buckinghamshire
(pp. 12–17). The use of ‘sunge’ in this context is not exceptional; see Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde, bk v, l. 1797: ‘And red wherso thow be, or elles songe’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by
Benson, p. 584. It has been argued that the usage ‘read and sung’ is a formula that derives from
the liturgy (Crosby, ‘Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery’, p. 415 and n. 1).
William Marx (w.marx@tsd.ac.uk) is reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Wales,

Trinity Saint David, Lampeter.
64 William Marx
According to this stanza The Devils’ Parliament is intended to be read on

Quadragesima Sunday, that is, the first Sunday after Ash Wednesday, which is
the beginning of ‘Clene Lent’, that is, ‘pure Lent’. The stanza suggests that the
poem comes in a tradition of verse sermons, and that it is intended for public
reading, as part of a church service, or in a context that is not specifically liturgi-
cal, but possibly outdoors, at a preaching cross or in some other public place.2
The textual history of The Devils’ Parliament, however, raises questions about
whether it was meant for public presentation. The stanza above is unique to the
B-version, that is, the revised version of the text, and is part of a programme of
changes that were designed to increase dialogue and make the narrative more
lively and dramatic.3 The original A-version does not associate itself explicitly
with public or oral presentation, and it is probable that it was intended for a pri-
vate reading community such as a household. It is an attractive hypothesis that
the B-version is the product of the appropriation of a text originally designed
for private reading to a mode of presentation that involves oral delivery that is
essentially public and dramatic. However, research on the medieval sermon sug-
gests other ways in which the origin, form, and function of a text like this can
be understood. Modern scholarship argues that the ‘preaching text’ (as distinct
from the ‘preaching event’) in manuscript or printed form needs to be seen as
the prospectus for or retrospective witness to the oral presentation or perfor-
mance of the sermon.4 The written or printed form bears traces of rhetorical
features that give the sermon its dramatic character, but it is essentially readerly.
John Mirk’s Festial, for example, contains a number of addresses to the audience
that illustrate the dramatic nature of sermon presentation.5 Beverly Kienzle has
introduced the term sermo literarius to refer to a form or type of sermon that is
‘designed to be read’. This category can be extended to include sermons that are
‘the imagined projection of an event that did not take place at all […]. In some
cases, a sermon may be an imagined discourse that takes the place of a real one’.6
2
Early scholarship on medieval sermon literature acknowledged that verse was used for
didactic writing of this kind: Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 275, and Owst, Literature
and Pulpit in Medieval England, pp. 226–27; Pfander, The Popular Sermon of the Medieval Friar
in England, pp. 20–44. For recent scholarship on this aspect of sermon literature see: Spencer,
English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 151–56; Spencer, ‘Middle English Sermons’,
pp. 615–22; and Wenzel, Preachers, Poets and the Early English Lyric, pp. 205–06.
3
The Devils’ Parliament, ed. by Marx, pp. 26–35.
4
Kienzle, ‘Introduction’; Swan, ‘Reading for the Ear’, pp. 196–97.
5
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xxxix–xliii.
6
Kienzle, ‘Introduction’, pp. 168–74. Also, Swan, ‘Reading for the Ear’, pp. 196–97:
The Devil as Narrator of the Life of Christ and the Sermo literarius 65
It is possible that the B-version of The Devils’ Parliament is an example of a

sermo literarius in this last sense, and that stanza B62 may have been intended to
create a fictional context and to associate the text with the tradition of sermon
composition and more importantly the essentially dramatic character of oral
presentation. This essay is designed in part to explore this hypothesis. Whether
or not the B-version of The Devils’ Parliament is a fictional record of a preaching
event, there can be no doubt that it was influenced by traditions of sermon writ-
ing, and it is important to consider what effects the association with dramatic
oral presentation generates for the audience or reader.
Both the A and B versions are witnessed in single manuscripts of the fif-
teenth century. The B-version proved the more enduring of the two and would
seem to have enjoyed its greatest popularity in printed form in the early six-
teenth century, when it was published by Wynkyn de Worde (1509), Julian
Notary (1520), and Richard Fakes (?1521).7 These printings retain the stanza
(B62) advertising the poem as one intended for public reading or oral presen-
tation, but in this printed form the text would probably have been used more
often than not in contexts of household reading be it silent or aloud.8 The asso-
ciation of the poem, even in its printed form, with sermons and with a spe-
cific day in the Church year gives the text a special significance. Effectively the
B-version crosses the boundary between public and private devotion. Indeed,
we can see in this an analogy with a book of hours, which is derived from and
organized around the liturgy and corporate worship but is designed for use in
private devotion within a household.9
‘[A preaching text] might be a fictive enactment of a preaching situation, always intended for
contemplation or study or devotional use outside the liturgy, and never intended to be preached
in a liturgical setting’.
7
On the manuscripts and early printed texts of the poem, see The Devils’ Parliament, ed.
by Marx, pp. 12–19. See Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in
England, Scotland, and Ireland (hereafter STC). The STC references for the three early printed
texts are: Wynkyn de Worde, STC 19305; Julian Notary, STC 19305.3, and Richard Fakes,
STC 19305.5.
8
That sermon texts were read in household contexts, in some instances read aloud, is an
argument that is widely supported in modern scholarship; see Spencer, English Preaching in the
Late Middle Ages, pp. 33–40. Joyce Coleman makes a strong case that elite households followed
the practice of reading aloud along with private reading; see Coleman, Public Reading and the
Reading Public.
9
The literature on medieval books of hours is extensive, but see Wieck, The Book of Hours
in Medieval Art and Life.
66 William Marx
The Devils’ Parliament, in both versions, is a didactic text. Its subject is the
Redemption of human kind, which it develops using two literary structures:
one based around the theme of the Devil or Satan’s ignorance of the identity
and nature of Jesus as Christ, and the other the tradition of the debate between
Christ and the Devil. The idea of the Devil’s ignorance of the identity of Jesus
is found in the contexts of specific episodes in the life of Christ in Medieval
Latin writing such as biblical commentaries, lives of Christ, and homilies.10
These texts established conventional interpretations that were taken up in ver-
nacular sermons. For example, the sermon for the ‘Circumcision of Christ’ in
Mirk’s Festial sets out four reasons why Jesus underwent this ritual; the second
of these is relevant thematically to The Devils’ Parliament:
Þe secunde was for te deseyue þe fynde. For ryght as he deseyuot Ewe, owre allur
modur, and so dampned al monkynde, ryght so hyt lee to Cryst to deseyue hym,
wherþoȝgh al monkynde schulde be broght aȝeyn to blysse. Þen when þe fynd sygh
Cryst cyrcumcysyd as oþur weren, he wende he hadde taken þat penance in remedy
of orygynal synne and so knew hym noght by anoþur synful mon. For ȝef he hadde
knowen hym redyly þat he hadde comon for to buggen monkynde out of hys þral-
dam, he wolde neuer ha tysud mon to haue don hym to þe deth. Þys was also þe
cause why oure Lady was wedded to Ioseph: for to deseyve þe fynde, þat he schuld
wenon þat Ioseph hadde ben hys fadur and not conseyuot of þe Holy Gost.11
This argument like the other three in this context derives from the Legenda
aurea.12 One purpose of the circumcision was to deceive the Devil into believ-
ing that Jesus was of human kind. This theme also appears in connection with
the marriage of Mary and Joseph.13 Part of the doctrinal argument for this
strategy is set out in this passage: if the Devil had understood that Christ had
become human in order to redeem human kind (‘to buggen monkynd’), he
would not have plotted the death of Jesus. The other part of the argument that
is only implicit here is that if he were responsible for the death of Jesus as an
innocent man, the Devil would have lost his power or his right to claim the
souls of human kind. This argument is conventional in medieval theology.14
10
Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England,
pp. 15–17, 30–32, 33–34, 47–58.
11
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 45.
12
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 296; Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. by Maggioni,
i, 142–53 (versos only).
13
The same theme is alluded to briefly in the sermon for the Annunciation in Mirk, Festial,
ed. by Powell, i, 95.
14
Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England, pp. 8–9.
Another episode in the life of Christ that is a focus for the idea that the
Devil was deceived about or misunderstood the nature and identity of Jesus
is Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, the gospel text of which, Matthew
4. 1–11, is appointed for the liturgy for the first Sunday in Lent, Quadragesima
Sunday, the same day on which the B-version of The Devils’ Parliament is meant
to be read.15 Sermon writers took the opportunity to develop the theme as part
of their treatment of the temptation, for example:
And whan þe feende sawe þat he [ Jesus] had so longe fastyd with-oute mete, ȝitt he
was in dispere wheþur þat he was Goddes Sonne or noon. Þer-for he vente to hym
and seid, ‘Ȝiff þou be Goddes Sonne,’ he seid, ‘þan commaunde þat þise stones be
brede.’ Oure Lord myght well a commaunded so, and he had wold, seþ þat he made
all þe world of nowȝth; but he wold not, for he wold not shewe to þe feende what
he was, but seid, ‘Goy, Sathanas, for man leuyþ not oonly in brede, but withe iche
worde þat commeþ from þe mouth of God.’ In þis maner and oþur mo tempted þe
feend oure Lord for to witt wheþur þat he was Goddes Sonne or noon. But oure
Lorde answerde hym so wisely þat þe feende wist not what he was.16
Here the purpose of keeping the Devil ignorant of the true nature of Jesus is
not made explicit; the idea has been reduced to a convention. In Medieval
Latin and vernacular didactic writing other episodes in the life of Christ are
interpreted as part of the plot to bring about the death of Jesus and as reflect-
ing the Devil’s uncertainty about Jesus. Herod’s massacre of the innocents is
interpreted as the work of the Devil, as is the dream of Pilate’s wife, and Peter
Comestor introduced into the Historia scholastica an idea that goes back at
least to Jerome’s commentary on Matthew 27. 42–43, that at the crucifixion
the Devil instigated the challenges to Christ to come down from the cross
because he had realized at this late stage that Jesus was the Christ.17
The Devils’ Parliament is innovative in the way it constructs from conven-
tional interpretations of key episodes a narrative of the Devil in the life of
Christ in which the Devil is cast in the role of narrator. This way of present-
ing the theme of the Devil’s ignorance of the nature of Jesus is not found in
Middle English sermons but the compiler of The Devils’ Parliament has bor-
rowed it from Latin writing and the Middle English drama. It defines the form
and function of The Devils’ Parliament as a didactic text, whether it is to be
understood as a record of a preaching event or a sermo literarius.
15
The Sarum Missal, ed. by Legg, pp. 55–57.
16
Middle English Sermons, ed. by Ross, pp. 141–42.
17
pp. 50–56. On the Devil’s influence on Herod see Skey, ‘Herod’s Demon-Crown’.
68 William Marx
The following discussion outlines first the form of the tradition of the Devil
as narrator of the life of Christ and then addresses the question of its func-
tion. The first example is from the Middle English N-Town Play, a miscellany
of religious drama covering Christian history from ‘Creation’ to ‘Judgement
Day’.18 ‘Passion Play I’ of N-Town begins with a prologue by ‘Demon’ or Satan
(ll. 1–124).19 Satan recounts his role in human history, from his own fall and
the fall of human kind; he addresses the audience with promises of wealth to
those who ‘give him their love’, and he encourages the audience to enjoy the
pleasures of the seven deadly sins. At the core of this prologue is an account of
the life of Christ, a portion of which follows. (The Middle English here is dif-
ficult, and I have therefore translated the passage into modern English.)
But now mervelous mendys rennyn in myn rememberawns
Of on Cryst, wiche is clepyd Joseph and Maryes sone.
Thryes I tempte hym be ryth sotylle instawnce,
Aftyr he fast fourty days ageyns sensual myth or reson,
For of þe stonys to a mad bred; but sone I had conclusyon;
Þan upon a pynnacle, but angelys were to hym assystent —
His answerys were mervelous, I knew not his intencyon;
And at þe last to veynglory, but nevyr I had myn intent.
And now hath he xij dysypulys to his attendauns.

To eche town and cety he sendyth hem as bedellys,
In dyverce place to make for hym puruyauns.
The pepyl of hese werkys ful grettly merveyllys:
To þe crokyd, blynd and dowm, his werkys provaylys;
Lazare, þat foure days lay ded, his lyff recuryd;
And where I purpose me to tempt, anon he me asaylys;
Mawdelyn playn remyssyon also he hath ensuryd.
Goddys son he pretendyth, and to be born of a mayde,

And seyth he xal dey for mannys saluacyon. (ll. 25–42)
(But now wondrous thoughts come into my memory of one, Christ, who is called
Joseph and Mary’s son. Three times I tempted him with right crafty urging after
he had fasted for forty days, which is contrary to what is reasonable and normal
human appetite. I tempted him to make stones into bread, but immediately I was
defeated in this. Then I took him up to a pinnacle where angels would come to his
assistance. His answers were wondrous, but I could not understand his meaning.
18
The N-Town Play, ed. by Spector.
19
The N-Town Play, ed. by Spector, i, 245–50.
At last I tempted him to vainglory, but I did not have my desire. And now he has
twelve disciples attending to him. To each town and city he sends them as messen-
gers into different places to make preparations for his coming. The people marvel
at his works. Through his deeds he is able to help the crippled, the blind, and the
dumb. He brought back to life Lazarus who lay dead for four days. Whenever I try
to tempt him, immediately he attacks me. He has granted full remission of her sins
to Mary Magdalene. He claims to be God’s son and born of a virgin, and he says
that he shall die for the salvation of humanity.)
N-Town treats the temptation in the conventional way, and it marks the beginning
of Satan’s revenge-plot against Christ (ll. 59–60). Here in a dramatic form the
Devil serves as narrator of the life of Christ. Two features characterize this narra-
tive: first, the Devil expresses frustration with Christ and is puzzled by him, and,
second, the Devil is shown to be ignorant of the nature and identity of Christ.
This way of presenting the Devil is not unique to this ‘Prologue of Demon’.
It originates with the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus which was known in the
medieval West in its Latin form as the Evangelium Nicodemi.20 This text is the
chief source for Christ’s harrowing of Hell, which is the culmination of the
conflict between the Devil and Jesus, and forms a major episode in medieval
lives of Christ. The episode in the Evangelium Nicodemi that is of interest here
comes in the midst of the dispute of the devils before Christ’s entry into Hell,
as Satan recounts his conflicts with the figure he refers to as Jesus:
Et cum exaultarent omnes sancti, ecce Satan, princeps et dux mortis, dixit ad
Inferum; ‘Prepara temet ipsum suscipere Iesum qui se gloriatur Christum Filium
Dei esse et homo est timens mortem dicens, “Tristis est anima mea usque ad mor-
tem” [Matthew 26. 38]. Et per multa aduersatus est mihi male faciens, et multos
quos ego caecos, claudos, curuos, leprosos et uexatos feci, ipse uerbo sanauit, et
quos ego mortuos ad te perduxi, ipse a te uiuos adtraxit.’
Respondens Inferus dixit ad Satan principem: ‘Quis tam est iste potens cum
sit homo timens mortem? […]. Et si dicit se mortem timere, capere te uult et ue
tibi erit in sempiterna secula.’ Respondens Satan, princeps Tartari, dixit: ‘Quid
dubitasti et timuisti suscipere illum Iesum, aduersarium meum et tuum? Ego enim
temptaui illum, et populum meum antiquum Iudaicum excitaui zelo et ira aduersus
eum. Lanceam exacui ad persecutionem eius, fel et acetum miscui dare ei pocu-
lum, et lignum preparaui ad crucifigendum eum et aculeos ad configendum, et in
proximo est mors eius ut perducam eum ad te, subiectum tibi et mihi.’21
20
The Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. by Kim. On the Latin and vernacular texts see, Medieval
Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. by Izydorczyk.
21
The Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. by Kim, XX/1–2, pp. 38–39. My translation follows.
70 William Marx
(And while all the saints were rejoicing, behold Satan, prince and leader of death,
said to Hell: ‘Prepare yourself to receive Jesus who boasts that he is Christ, the
Son of God, and is only a man fearing death; he says, ‘My soul is sorrowful to the
point of death’ [Matthew 26. 38]. And in many things he has opposed me and
done injury to me, and many whom I have made blind, lame, crooked, leprous, and
disturbed, he has healed, and those whom I brought to you as dead, he has taken
from you alive.’
In reply Hell said to the prince Satan, ‘Since he is a man who fears death, how
can he be so powerful? […]. And if he says that he fears death, he intends to deceive
you, and terrible will it be for you in eternity.’ Satan, the prince of Hell replied,
‘Why do you doubt and fear to take this Jesus, my adversary and yours? For I have
tempted him, and I have aroused my ancient people the Jews with zeal and anger
against him. I have sharpened the lance for his persecution; I have mixed vinegar
and gall to give to him to drink; and I have prepared the tree to crucify him and
nails to pierce him, and his death is very close so that I may lead him to you so that
he will be subject to you and to me.’)
Satan’s account of Christ’s life is fragmentary, but it includes some of the same
episodes as the ‘Prologue of Demon’ in the N-Town Play. More importantly, we
see that in this passage from the Evangelium Nicodemi Satan’s narrative reveals
his ignorance of the nature of Jesus; he believes him to be mortal.
These two passages of dialogue from the Evangelium Nicodemi, which
together contain a brief narrative by the Devil of events in the life of Christ
leading up to the Devil’s plot to kill him, provide the first hints of a tradition
that in many ways is more fully realized in vernacular literature than in Latin
writing. Tracing the development of this narrative tradition in early writing
— from the fifth to the tenth century — is problematic.22 One Latin text that
is closely related to an early tradition of homilies on the harrowing of Hell is
the Sermo de confusione diaboli, which survives in a tenth-century manuscript.
Here Satan’s account of his plot against Christ is presented in much more detail
than it is in the Gospel of Nicodemus:
Audiens Diabolus Dominum dicentem: Tristis anima mea usque ad mortem [Mat-
thew 26. 38] sperauit se quia mortem uel crucem pertimesceret et capit prumptus
fieri. Currens abiit ad Infernum et dixit ei, ‘Paratus es tu; para mihi locum muni-
tum, ubi recludamus eum qui dicitur Christus, quem Iohannes et reliqui proph-
ete dicunt quia uenit et eiecit nos. Ecce paraui aduersus eum mortem; discipulum
eius ad traditionem eius praeparaui: paraui clavos, acutaui lanceas, Iudaeos inritaui
sicut sagittas aduersus eum. Omnia feci, omnia praeparaui ad traditionem eius; tu,
22
Izydorczyk, ‘The Evangelium Nicodemi in the Latin Middle Ages’.
tantum, paratus es tu ad suscipiendum eum. Multa enim mala mihi ostendit super
terram, multum me inritauit, multa uasa mihi subripuit. Quorum ego in mala
delectabar, hic uerbo suo eos sanabat; et quorum claudebam lumen et delectabar
in illis, quando in parietem eos percutiebam aut in aquas mittebam et in lacum
uersabantur, ueniens autem ille unde nescio e contrario mihi agens, uerbo eis don-
abat lumen. Alio autem dum esset in utero matris suae clausi oculos eius ut nec sig-
num oculorum eius appareret. Ille autem inueniens eum et lutum de sputo faciens,
unguens oculos eius iussit eum ad Siloa lauare et statim uidit. […] Et inueni iuue-
nem Matheum et introiui in eum cum ministros meos et gaudens habitabam in eo.
Quomodo cognouit ille nescio et ueniens increpauit me exire ab eo.’23
(The Devil hearing the Lord say, ‘My soul is sorrowful to the point of death’ [Mat-
thew 26. 38] hoped that Christ was becoming fearful of death and the cross, and
therefore held himself ready. Hurrying, he came to Hell and said to him, ‘Pre-
pare yourself; prepare for me a strong place where we may imprison him who is
called Christ, whom John and the other prophets said would come and cast us
down. Behold I have prepared death for him. I have prepared his disciple to betray
him; I have prepared nails; I have sharpened lances; I have stirred up the Jews like
arrows against him. I have done all these things; I have prepared everything for his
betrayal. You need only be ready to receive him. He did many injuries to me on
earth; he angered me in many ways; he snatched many prizes. Those whom I led
into evil, he restored with his word, and to those whom I made blind and led into
evil things, when I persecuted them or sent them into the waters and they were
embroiled in the pit, he came, I know not from where, against me, and he gave
them light with his word. For another one, while he was in the womb of his mother,
I closed his eyes so that no light might shine from his eyes. Jesus found him and
made mud with his spittle and rubbing his eyes, ordered him to wash at Siloh, and
immediately he saw. […] I found the young man Matthew and entered into him
with my ministers, and rejoicing I inhabited him. How he knew this I know not.
And he came and ordered me to come out of him.’)
The compiler of this homily has exploited what is implicit in the Evangelium
Nicodemi, and here Satan’s first-person narrative serves to dramatize more
extensively his ignorance of the nature of Jesus and his frustration.
The Gospel of Nicodemus was used and adapted in a variety of ways for didac-
tic writing, for devotional writing, and for the drama.24 The late thirteenth-cen-
tury Harrowing of Hell and Destruction of Jerusalem which is part of that com-
plex network of didactic texts in verse known as The South English Legendary
23
Rand, ‘Sermo de Confusione Diaboli’, p. 270. My translation follows.
24
For its use in vernacular literature in medieval England see Marx, ‘The Gospel of Nicodemus
in Old English and Middle English’.
72 William Marx
makes use of the Evangelium Nicodemi and includes its fragmentary narrative
of Satan’s involvement with the life of Christ.
In al þis ioyȝe Sathanas fro erþe gan go;

To þe hyȝe mayster þat lefte at hom euer in helle he sede,
‘Greþe þe faste & a stronge stede for I haue do a good dede;
Þe moste foo þat we euere abyde & most schame vs haþ wrouȝt
Ouercome I haue & aȝen I wil þat his soule were here brouȝt.
For þo same þat we blynd made, witles, wood or lame,
Def or dombe he heled anon & he haþ don vs gret schame;
& Lazar also & oþer mo þat I brouȝt heder ded
He fette here & ȝaf hem lyf & brouȝt vs in gret dred.
Fonded I haue many a day hym to ouercome;
With my queyntyse I haue maad þat he is now inome.
For ho so is not strong he must be queynte; þerfore I haue brouȝt
Hym to deþe with my queyntyse for with strengþe myȝt I nouȝt.
And I herde þat he seyde he was of deþ adrad;
Þerfore I wot wel he comyþ here sone; lok þat ȝe be glad.’25
This treatment is uncritical and translates the Latin text into the verse form
of the South English Legendary without significantly affecting the sense of the
original.
William Langland’s Piers Plowman of the late fourteenth century con-
tains a distinctive account of the harrowing of Hell that serves as the culmina-
tion of the narrator’s vision or dream of the significance of the life of Christ.
Here Langland borrows and develops from the tradition established by the
Evangelium Nicodemi the brief narrative by Satan in which he expresses his
frustration with Jesus:
‘Certes I drede me’, quod þe deuel, ‘lest truþe do hem fecche.

Thise þritty wynter, as I wene, he wente aboute and preched.
I haue assailled hym with synne and som tyme yasked
Wheiþer he were god or goddess sone; he gaf me short answere;
And þus haþ he trolled forþ lik a tidy man þise two and þritty wynter.
And whan I seiȝ it was so, slepynge I wente
To warne Pilates wif what done man was Iesus,
For Iewes hateden hym and han doon hym to deþe.
I wolde haue lengþed his lif, for I leued if he deide
That his soule wolde suffre no synne in his sighte;
25
The Harrowing of Hell and Destruction of Jerusalem, ed. by Marx, p. 137, ll. 164–78.
For þe body, while it on bones yede, aboute was euere

To saue men from synne if hemself wolde.’26
An episode that Langland added to the Devil’s narrative of the life of Christ is
the dream of Pilate’s wife, in which the Devil, having remained ignorant of the
true identity of Jesus, suddenly learns or realizes that Jesus is Christ and sees the
consequences of his death for the devils. He then intervenes to try to prevent
the crucifixion.27
These instances — and many more could be cited — where the Devil
appears as narrator of episodes in the life of Christ are incidental to the texts
in which they appear. What makes The Devils’ Parliament distinctive is the way
in which it fully and self-consciously develops the strategy of casting the Devil
in the role of narrator of the life of Christ.28 In the A-version the narrative is
constructed around two assemblies or councils of devils. The first is set after
the childhood of Jesus, and Satan relates the story of the miracles at the birth
of Jesus, the arrival of the wise men, and the child Jesus debating in the temple
with the doctors of the law. The narrative is not dispassionate; the Devil is puz-
zled and frustrated by what he has observed. And, he says, he has tried to have
Jesus killed by influencing Herod to the massacre of the innocents. A central
theme of the narrative, which has its origins in the Evangelium Nicodemi, is the
failure of the Devil to realize that ‘Jesus’ and ‘the Christ’ are one and the same.
At the first council the devils decide to tempt Jesus in order to discover his true
nature. As in traditional accounts of the temptation, the Devil fails to discover
the true identity and nature of Jesus, although he remains suspicious of him.
The second parliament or council of the devils is set at some unspecified
time after the temptation. The occasion of the council is purposely left vague,
and the Devil relates events from the adult life of Jesus. Again, the narrative is
not dispassionate; as much as the first council, it highlights the Devil’s frustra-
tion with Jesus. In this latter part of the narrative we see that the Devil has been
responsible for the chain of events leading up to the crucifixion: the Devil had
influenced Judas and the Jews. What gives a dramatic effect to the narrative is
that it suddenly becomes apparent that the occasion of the council of the devils
and the Devil’s narrative is Good Friday:
26
Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. by Kane and Donaldson, B.xviii.295–306, pp. 623–24.
27
pp. 52–53.
28
The edition contains a commentary on the episodes of the narrative: The Devils’
Parliament, ed. by Marx, pp. 95–114.
74 William Marx
‘But Ihesus soule ys Y not neuere where

So priuely yt ganne passe;
Whanne hys hert was thrilled with a spere
Tho I wyst what he was.
Forthy ordeynyth all oure gere
For hyder he wyl make a race;
Anon ryse we all nowe here
For to defende oure owne place.’ (stanza A32, ll. 249–56)
The Devil’s narrative ceases with the entry of Jesus into Hell, and the Devil
or Satan realizes his error in failing to identify Jesus with Christ. The Devil
has been deceived, or, it would seem, the Devil has deceived himself. The plot
against Jesus has collapsed and has turned against the Devil, and the narrative
abruptly ceases. The text now takes the form of a dialogue, as there follows a
debate between Christ and the Devil concerning the Redemption of humanity.
The audience or reader, like the Devil, it would seem, is meant to be surprised
by the climax of the narrative. The narrative strategy of The Devils’ Parliament,
in that it assigns to the Devil the role of narrator up to the point of Christ’s
entry into Hell, serves to show the consistency of the Devil’s ignorance of the
nature and identity of Jesus. This makes for compelling dramatic irony. This
narrative strategy can be found in a number of medieval texts, but The Devils’
Parliament shows careful ordering and control over traditional materials, and
exploits their potential in a way that is highly purposeful.
This is the form of the tradition of the Devil’s narrative of the life of Christ.
What of its function? Whether or not The Devils’ Parliament was used for oral
presentation, the readers or audiences are encouraged to imagine it as such; that
is, readers or audiences are encouraged to respond to the text as if it were pre-
sented as a sermon, in the dramatic situation of the sermon event. The same
can be said for the Latin Sermo de confusione diaboli which derives from the
Evangelium Nicodemi. What is achieved in the ‘Prologue of Demon’ in the
N-Town Play is more subtly developed in the manuscript and printed forms
of the Sermo de confusione diaboli and of The Devils’ Parliament. The effects of
these fully realized presentations of the Devil as narrator of the life of Christ in
the Latin sermo, the dramatic form of the prologue in the passion play, and the
real or imagined dramatic form of the verse-sermon of The Devils’ Parliament
have a didactic purpose. The Devil may observe events in the life of Christ and
may construct a narrative of the life of Christ, but the Devil does not under-
stand what those events mean. Through the drama and the narrative of The
Devils’ Parliament, the Devil is being presented as one who is ignorant of Christ
and the significance of events in Christ’s life. This device turns the Devil into
a comic figure. The Devil is a narrator who fails to understand the significance
of what he is relating and becomes the victim of his own plot. The Devil is an
ironic figure in his own narrative.29 The Devil cannot attach the true meaning
to episodes in his narrative and indeed to the narrative as a whole: the mean-
ing that he attaches to it — that Jesus is a human being and not divine — is
incorrect; that is, it is incorrect in terms of Christian orthodoxy. The narrative
generates its didactic purpose through the response that it encourages from the
reader or audience, which, implicitly, takes this form: ‘We are more astute than
the Devil. During the temptation the Devil was unable to discover Jesus’s iden-
tity, but we know who Jesus is. The Devil may not have understood why there
were miracles at the birth of Jesus, but we know’. In other words, the Devil may
observe events in the life of Christ and he may construct a narrative of the life of
Christ, but he does not understand the significance or meaning of those events.
The device of casting the Devil in the role of narrator in this way is a subtle
technique. Rhetorically its effect is to demonize those who fail to understand
the significance of the life of Christ and events in the life of Christ. The Devil
is sinister — his speech is threatening, and he hatches plots of murder against
innocent victims. But the Devil is also an ironic figure, both as narrator and
as dramatic character. In this way, the Devil can be seen as evil because he is
ignorant of the true nature of Jesus; the basis of evil can be seen to rest in igno-
rance of the truth. This narrative and dramatic technique is a useful device for
reinforcing orthodoxy. On the one hand, it raises the possibility of different or
alternative readings of the life of Christ, but in the end only one reading is the
correct one; any others are misguided.30
This didactic technique is characterized by a degree of open-endedness; the
audience or reader has responsibility for interpreting the narrative correctly.
This is unusual in medieval sermons where little if anything is left to the audi-
ence to interpret; the tendency of sermons is to impose meaning and forestall
misunderstanding. For example, Mirk’s Festial insists on correcting a misinter-
pretation of an image of the magi that appears in public places, and making the
orthodox meaning explicit:
Þen as hyt ys mony plases peynted and koruen, þat þe kyng þat ys in þe myddel, for
gret ioye þat he hadde, wryed on bakward to hys felow byhynde and put hys honde
vp, schewyng þe sterre to hym. Lewot men han opynyon and sayn þat he hadde
slayn a mon, wherfore he myght not se God in þe face. But God forbede þat þys
29
This idea was first developed by Frye, ‘Theory of Modes’.
30
Irony is one of the tools of satire, and the theme of the Devil’s ignorance of the nature of
Jesus is used to generate satire in the Wycliffite Epistola Sathanae ad Cleros.
76 William Marx
opynyon where trewe, for now ys mony hundred of gret seyntes in heuen þat where
byfore monsleeres and duden mony an holy martyr to deþe, but aftur þey weren
turned and holy marteres hamself and sen God in þe face euermore.31
This passage suggests that a popular interpretation was in circulation, but

Mirk’s Festial argues that it is fallacious, and the audience is given no scope to
interpret the meaning of the image independently.
Although the device of the Devil as narrator of the life of Christ shifts the
responsibility for interpretation onto the audience, The Devils’ Parliament does
not lack a voice of authority. This is not the voice of the preacher, but it appears
in the latter part of the text in the debate between Christ and the Devil on
the question of the Redemption of humanity.32 The debate form, by its nature,
is democratic and allows for an equal airing of different points of view, and
indeed in some medieval texts debates are purposefully unresolved and the
outcome left to the judgement of the audience.33 In The Devils’ Parliament
Christ’s voice is the voice of authority, and his victory over the Devil is played
out through a debate; his arguments are sophisticated and clearly derived from
Latin theological writing.34
Allusions to this kind of extended, theologically informed debate con-
cerning questions about the Redemption are not unknown in Middle English
sermon writing, but they remain allusions. The sermon on the Nativity in a
fifteenth-century revision of Mirk’s Festial contains a lengthy discussion of the
Redemption that reveals traces of its origins in Latin theological writing and
debate literature.35 This part of the sermon bears a close relationship to but does
not derive exclusively from Hugh of St Victor’s treatment of the Redemption
as a causa inter Deum et hominem et diabolum which appears in his De sacra-
mentis and Miscellanea, and which was incorporated into the Sentences of Peter
Lombard, the standard textbook of theological training in the Middle Ages.36
31
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 48; see also Mirk’s discussion of the lily in images of the
Annunciation on pp. 95–96.
32
The Devils’ Parliament, ed. by Marx, stanzas A36/B35–A41/B45, pp. 72–77.
33
Two examples are The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by Cartlidge, and Chaucer’s
Parliament of Fowls, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, pp. 385–94.
34
pp. 133–39.
35
The Advent and Nativity Sermons, ed. by Powell, pp. 91–97 (pp. 94–95).
36
Hugh of St Victor, ‘De reparatione hominis’, cols 305–18; Hugh of St Victor, Miscellanea,
bk ii, chap. 8, cols 591–92. Lombard, Sententiae in iv libris distinctae, bk 3, distinction 20,
chap. 4, paragraph 1 (ii, 127).
An intriguing feature of the Middle English passage is the way that the formu-
lations of the arguments suggest that the sermon writer was using a debate text
or a disputation:
The devill aleggith ageyns man iiij thinges whereby he wolde callaunge man for his.
First þe devill aleggyth ageyns man an open and an autentike instrument, Genesis 2 [...]
The thrid þat the devill alleggid ageyns man was that he bought man for an appyll.
Criste answerd and seyde that he disceyvid man.
The compiler has, it would seem, summarized his source. As Susan Powell has
pointed out, the passage employs legal and quasi-legal language.37 A tradition
of Latin literature of debate on the Redemption that uses legal language in
conjunction with theological argument is attested in medieval England from
the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century.38 A text such as the Conflictus
inter Deum et Diabolum is probably in the background to this passage in the
Nativity sermon. That the compiler of the Middle English sermon resorted
to paraphrase rather than give free rein to the debate in its original form sug-
gests that for sermon writers debates or disputations needed to be carefully
controlled. However, in The Devils’ Parliament the voice of authority is allowed
to emerge through the dynamics of debate.
Medieval culture associates the Devil with various forms of evil through con-
ventions like the seven deadly sins and through images of destruction and mob
violence. All those ideas can be found in medieval writing of various kinds, but
also it is important to appreciate that the tradition of the Devil as narrator of the
life of Christ associates the Devil with ignorance of the significance of the life
of Christ and those who would seek to deny the orthodox narrative of the life of
Christ — heretics and unbelievers. The idea of the Devil as a narrator who fails
to understand the significance of the life of Christ, and what that implies about
how the audience is being encouraged to respond to the Devil’s narrative, sug-
gests a strategy that has a place in what is referred to as ‘vernacular theology’.39
Although it is grounded in Latin writing, the idea of the Devil as narrator of the
life of Christ develops and flourishes in vernacular literature: in the medieval
drama, in the South English Legendary and Piers Plowman, and a text that is
closely associated with sermon literature such as The Devils’ Parliament.
37
The Advent and Nativity Sermons, ed. by Powell, p. 132, note on sermon 6, ll. 66–160.
38
‘An Edition and Study of the Conflictus inter Deum et Diabolum’, ed. by Marx.
39
Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’.
78 William Marx
As was pointed out at the beginning of this essay, The Devils’ Parliament
uses two devices, or two literary structures: the Devil’s narrative of the life of
Christ and the debate between Christ and the Devil. Although Middle English
sermons make reference to the doctrinal themes that lie behind these two liter-
ary devices, they do not develop them in the ways that are found in The Devils’
Parliament, and for this text it is necessary to look for models or precedents
outside of the traditions of sermon literature. What does this suggest about
the relationship of The Devils’ Parliament to the tradition of sermon writing?
Beverly Kienzle’s hypothesis of a type of sermo literarius that was not designed
to be used for a sermon event but was intended as a readerly text is a helpful
way of accounting for the origin, form, and function of The Devils’ Parliament.
This text can be seen to have a place in a tradition of medieval literary sermons
alongside what is probably the most well-known example, ‘The Pardoner’s
Prologue and Tale’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.40
40
The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, pp. 194–202.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Early Printed Text

The p[ar]lyament of deuylles (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509; Julian Notary, 1520;
Richard Fakes, ?1521), STC 19305, STC 19305.3, and STC 19305.5
Primary Sources
The Advent and Nativity Sermons from a Fifteenth-Century Revision of John Mirk’s ‘Festial’,
ed. by Susan Powell, Middle English Texts, 13 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by
Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 194–202
—— , Parliament of Fowls, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 385–94
—— , Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn
‘The Devils’ Parliament’ and ‘The Harrowing of Hell and Destruction of Jerusalem’, ed. by
William Marx, Middle English Texts, 25 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993)
‘An Edition and Study of the Conflictus inter Deum et Diabolum’, ed. by William Marx,
Medium Ævum, 59 (1990), 18–40
Epistola Sathanae ad Cleros, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Anne
Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 89–93
The Gospel of Nicodemus: Gesta salvatoris, ed. by H. C. Kim, Toronto Medieval Latin
Texts, 2 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973)
Hugh of St Victor, ‘De reparatione hominis’, in De sacramentis Christianae fidei, in
Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne,
1844–64), clxxvi, cols 173–618
—— , Miscellanea, in Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols
(Paris: Migne, 1844–64), clxxvii, cols 469–900
Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols (Firenze:
SISMEL — Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007)
Langland, William, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. by George Kane and E. Talbot
Donaldson (London: Athlone, 1975)
Lombard, Peter, Sententiae in iv libris distinctae, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Roma: Editiones Collegii
S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–81)
Middle English Sermons: Edited from British Museum MS Royal 18.B.xxiii, ed. by Woodburn
O. Ross, EETS, o.s., 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940)
80 William Marx
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The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed. by Stephen Spector, EETS, s.s., 11–12, 2
vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. by Neil Cartlidge (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001)
The Sarum Missal: Edited from Three Early Manuscripts, ed. by J. Wickham Legg (Oxford:
Secondary Studies
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France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 26 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
Crosby, R., ‘Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery’, Speculum, 13 (1938), 413–32
Frye, Northrop, ‘Theory of Modes’, in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957; repr, New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 33–67
Gillespie, Vincent, ‘Vernacular Theology’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to
Literature: Middle English, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), pp. 401–20
Izydorczyk, Zbigniew, ‘The Evangelium Nicodemi in the Latin Middle Ages’, in Medieval
Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, ed. by Zbigniew
Izydorczyk, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 158 (Tempe: Arizona Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 43–101
—— , ed., Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe,
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 158 (Tempe: Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997)
Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, ‘Introduction’, in The Sermon, ed. by Beverly Mayne Kienzle,
Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 81–83 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000),
pp. 143–74
Marx, William, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval
England (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995)
—— , ‘The Gospel of Nicodemus in Old English and Middle English’, in Medieval Gospel
of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, ed. by Zbigniew
Izydorczyk, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 158 (Tempe: Arizona Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 207–59
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History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91)
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261–78
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(1977), 274–76
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Swan, Mary, ‘Reading for the Ear: Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487, Item 10’, Leeds
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Preaching by Numbers:
The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost
in Late Middle English Sermons
and Works of Religious Instruction
Margaret Connolly
L
ater medieval works of instruction in all subject areas typically rely on
enumeration as a method of organization and as an aid to teaching.1 In
the case of religious instruction, this habit of quantifying and categoriz-
ing those elements deemed most essential for the faithful to know and under-
stand had a very long history, and whilst the Lateran councils of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries were influential in promoting such methods of teach-
ing, ultimately the origins of this approach lay in the Bible itself. Devotional
manuals usually begin with the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Creed; the first
section, which is numerically organized, is often that devoted to the Ten
Commandments, a series of basic laws which came with a ready-made numeri-
cal framework. Teaching on the vices and virtues follows, conveyed through a
series of numbered categories: the five wits (of both body and soul); the seven
deadly sins (and equivalent virtues); the seven works of mercy (both bodily and
spiritual). Other categories, such as the teaching on the sacraments and on the
gifts of the Holy Ghost, are also organized by number, as are many additional
texts which occur in conjunction with devotional manuals.2
1
For a discussion of the use of this method see Connolly, ‘Practical Reading for Body and
Soul’, pp. 156–67.
2
A few examples are the Nine Virtues, The Twelve Lettings of Prayer, The Sixteen Conditions
Margaret Connolly (mc29@st-andrews.ac.uk) is honorary research fellow in English at the
University of St Andrews.
84 Margaret Connolly
One of these numerically organized texts, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost,
seems only sometimes to have featured in devotional manuals. The instruction
on the gifts of the Holy Ghost is based on the teaching of Isaiah 11. 2–3: ‘Et
requiescet super eum spiritus Domini: spiritus sapientiæ, et intellectus, spiri-
tus consilii, et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiæ, et pietatis. Et replebit eum spiri-
tus timoris Domini’ (And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit
of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of
knowledge and pity. And he shall be filled with the fear of the Lord).3 A typical
example of a manual text based on this topic occurs in Cambridge, Cambridge
University Library, MS Ii.6.43:
Wysdom, þat is, be gostely wys in sauynge þy soule. Undirstondinge, þat is, gostely
undirstondinge. Þe lawe of god consell, þat is, ȝeue god consell and take god con-
sell. Streynþe, þat is, be þou gostely stronge in aȝenstondynge þe temptacions of þe
fend, þe world, and þy owyn flesshe. Kunnynge, þat is, haue þou gostely cunnyng
to dissern treuþe fro falshed and falshed fro treuþe. Pite, þat is, haue þou pete on
þyne owen soule, and also on þyne euen cristen. And drede of þe lord, þat is, drede
to offende þy lord God in any þynge.4
In this instance the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost is placed fifth in a sequence of
ten texts, after discussions of the commandments, sins, and works of mercy, and
before the virtues, wits, conditions of charity, and beatitudes. In another devo-
tional manual with eighteen individual elements, in Manchester, John Rylands
Library, MS English 85, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost is placed thirteenth
in the sequence, again following the works of mercy.5 The order of individual
texts within the catechetical sequence varies from manuscript to manuscript,
and greater investigation of this material might reveal whether such variations
are random or patterned, or indeed, whether these manuals had a standard
method of organization at all.
More surprising than variation in the placing of the Seven Gifts of the
Holy Ghost in the sequence of manual texts is the fact that the text is some-
times absent altogether from such contexts. In his pioneering survey ‘Works
of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’ for A Manual of the Writings in
of Charity.
3
Quotations from the Vulgate are from Biblia sacra latina ex Biblia sacra vulgatæ editionis;
the translations are my own.
4
Fol. 12v, with the rubric ‘Þe seuene ȝiftis of þe holy gost’ at the foot of fol. 12r.
5
On this manuscript see Connolly, ‘Books for the “helpe of euery persoone þat þenkiþ to
be saued”’.
Preaching by Numbers 85
Middle English, Robert Raymo recorded only thirty instances of texts on this
topic amongst eighty-five devotional manuals, meaning that teaching on the
Holy Spirit was included in just over a third of them.6 Of course, this figure
undoubtedly requires some adjustment in the light of further research in this
area, and Raymo’s important work, published in 1986, cannot now be regarded
as an exhaustive account. There has been so much more investigation of Middle
English manuscripts over the last quarter of a century, a great deal of it under-
taken in conjunction with work to prepare The Index of Middle English Prose,
and the publication of successive volumes in that series is yielding additions
and corrections to the bibliographical listings given in most of the Manual vol-
umes.7 In the case of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, at least one overlooked
text may be added. Raymo noted the presence of a short devotional manual in
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.4.9, and recorded fourteen
items within it, all of a brief nature, many consisting of little more than sim-
ple lists of essential elements.8 Unusually in this instance the Pater Noster, Ave
Maria, and Creed are placed last in the sequence of texts, following the doxol-
ogy; the sequence begins with the Ten Commandments and then covers the
sins and their opposing virtues, wits, works of spiritual and corporeal mercy,
sacraments, principal virtues, and sixteen conditions of charity. Sandwiched
between the brief expositions of the seven works of corporeal mercy and the
seven sacraments on fol. 62r–v is an even briefer list of the seven gifts of the Holy
Ghost which has previously gone unrecorded: ‘One is wysdam, the secunde
undyrstondyng, the threde counseyll, the fourth strenght, the v reneuyng, the
vj pyty, the vij drede of Gode’.
The sheer brevity of this text easily accounts for its lack of notice: it is a mere
list of terms, and the text cited above, from Cambridge, Cambridge University
Library, MS Ii.6.43, is not much fuller. In fact, many of the recorded texts that
describe the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are brief in nature, offering defini-
6
Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, pp. 2273 and 2495–2501.
This total includes two copies of a ‘Prayer for the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost’ in the Vernon
and Simeon manuscripts, respectively Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet a.1, fol. 115 v
and London, British Library, MS Additional 37787, fols 157v–158r; see A New Index of Middle
English Verse (hereafter NIMEV), ed. by Boffey and Edwards, no. 975; for an edition see The
Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, Part i, ed. by Horstmann, p. 34.
7
Twenty handlists have been published to date for The Index of Middle English Prose, gen.
ed. Edwards.
8
Fols 60v–63r; for details of the manual texts and their incipits and explicits see Connolly,
Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xix, pp. 210–17.
tions but mostly lacking examples or any extensive exposition. This lack of
detailed explanation is surprising, since the doctrine of the Holy Ghost or Holy
Spirit was one of the most challenging aspects of the Christian faith for medi-
eval preachers to convey. The disciples themselves found this a hard concept
to understand, as may be perceived from Christ’s repeated efforts to explain
it. A large part of the difficulty lies in the intangible nature of the Holy Spirit,
an entity that cannot be seen or heard or felt by normal earthly perceptions,
and which cannot easily be explained or even described using earthly terms
of reference; instead Christians are required to have faith in what they cannot
see or readily understand. The disciple Thomas does not believe in the truth of
Christ’s resurrection until he can actually see and touch Christ’s wounds, an
episode which Christ uses to commend those who have faith without seeing.9
This is also the occasion when Christ tells the disciples that they are empow-
ered by the Holy Spirit to forgive sin; elsewhere in the gospels Christ promises
that the Holy Spirit will bring knowledge of righteousness, truth, and judg-
ment. Ultimately the gift of the Holy Spirit is offered as a sort of compensation
for Christ’s absence, to console and fortify the disciples who had presumably
imagined that the resurrected Christ would continue to remain bodily amongst
them. The Holy Spirit (a challenging concept to grasp in itself ) was also part of
the larger doctrine of the Trinity, a central tenet of Christian belief but difficult
because abstract, complex, and paradoxical. One sermon writer, after attempt-
ing to explain the nature of the Trinity, and in particular the position of the
Holy Spirit within it, commented: ‘But for þis sentence ys myche hyd fro wyt of
þe comune puple, þerfore schulden preestis schapon of þe wordys of þis gospel
wat myte profiȝte to his puple aftur vndurstondyng of hem’.10
Preaching on the topic of the Holy Spirit was logically clustered in sermons
intended for delivery in the post-Easter period. In the same way that teach-
ing on the sins and sinful behaviour tended to be presented in sermons for the
Lenten season of penitence, teaching on the Holy Spirit was clearly the appro-
priate topic for Pentecost or Whitsun. The fourteenth-century Augustinian
canon, John Mirk, explains that ‘Whyt Sonday and þe weke aftyr’ was the
time ordained by the Church ‘in vorchep of þe Holy Goste’.11 This then led up
immediately to Trinity Sunday, for which some understanding of the difficult
9
The story of how Thomas doubts the risen Christ is recounted in John 20. 24–29.
10
‘Dominica iiii post Pasche [Euangelium]’, in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Hudson
and Gradon, i, 451, ll. 76–79.
11
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 150, l. 6.
concept of the Holy Spirit needed to be in place. The gospel reading for Trinity
Sunday, from John 3, related the story of Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of
the Jewish council, to whom Jesus said that those who wished to enter the king-
dom of heaven would have to be ‘twies born […] born of þe water and of þe holi
gost. Of flesche is born þat flesche haþ biȝeten; and gostliche he is þat is born
of þe gost’.12 This would be baffling to any congregation who had not already
received some instruction about the nature of the Holy Spirit; it was perhaps
not easily understood even so, as is acknowledged by the author of the sermon
for this occasion in the late fourteenth-century cycle produced by the followers
of John Wyclif (c. 1330–84). He introduces the gospel lection with the com-
ment: ‘This gospel vndur a story telluþ of þe Trinnyte and boþe þese ben harde,
as comunly is Iohnes gospel’.13 Then, in the course of the exposition of the peri-
cope, in relation to verse 8: ‘Spiritus ubi vult spirat: et vocem eius audis, sed
nescis unde veniat, aut quo vadat: sic est omnis, qui natus est ex spiritu’ (The
wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it
comes from nor where it goes to: thus it is with all who are born of the Spirit),
the sermonist quantifies precisely what we do not know about the Spirit:
[…] for we knowen not þe ordenaunce of God, why he enspyreþ þes men, and to
what ende, or wheþur he schal saue þis man or wendon awey from hym. And so
eche man þat is born of þis Spiryȝt vnknowon to oþre by manye hydde resownes;
and so eche man ys somwhat knowon and somwhat vnknowon for wysdam of þis
Spiryȝt.14
The coming of the Holy Spirit is described in sermons intended for Pentecost
or Whit Sunday, so-called, Mirk explains, ‘for encheson þat þe Holy Goste as
þis day broght wytte and wysdam into alle Crystes dysciplus, and so be here
prechyng aftur into alle Crystys pepul’.15 Mirk’s Pentecost sermon begins with a
discussion of ‘wytte’ (knowledge) and wisdom, and the proper use of these fac-
ulties for good living, in imitation of Christ’s disciples who by the grace of the
Holy Spirit both taught well and lived good lives. This introduces an account of
how the Holy Spirit came to the disciples in a house in Jerusalem:
12
From the sermon for Trinity Sunday in the Mirror, quoted from Glasgow, Glasgow
University Library, MS Hunter 250, fols 59v–61v (fol. 60r).
13
The introduction to the gospel sermon for Trinity Sunday (‘In festo sancte Trinitatis’),
English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and Gradon, i, 469, ll. 1–2.
14
15
‘De die Pentecostes sermo’, in Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 146, ll. 2–5.
[…] sodenly a grete sownde was made in þe firmament and lyk a grete berste of
þondyr, and þerwyth anone þe Holy Gost com amonges hem and lyght on yschone
of hem in lyknes of tonges of fyre, os it were þe lem of lyght fyre schapet lek tonges,
brennyng not smertyng, warmyng notte harmyng, lyghtyng not frytyng, and fyllyd
hem so full of gostly wytte and [wysdom] […].16
Mirk stresses the transformational effect of the coming of the spirit:

[…] þereos beforyn þei weren bot wery ydiotos and lewed men and ryght noght
cowþen of clergy, sodenly þe weren þe wysest and best clerkys in alle þe worlde and
spokyn alle maner language vndyr son.17
Similarly, whereas the disciples had previously been reluctant to proselytize

because of fear of persecution and death, now they preach God’s word fearlessly
because their hearts have been warmed by the fire of the spirit. Mirk expounds
the meaning of the image of the ‘tonges’, linking the transformative effects of
fire (heating, softening) to the impact of the Holy Spirit on human hearts and,
in particular, on human tongues, exchanging words of ‘envye and debate’ for
those of ‘pes and reste’.18
The issue of language, and the apostles’ new-found ability to speak in for-
eign tongues, forms one of the main points of interpretation in Pentecostal
sermons. The Sunday epistle sermon in the English Wycliffite cycle focuses
on this issue in a detailed way, asking whether all the apostles could speak all
the languages, or whether each spoke a different language, and how, precisely,
their communication with foreigners would have worked. The Sunday gospel
sermons tend to take up the topic in more general terms, partly because their
main focus (the gospel lection) was not the passage that described the coming
of the Holy Spirit (which actually occurs in the Acts of the Apostles); instead
the prescribed gospel reading was the passage from John 14. 15–21 in which
Christ promised that the disciples will be sent ‘þe Counfortour, þat is þe Hooly
Goost’ after his departure.19 Much of the content of this passage is concerned
with remaining true to Christ’s teaching; it does not offer much explanation
about ‘þe Counfortour’, meaning that sermon commentators had to intro-
duce other elements to make their discourse relevant to the day’s worship of
16
17
18
19
‘In Die Pentecosten [Euangelium]’, in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and
Gradon, i, 466, l. 48.
the Holy Spirit. The writer of the sermon for Pentecost in the Middle English
Mirror cycle does this by including a summary of the epistle reading and an
exposition of its meaning, justifying this with an introductory remark: ‘And for
as it is dai þat dai þat God ȝeueþ þe Holi Gost, þat is þe Gost confortable, unto
hem þat him louen, hereþ now how he was sent þat ȝe mai be conforted’.20 The
Wycliffite sermon writer, having the luxury of a sermon based on the epistle
as well as one on the gospel, contents himself at the end of the gospel sermon
for Pentecost with the statement: ‘And al þis sentence of gospel of Iohn is fully
perteynynge to comyng of þe Hooly Goost, and so redyng of þis gospel was wel
ordeynot for þis day.’21
Discussion of the nature of the Holy Spirit is also distributed throughout
some of the immediately preceding sermons in the cycles based on the Sunday
gospels; this is partly because of the requirement that those sermons expound
the gospel lections but may also have been because this was a challenging topic,
requiring repeated attention for successful understanding. Typically in these
cycles the notion of the Holy Spirit and its connection with wind or air was
introduced on the first Sunday after Easter with an explanation of what was
meant by the reference to Christ’s breathing over his disciples.22 The Wycliffite
sermonist is at pains to stress that Christ ‘blew not by chyldhede […] but by
greet wyt’, and starts to introduce elements of Trinitarian doctrine by stating
that the Holy Spirit comes from both the Father and the Son, ‘as wynd of erþe
and watur’.23 The writer of the equivalent sermon in the Mirror cycle defines
this blowing or breathing as a first earthly gift of the spirit (to be followed by
the heavenly gift of the tongues of fire), further expounding these as related to
Christ’s two great commandments: to love one’s neighbour and to love God
with all one’s heart.24 Successive gospel sermons continue to develop the theme
of Christ’s imminent departure until in the sermon for the fourth Sunday after
Easter the promise of the coming of the Holy Ghost is returned to directly.
20
From the sermon for Pentecost in the Mirror, quoted from Glasgow, Glasgow University
Library, MS Hunter 250, fols 57v–59v (fol. 59v).
21
22
John 20. 22: ‘Haec cum dixisset, insufflavit: et dixit eis: Accipite Spiritum sanctum’
(When he had said this he breathed on them, and said to them: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’).
23
‘Dominica in Albis [Euangelium]’, in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and
Gradon, i, 434, ll. 34–36.
24
‘Dominica prima post Pascha’, quoted from Glasgow, Glasgow University Library,
MS Hunter 250, fols 47r–48v (fols 47v–48r); for Christ’s two commandments see Matthew
22. 37–39.
Christ tells the disciples that it is better that he leaves them, because the Holy
Spirit will only come to them when he goes: ‘For whan þat ȝe ne sen nouȝt my
flesche ȝe schul receyue þe holi gost. Þouȝ Y ne be nouȝt in present, beleue ȝe
mai þat ich it schal send’ (the psychological strategy employed here is akin to
parents warning their children that Santa Claus will only come when they are
asleep).25 In both the Mirror cycle and the English Wycliffite cycle, the most
extended treatments of the benefits of the Holy Spirit are presented at this
stage, though these are not enumerated nor defined specifically as gifts. Instead
it is explained that the Holy Spirit teaches the world about the righteousness
of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and those who believe in this will be
comforted; the Spirit also teaches the world about judgment and the nature of
sin. The coming of the Holy Spirit, and further discussion of its nature, particu-
larly as an element of the Trinity, is again taken up in the gospel sermons for the
Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension.26
The different arrangement of the Festial cycle, which has twelve sermons for
various occasions between Easter and Trinity but none based on the Sunday
gospels, meant that Mirk’s teaching about the Holy Spirit could be presented
in a more concentrated manner. Accordingly Mirk devotes the whole of the
sermon for the Vigil of Pentecost to a discussion of this topic, and, freed from
the obligation to expound the abstract teaching of John’s gospel, Mirk organ-
izes his material differently, concentrating on listing and defining the gifts or
graces of the Spirit.27 Mirk deals with these seven in order and in a straightfor-
ward fashion, giving examples to explain each concept more fully. The grace of
wisdom allows clerks to become effective preachers and teachers. The grace of
understanding is defined as an understanding of different languages. The grace
of counsel is doubly defined as giving and doing: those who give counsel know
what will happen and advise others accordingly; those who can follow Christ’s
counsel can submit to the discipline of religious orders. The grace of strength
allows individuals to bear various burdens. The grace of knowledge allows indi-
25
‘Dominica iiij post Pascha’, quoted from Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS
Hunter 250, fols 52r–53v (fol. 52v).
26
‘Dominica infra Octavam Ascencionis’; for the Mirror, see Glasgow, Glasgow University
Library, MS Hunter 250, fols 56v–57v), and for the English Wycliffite sermon see, English
Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Hudson and Gradon, i, 459–63. The Wycliffite sermonist takes this
opportunity to discuss differences between the Greek and Latin Churches in relation to the
origins of the Holy Spirit.
27
‘De vigilia Pentecostes sermo’, in Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 144–46.
viduals to acquire different skills and thus earn their living. The grace of pity or
compassion allows some to help the needy and to forgive offenders. The grace
of fear of the Lord makes people eager always to do good deeds. Mirk further
explains that these gifts are assigned at baptism and confirmed at confirmation,
but their distribution may not be what we expect: ‘But þe Holy Gost deluth to
vche man þat is spedeful to ham and ȝeuyn som more, somme lasse, somme of
one ȝefte and somme of anoþer’.28
Mirk’s explanation of the seven graces of the Holy Ghost is clearly linked
to the catechetical teaching offered in the manual texts that enumerate the
Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, but the greater expansiveness of the sermon
context allows him to go far beyond their bald didactic definitions. Another
cleric, writing some forty years or so after Mirk, worked this type of material
into verse. John Audelay, the deaf and blind poet of Haughmond Abbey in
Shropshire who died sometime after 1426, produced an anthology of spiritual
counsel which contains invocations to Mary and various saints, verses for par-
ticular festivals, and a sequence of carols on catechetical topics including ‘De
septem dona Spiritus Sancti’: ‘God hath geven of myghtis most | The Seven
Giftis of the Holé Gost’.29 The first verse identifies the gifts somewhat differ-
ently as: ‘Mynd, Resun, Vertu, and Grace, | Humeleté, Chast, and Chareté’, and
these seven are then expounded through two more verses, though each element
is allocated only a single line’s worth of exposition:
Mynd makis a mon himselve to know,
And Resun him reulis in his werkis alle,
And Vertu makis his goodnes yknow,
And Grace is grownder of hem alle —
Ellis were we lost!
God hath geven of myghtis most
The Seven Giftis of the Holé Gost.
28
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 144, ll. 28–30. Cf. the similarly extended treatments of the
gifts of the Holy Ghost in the Sunday epistle sermons preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Bodley 95, in the sermons for Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and the two Sundays immediately
following (see O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, iii, 1659–64),
and in the sequence known as Jacob’s Well, preserved in Salisbury, Cathedral Library, MS 103
(see O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, iv, 2343–48, 2354–56,
2358–63, 2365–67, 2369–71, 2375–77, and 2386–88).
29
NIMEV 2173, preserved uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302,
fols 27v–28r.
Humeleté, pride he dothe downe falle;

Chast kepis thee clene in thi levyng;
Then Chareté is chef of hem alle;
Mon soule to blis he dothe hom breng —
Ellis were we lost!
God hath geven of myghtis most
The Seven Giftis of the Holé Gost.30
At this point Audelay’s poem turns into an account of the importance of faith,
hope, and charity instead, with three more verses devoted to these concepts.
The gifts of the Holy Ghost are only partially dealt with here, and Audelay’s
identification of the seven differs considerably from their usual definition.31
Another variation on the same theme occurs in a second set of verses which
survives uniquely in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.4.9. 32
In these verses, beginning ‘Alle þat well a stownde dwelle | Lysten I xal ȝou telle
| Þe ȝeftes of þe Holygoste’, the seven gifts are more conventionally defined, but
the order is which they are discussed is reversed, beginning with ‘timor domini’
and ending with ‘sapientia dei’.33 Overall this is a more extended treatment of
the topic, running to sixty-six lines in total, with sufficient scope not only to
define each concept but also to offer more discussion and explanation; so, for
example, the four couplets devoted to ‘consilium dei’ advise that the traveller
take counsel before setting out too hastily on a journey.
Two accounts of the gifts of the Holy Ghost occur in Cambridge, Cambridge
University Library, MS Nn.4.12.34 This early fifteenth-century manuscript
contains a basic devotional manual on fols 39r–40r which consists only of lists
of the wits, sins, virtues, and so on, including the seven gifts as the fourth item
30
Carol 5, ll. 1–14, quoted from Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 179–80, also
available online at <http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/fsjac5f.htm> [accessed 12
April 2013].
31
It might be noted that a different seven-fold division of the workings of the Holy Spirit
is proposed by the author of the English translation of the Filius matris cycle, where the Sunday
gospel sermon for Pentecost describes and explains how the Spirit proceeds, inspires, inhabits,
fulfils, glorifies, tends, and enlightens; for details see O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle
English Prose Sermons, ii, 1281–83 (p. 1282).
32
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.4.9, fols 188 v–190r (NIMEV 215);
for an edition see Bowers, ‘A Middle-English Poem on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost’.
33
Cf. the order in NIMEV 975 where pity and dread come first and wisdom is last, see The
Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, Part i, ed. by Horstmann, p. 34.
34
For details of the prose contents see Connolly, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist
xix, pp. 348–51.
in a sequence of seven. A second listing of the gifts occurs earlier in the same
manuscript on fol. 11r–v:
Þe seuene ȝiftes of þe holi goste, þat we be not schent for derknesse of synne and
lackynge of gostly grace. Þe whiche ȝiftes, as Yasay þe prophet seiþ in þe elleueþ
chapitur: ‘On him schal reste þe spirit of wisdome and understondynge, þe spirit of
conseile and strenk-[fol. 11v]-the, þe spirit of connynge and pitee. Þe spirit of dreed
of God schal fulfille him’.
In the manuscript this has the appearance of a separate text because of its
rubric, ‘Þe seuene ȝiftes of þe holy goste’, and the enlarged initial capital ‘Þ’ with
which the text opens; the letter extends five lines down the left margin and is
further elongated with tracery. There is no equivalent indication of where the
text ends: copying continues with no visible break until the beginning of the
Wycliffite exposition of the Pater Noster on fol. 12v, though the account of the
gifts of the Holy Ghost quickly gives way to a discussion of the importance of
keeping God’s commandments. In fact, despite the rubric and the oversized
initial, this listing of the gifts of the Holy Ghost is probably not a separate text
at all.35 Before it in the manuscript is a tripartite text known from its opening
words as Pride, Wrath, and Envie Synnes of the Fend, the second and third parts
of which also circulated independently under different titles.36 The version in
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Nn.4.12 seems to be the tripar-
tite text but with an abbreviated third section.
Whether short texts such as those that quantify the gifts of the Holy Ghost
were intended as independent pieces, or as constituent parts of larger works, is
very difficult to determine. Noting the occurrence of ‘The World is Contrarie
to God’ in London, British Library, MS Harley 2339, P. S. Jolliffe commented:
‘This begins a series of short tracts. It has proved impossible to separate one
from another with certainty’.37 S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson has offered some eluci-
dation of the tripartite Pride Wrath and Envie, building upon Jolliffe’s classi-
fications and distinguishing between manuscripts which have abbreviated or
different versions of its first section.38 However, more recently, Kari Anne Rand
35
Though I recorded it as such in Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xix, p. 349, entry
for MS Nn.4.12 [3].
36
For ‘The World is Contrarie to God’ and ‘Iff thou have godis of grace’, see Raymo,
‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, pp. 2313 and 2533.
37
Jolliffe, A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings, p. 83 [F/17].
38
Ogilvie-Thomson, Index of Middle English Prose Handlist xvi, p. 53, entry for Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 524 [3].
has observed that these relationships are complicated and still require further
attention.39 In the case of independent texts which describe the gifts of the
Holy Ghost, Raymo noted five manuscript copies of prose versions, describing
three as brief accounts and two as lists, but Ogilvie-Thomson has been able to
augment and extend this, identifying six different versions in ten manuscripts
and lists in eight manuscripts.40
The devotional manuals and anthologies within which the Seven Gifts of
the Holy Ghost typically survives are usually supposed to have been prepared
for an audience of literate lay men and women, of all ranks of educated soci-
ety. These basic devotional manuals were produced in response to the Church’s
demands that members of its flock should possess at least a minimum level
of theological knowledge.41 The 1281 Lambeth Constitutions of Archbishop
Pecham of Canterbury and the 1357 injunctions of Archbishop Thoresby
of York stipulated that the laity must have knowledge of the creed, the Ten
Commandments, the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, the seven works
of mercy, and the seven virtues, and these statutory requirements were repub-
lished many times, notably by Archbishop Arundel in 1409 in response to
the perceived threat of the Lollard heresy, and later, in the Tudor period, by
Cardinal Wolsey.42 Such repeated restatements of what was, after all, only a
minimum level of knowledge, indicate an ongoing dissatisfaction amongst the
Church hierarchy with the general state of religious education amongst its
members, which in turn betrays a continued lack of effectiveness in the theo-
logical instruction offered by its teachers. Pupils can only learn if they have
knowledgeable and effective instructors, and the Church’s recognition of the
need to improve standards amongst its clergy may be seen in the appearance of
vernacular texts such as Ignorancia sacerdotum and Sacerdotale parochialis, and
the later Exornatorium curatorum, all works of religious education that spelt
out the requirements of the syllabus designed by Pecham but directed towards
the clergy rather than the laity.43 Provided that the clergy themselves had the
39
Rand, Index of Middle English Prose Handlist xx, p. 94, entry for Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College, MS 385 [4].
40
Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, pp. 2311 and 2531; Ogilvie-
Thomson, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xvi, pp. 6–7, entry for Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Laud misc. 23 [10].
41
On the background to the production of devotional manuals see Boyle, ‘The Fourth
Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’.
42
See Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 199.
43
On these texts see Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, nos [12],
requisite knowledge, such concepts might be readily conveyed via preaching,

and it is likely that some copies of devotional manuals were prepared by or for
preachers in the first instance: Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS
Ii.6.43, for example, has been described as a priest’s ‘private book’.44 Certainly
those manuals which are little more than simple lists of terms would have con-
stituted handy mnemonic prompts for both learners and teachers. As is dem-
onstrated by the correlation between Mirk’s account of the seven gifts in his
Vigil of Pentecost sermon and the content of manual texts on this topic, those
latter texts would have been equally if not more useful to those charged with
preparing sermons as they were to individual readers. Indeed, the need to pro-
vide suitable sermons for all the principal feasts of the year, and the difficulties
that individual parish priests might have in accomplishing this, ‘by defaute of
bokus and sympulnys of letture’, provided Mirk with the motivation to pro-
duce the Festial in the first place.45
It should also be remembered that sermons themselves might be read as
well as preached, or at least that they might be heard (if read aloud), in a set-
ting other than that of a church or chapel. The prologue to the Middle English
Mirror contains numerous references to hearing and reading which makes it
clear that its translator envisaged a lay reading public for these sermons, and
its source text, the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Miroir of Robert de
Gretham, was addressed specifically to a female lay reader, ‘dame Aline’, whose
predilections for ‘chancon de geste et d’estoire’ de Gretham hoped to curtail and
correct.46 The Festial, despite being so clearly directed at the parish preacher,
may also have been used as devotional reading, judging by the great number
of manuscripts in which it survives and the large number of printed editions
that it enjoyed; it was in fact the only cycle of medieval sermons to be printed
in England before the Reformation.47 Miscellaneous manuals of the type cata-
logued by Raymo did not make the transition from manuscript to print, even
though other works which specialized in offering instruction in the basics of
[22], and [23], pp. 2264, 2272–73, 2483, and 2494–95. Niamh Pattwell is currently editing
Exornatorium curatorum for Middle English Texts.
44
The description is A. I. Doyle’s, see ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of
Theological Writings’, i, 47.
45
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 3, l. 9.
46
The Middle English Mirror, ed. by Duncan and Connolly, p. 2, ll. 1 and 5.
47
For an account of the printed editions see Powell’s introduction to Mirk, Festial, i,
pp. lv–lvii, and see also Powell, ‘What Caxton Did to the Festial’.
devotion were taken up by the early printers: Quattuor sermones, a compila-

tion of pastoral material which Susan Powell has defined as equally appropriate
for both laity and clergy, was regularly printed with the Festial; Exornatorium
curatorum was printed eleven times before 1552.48
Modern editors of later medieval texts, like the early modern printers, have
been selective in the amount of attention they have directed towards devotional
manuals of instruction, and although much editorial work remains undone in
the field of vernacular sermons, by comparison with devotional manuals these
cycles have been well served. The Filius matris still awaits its editor, but the
Festial, partly edited in the early twentieth century by Theodore Erbe, has
recently been authoratively edited by Susan Powell.49 The Wycliffite sermons
have received similarly authoritative treatment from Anne Hudson and Pamela
Gradon, and the Middle English Mirror is in the process of being edited by
Margaret Connolly and Thomas G. Duncan for Middle English Texts.50 Stephen
Morrison’s edition of another dominical cycle from the late fifteenth-century
has recently been published by the Early English Text Society.51 The devotional
texts mentioned in the previous paragraph are available in modern editions (or
will shortly be so). Yet the devotional manual itself, clearly a common literary
format in its own time with a widespread distribution and extensive reading
audience (judging from the large number of surviving manuscripts), is a type of
medieval book which is presently scarcely accessible to modern readers.
The taxonomy of this area has only been briefly sketched, most significantly
by C. A. Martin who proposed a five-fold classification of manual types.52 With
48
See Index of Printed Middle English Prose, ed. by Lewis, Blake, and Edwards (hereafter
IPMEP), no. 689. For an account of the print relationship between the Festial and Quattuor
Sermones see Three Sermons for Nova Festa, ed. by Powell, and see also the discussion in ‘What
Caxton Did to the Festial’, pp. 51–52. For an edition see Caxton, Quattuor sermones, ed. by
Blake. Exornatorium curatorum is IPMEP 399; for details see Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and
Philosophical Instruction’, p. 2495; a fuller account will be given by Pattwell.
49
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell. The earlier edition is Mirk, Festial, ed. by Erbe; this volume
(containing only the text of the sermons) was to have been supplemented by another (present-
ing the Introduction and notes), but this was never completed due to Erbe’s death in the First
World War.
50
The first volume (of a projected series of four) appeared in 2003, and the second, The
Middle English Mirror: Sermons from Quinquagesima to Pentecost, is nearing completion. In
the meantime the complete text of the Mirror is accessible in a single-text edition, The Middle
English ‘Mirror’, ed. by Blumreich.
51
A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, ed. by Morrison.
52
Martin, ‘Middle English Manuals of Religious Instruction’.
further investigation it might be possible to locate some versions with particu-

lar geographical or dialectal areas, and recent developments such as the crea-
tion of the database of manuscripts associated with the West Midlands might
prove useful tools for the investigation of such aspects.53 It might also be possi-
ble to link the production of some devotional manuals with particular religious
movements, or with preaching in particular environments. Yet at present these
questions can barely be addressed because of the absence of any kind of edition
that could provide a starting point. Preparing an edition of such material would
be a daunting undertaking, since these manual texts offer a complex manifesta-
tion of what might be described as a dynamic textual tradition. 54 Traditional
editorial practices, developed to handle discrete texts and designed with the
twin objectives of establishing stemmatic relations between witnesses and dis-
tinguishing correct readings from errors, are ill equipped to cope with varied
collections of short, interrelated but discrete texts whose resemblance to each
other may be as much coincidental as genetic, and whose fluid transmission
may have been conducted by aural methods as well as through written forms.
Two groups of modern editors are experienced in handling such types of mate-
rial: those who have edited medieval lyrics, and those who have edited medie-
val sermons. Sermon editors, accustomed to dealing with a genre which is both
complex in itself, and in its relations with other contemporary instructional
texts, might prove to be the group with the necessary expertise to grasp this edi-
torial nettle. The benefits of this would be immense, since devotional manuals,
which served both the laity and the clergy, provide an important missing link
in our understanding of the full picture of medieval preaching. As this essay
has demonstrated, God’s word was preached not just from the pulpit but also
more quietly, by simple written formulations which might be memorized and
taught orally, or read and meditated upon during private devotions. The writ-
ers, preachers, hearers, and readers of medieval sermons were also, variously, the
producers and users of devotional manuals; this conjunction means it would be
beneficial if the modern scholars who studied these different types of surviving
medieval texts recognized and acknowledged their interdependency.
53
Manuscripts of the West Midlands: A Catalogue of Vernacular Manuscript Books of the
English West Midlands, c. 1300–c. 1475 <http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/mwm/> [accessed 2
April 2013].
54
A. I. Doyle and then Bella Millett both use the term ‘dynamic’ to describe the textual
tradition of another work of pastoral instruction, Ancrene Wisse: see Ancrene Wisse, ed. by
Millett, i, p. xxxvii.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 385
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.4.9
—— , MS Ii.6.43
—— , MS Nn.4.12
Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 250
—— , MS Douce 302
—— , MS Eng. poet a.1
Salisbury, Cathedral Library, MS 103
Early Printed Texts

Exornatorium curatorum (London: Wynkyn de Worde, ?1516; with nine further editions
between ?1518 and c. 1552), STC 10627.5
Mirk, John, Liber festivalis (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483; with twenty-two fur-
ther editions and a variant between 1486 and 1532), STC 17957
Quattuor sermones (Westminster: William Caxton, 1482/83; and in further editions,
printed with John Mirk’s Liber festivalis), STC 17957
Primary Sources
Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Bella Millett, EETS, o.s., 325–26, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005–06)
Audelay, John, John Audelay: Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce
302), ed. by Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009)
Biblia sacra latina ex Biblia sacra vulgatæ editionis, Sixti V et Clementis VIII (London:
Bagster, 1977)
Caxton, William, William Caxton: Quattuor sermones, ed. by Norman F. Blake, Middle
English Texts, 2 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975)
English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, 5 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983–96)
Exornatorium curatorum, ed. by Niamh Pattwell, Middle English Texts, 49 (Heidelberg:
Winter, forthcoming)
The Middle English ‘Mirror’: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library MS Holkham Misc.
40, ed. by Kathleen M. Blumreich, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 182
(Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002)
The Middle English Mirror: Sermons from Advent to Sexagesima, ed. by Thomas G. Duncan
and Margaret Connolly, Middle English Texts, 34 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003)
The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, Part i, ed. by Carl Horstmann, EETS, o.s., 98 (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892)
2009–11)
—— , Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus, ed. by Theodor Erbe,
EETS, e.s., 96 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905)
Three Sermons for ‘Nova Festa’, together with the ‘Hamus Caritatis’: Edited from Caxton’s
1491 Edition of John Mirk’s ‘Festial’, ed. by Susan Powell, Middle English Texts, 37
(Heidelberg: Winter, 2007)
Secondary Studies
Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British
Library, 2005)
Bowers, R. H., ‘A Middle-English Poem on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost’, Modern
Language Notes, 70 (1955), 249–52
Boyle, Leonard E., ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in
The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan, Tennessee
Studies in Literature, 28 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 30–44
Connolly, Margaret, ‘Books for the “helpe of euery persoone þat þenkiþ to be saued”:
Six Devotional Anthologies from Fifteenth-Century London’, Yearbook of English
Studies, 33 (2003), 170–81
—— , Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xix: Manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge (Dd–Oo) (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009)
—— , ‘Practical Reading for Body and Soul in Some Later Medieval Manuscript
Miscellanies’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 10 (2007), 151–74
Doyle, A. I., ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in
the 14th, 15th and Early 16th Centuries with Special Consideration of the Part of the
Clergy therein’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge,
1953)
Edwards, A. S. G., gen. ed., The Index of Middle English Prose, 20 vols to date (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1984–)
Jolliffe, P. S., A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance, Subsidia
Lewis, R. E., N. F. Blake and A. S. G. Edwards, eds, Index of Printed Middle English Prose,
Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 537 (New York: Garland, 1985)
Martin, C. A., ‘Middle English Manuals of Religious Instruction’, in So Meny People
Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented
to Angus McIntosh, ed. by Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Middle
English Dialect Project, 1981), pp. 283–98
Ogilvie-Thomson, S. J., Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xvi: Manuscripts in the
Laudian Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000)
Powell, Susan, ‘What Caxton Did to the Festial: From Manuscript to Printed Edition’,
Journal of the Early Book Society, 1 (1997), 48–77
Rand, Kari Anne, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xx: Manuscripts in the Library
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009)
Raymo, Robert R., ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, Section xx, in A
Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung, vii
(New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986), pp. 2255–378,
2470–582
1993)
Preaching with a Pen:
Audience and Self-Regulation
in the Writing and Reception of
John Mirk and Nicholas Love
John J. Thompson
A
ll writers and speakers develop strategies for dealing with the fact that
they cannot completely control how audiences will respond to poten-
tially controversial material originally transmitted by them in either
verbal or written form. Throughout history the problem has remained a par-
ticularly interesting occupational hazard for preachers, politicians, and educa-
tors, for example, but, perhaps, never more so than in fifteenth-century oral,
manuscript, and print culture. For modern book historians (working with the
benefit of hindsight), the long fifteenth century represents an era in the West
marked both by a continuing gradual relocation of oral cultural traditions in
various written forms and also by the advent of a vernacular reading public
with, apparently, a voracious appetite for written material of all kinds.1 That
growing audience of lay and religious included a diverse range of private readers
who, towards the end of the period, were serviced not only by the pen but also,
because of the technological miracle of printing, by moveable type. In this essay
I want to examine comparatively how such developments influence our critical
judgment of two distinctive late medieval English religious writers and their
most characteristic vernacular works. The writers are John Mirk, an Augustinian
1
See further discussion and references in my ‘The Memory and Impact of Oral Per
formance’.
John J. Thompson ( J.Thompson@qub.ac.uk) is chair of English Textual Cultures and director
of the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queen’s University Belfast.
102 John J. Thompson
canon and later prior of Lilleshall Abbey, Shropshire, and Nicholas Love, the
Carthusian prior of Mount Grace charterhouse, North Yorkshire. The works
in question — Mirk’s Festial and Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
— exemplify the diverse challenges and opportunities ‘preaching with a pen’
offered to English author/translators and also English vernacular audiences in
the manuscript and early print culture of the period.2
Although very different in background and context, versions of both Mirk’s
Festial and Love’s Mirror are now extant in multiple second- and third-gener-
ation manuscript copies, also in a series of early prints. 3 And even when such
works were appropriated and repurposed by later hands, a large part of their
continuing attraction would seem to have been that both Mirk and Love had
themselves originally reworked widely known material — widely known, that
is, in educated polite circles — for their English vernacular audiences. Such
writing traditions and sources had hitherto largely been the preserve of an
educated and Latinate elite, but both English writers reworked their inherited
material with specific and different vernacular readerships in mind. For dif-
fering purposes in each of these cases, their imagined English audiences were
often characterized by them as consisting of ‘good men and women’ or ‘simple
souls’ requiring careful mentoring, encouragement, and support. Quite who
these ‘simple souls’ were, and just how either Mirk or Love proposed to cater
for their particular needs, remain interesting issues worth exploring further
in this essay.4 Because, in each case, some attempt has been made to control
or direct an imagined audience response, the examples of Mirk’s Festial and
Love’s Mirror also raise important questions regarding the varying dissemina-
tion and reception patterns that brought these particular works to the atten-
tion of a variety of devout English readers over a two-hundred-year period that
begins with the Wycliffite and Lollard controversies and ends with the English
Reformation.
2
All textual references are to Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell; Love, The Mirror of the Blessed
Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent.
3
See listing and bibliographical discussion in Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xiii–xiv,
xliii–lix; The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. xvii–xviii; Introduction,
pp. 96–142. In Sargent’s edition both the introduction and text each begin at p. 1; in order to
prevent confusion in the notes here, references to the former are signalled by ‘Introduction’, fol-
lowed by the relevant page numbers.
4
I partly return here to the important questions regarding the transmission and reception
of medieval sermons and their audience stimulatingly raised in Spencer, English Preaching in the
Late Middle Ages.
Preaching with a Pen 103
John Mirk
John Mirk expressed his original purpose clearly when he prepared and
wrote the Festial as sixty-four sermons for the major feasts of the Church
calendar in the late 1380s. At this time Mirk was an Augustinian canon in
Lilleshall Abbey, Shropshire. In his preface to the work he indicates that it is a
‘treti’ intended for others like him ‘that hauen charge of soulus and bene hol-
dyn to teche hore pareschonus of alle the principale festus that cometh in the
ȝere’.5 This is Mirk’s primary target audience. He is aware too that sermons
may ultimately become the property of everybody who experiences them either
through their eyes or ears, so he spends some time in both the Preface and else-
where imagining the parish congregations for whom his words and ideas in the
Festial will be repurposed by their priest. Through oral delivery of some future
version of his vernacular work, he promises that this important secondary audi-
ence will be the ultimate beneficiaries of his sermon collection because, as a
result of their vicarious experience of it, they ‘schuldon haue the more deuocion
in Goddus seyntys and wyth the better wylle com to the chyrche to serue God
and pray to holy seyntys of here help’. 6 The prospect of increased devotion to
the saints is here balanced by the promise of a more positive local engagement
in Church ritual and practice at parish level. On the other hand, Mirk recog-
nizes that his primary audience is currently not in a strong enough position to
ensure that this might happen:
But for mony excuson ham by defaute of bokus and sympulnys of letture, therefore
in helpe of suche mene clerkus as I am myselff I haue drawe this treti sewyng owt of
Legenda Aurea wyth more addyng to, so he that hathe lust to study therein he schal
fynde redy of alle the principale festis of the ȝere a schort sermon nedful for hym to
techyn and othur for to lerne.7
Utilizing the time-honoured idea of ignorancia sacerdotum, the Festial is here

presented as a vernacular study aid for preachers and teachers without many
books or much education themselves.8 In that sense it takes its place along-
side the two other reference works Mirk is known to have written. These
5
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, Prologue, 3–5.
6
7
8
That the opening words of Archbishop Pecham’s catechetical manual of 1281 had
become almost a trope by Mirk’s time is confirmed by the discussion of pastoralia in Spencer,
English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 196–227.
other two works can be said to complement the Festial insofar as, together,
they offer a full pastoral programme for preaching and teaching.9 The first is
the Instructions for Parish Priests, in Middle English rhyming couplets, where
Mirk covers the significance of the basic tenets of the Christian faith and other
pastoral duties, such as priestly teaching and learning, celebrating the sacra-
ments of baptism and confirmation, and performing the last rites. In the cen-
tury following Archbishop Pecham’s 1281 Lambeth Constitutions, all of the
aforementioned had accrued considerable significance, particularly in terms
of how they defined the efficient operation of the office of the priesthood for
an increasingly broad spectrum of interested parties that included both reli-
gious and secular observers and critics, as well as informed and concerned pious
layfolk. Finally, Mirk wrote the Manuale sacerdotis in Latin prose as a more
advanced pastoral manual, apparently intended for a priest’s own instruction.
Mirk’s Latin prefatory comments introducing the work suggest the Manuale
was probably written late in his career, after he had become prior of Lilleshall.10
In view of Mirk’s primary target audience, it is noteworthy that his sermon
material in the Festial does not overlap hugely with the practical pedagogical
concerns of his other two works, nor in his treatments of hagiographical and
biblical topics does Mirk utilize the scholastic divisions and subdivisions of
biblical themes that one might have expected to find in a work setting out to
demonstrate by example the basic tools for effective preaching. Perhaps Mirk’s
English sermons in the Festial thereby demonstrate that they are unlikely to be
the work of a university-trained preacher. One should not make too much of
this point, of course, but it is worth noting that the absence of such rhetorical
devices outlining biblical divisions has been remarked upon as a feature shared
by other vernacular sermon collections such as the Speculum sacerdotale with
which the Festial is often compared.11 Indeed, Mirk’s collection of short ser-
mons is also described by him as a ‘treti’ and, as such, has been worked up and
presented as a compendious sermon narrative from sanctorale material which
he tells us in the Preface has been largely drawn from the Legenda aurea. Mirk
is here referring to the standard medieval hagiographical source by Jacobus de
Voragine, a compilation much mined by European preachers and storytellers
9
Discussion and further references in Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xxv–xxviii.
10
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xx–xxi.
11
For examples of other sermon collections that do not use biblical themes to form their
divisions, see the census of texts and manuscripts in O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle
English Prose Sermons.
and now extant in well over a thousand Latin and vernacular manuscripts and
a multitude of early printed versions.12 Already over a century in circulation by
the 1380s, the Legenda aurea was well on its way to becoming a European best
seller, a point that was surely not lost on Mirk when he identifies it as a major
inspiration and source. It was no coincidence that he chose to name this repu-
table and popular European hagiographical source immediately following his
comments in the same sentence on the relative booklessness of his target English
audience of poor local preachers and their consequent incapacity to undertake
some essential pastoral duties. In other words, the Festial seems to have been
imaginatively cast by Mirk’s prefatory remarks as part of an important bulwark
and defence he is raising against ignorance and apathy. His three known works
all seem to have originated in his desire to provide essential safe reading for
English priests as they went about their everyday work for Church and parish.
Codicological and textual evidence in the extant manuscripts and texts pro-
vide the best indication that Mirk’s writings often reached their target audience,
although some puzzles still remain regarding the larger dissemination patterns
that emerge.13 Throughout its lengthy textual history it is clear that Festial ser-
mon material was always subject to some tinkering and revision — a process that
was perhaps prompted by Mirk’s modus operandi in originally shaping earlier
and continuing sermon work so that, by and large, most of his writings fitted or
could be made to conform to the calendrical narrative frame he had established
for the Festial. His text is now extant in something approaching what modern
editors might consider its complete form in twenty-two manuscripts, nearly all
of which can be assumed to have been prepared either by or for priests. These can
be divided into A- and B-recensions, with the A-texts preserving Mirk’s original
ordering of the sermons chronologically, according to the Church calendar, and
the B-texts reordering the sermons into temporale and sanctorale service-book
categories and removing material that seemed extraneous to the larger project
or was originally of mainly local interest. An additional four manuscripts pre-
serve a major revised version of the B-recension in which Festial material was
comprehensively rewritten and the sermon series expanded, often by recourse to
Mirk’s original source in the Legenda aurea. And there are nineteen manuscripts
preserving individual sermons, or small clusters of sermons, or shorter extracts
from the Festial. In addition, Caxton published the Liber festivalis in 1483 (his
12
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xxxii–xxxv; Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed.
by Maggioni.
13
I here build on the codicological work completed over many years by Susan Powell; see
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xliii–lxxxiii.
text based on a B-recension manuscript), and the Festial continued in print in

this form until 1532. Its survival generally conforms to the broad pattern that
has been established for other late medieval Middle English works surviving in
similar such numbers: although written in the latter decades of the fourteenth
century, the extant Festial manuscripts mostly date from the second half of the
fifteenth century, with copying tailing off once printed texts became available.14
On the other hand, it is surprising that there is so little evidence of early copies
and that much of the substantial early editorial interest in the Festial dates from
the mid-1400s, thus a generation or two after Mirk’s presumed death in the
early years of the fifteenth century when one might have imagined that interest
in his sermons would have gradually subsided.15
From a modern editorial point of view it is probably best to support the
idea that the first Festial copies were originally disseminated by Mirk for local
parish work in and around Lilleshall and that these have simply been read to
pieces. Thus the A-texts include a sermon for the feast of St Alkmund, who is
referred to as ‘patron to þis chyrch’.16 This sermon represents one of the most
important additions Mirk made to his Legenda aurea source, since the saint
does not appear there and he was almost certainly making a reference in the
sermon to either the church at Lilleshall itself (where the saint had been origi-
nally interred as the sermon also tells us) or one associated with the college of
St Alkmund, Shrewsbury, upon whose endowments Lilleshall had been found-
ed.17 While this may be taken as an indication of the original setting in which
the sermon had been preached, or perhaps even the local parish community that
Mirk’s sermon texts were originally intended to serve, by mid-century A-texts
of the Festial had been made more widely available beyond the immediate West
Midlands area where Mirk is believed to have lived for most of his adult life.
The B-recension had also been prepared, where the sermon for St Alkmund
was among the material stripped away, and there is strong linguistic evidence in
B-group manuscripts that original dialect features have been standardized. All
this seems part of some more organized production effort in the first decades
of the fifteenth century to promote the Festial in the central Midlands area.18
14
The pattern is discussed in Sargent, ‘What do the Numbers Mean?’. Perhaps surprisingly,
Sargent does not include the Festial in this study.
15
Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 182–183, is keener than I am to
link this peculiarity to the repressive effects of Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions.
16
See Fletcher, ‘John Mirk and the Lollards’, pp. 220–22.
17
See Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. xxiii–xxiv and references.
18
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. lii–lv.
The radical revision of the B-recension that probably took place in the
1430s shows that another anonymous later hand had not only returned to
Mirk’s original source in the Legenda aurea to borrow supplementary mate-
rial with which to update the Festial but had also utilized texts, such as the
Fasciculus morum and Alexander Carpenter’s Destructorium viciorum, for a
more scholarly rewriting, expansion, and presentation of Mirk’s original ser-
mon programme.19 Carpenter’s text is a compendious treatment of the deadly
sins that was completed in 1429. It is an interesting and potentially controver-
sial choice, since in it he strongly advocates lay access to the gospels through the
priesthood and dismisses as heresy any attempt to deny adults that privilege.20
If we accept that all adults are bound to know the Pater noster, Ave Maria, and
the commandments, then Carpenter reasons that it must be the priesthood
who are charged with teaching layfolk how to listen to holy scripture and then
talk about what they have heard. In this respect, his attitude both confirms and
extends a view expressed regarding the authority of the priesthood in Manuale
sacerdotis where Mirk insists that it is the priest who should be seen to carry
a book.21 Such an insistence reinforces a theoretical distinction between reli-
gious and lay reading practices, without necessarily excluding layfolk from the
privilege and experience of biblical knowledge through oral instruction and by
word of mouth.
Both Mirk’s and Carpenter’s views ultimately represent a conservative view-
point regarding lay access to scriptural writings, of course. At a time of contro-
versy about such matters, both churchmen may well also have been respond-
ing to the reality that pious layfolk were increasingly gaining access to such
reading materials, either at church, through the priesthood acting as spiritual
advisers, or else from other less desirable and possibly heretical sources operat-
ing beyond formal ecclesiastical control and increasingly critical of attempts
to curb their influence. Some such recognition of the same reality may well
have influenced the decision to revise wholesale the B-recension of the Festial
so that it took on a more academic guise, perhaps in imitation of the competing
claims of the Wycliffite sermon cycle that was already efficiently in circulation
with a more concentrated focus on the efficacy of scriptural reading and inter-
pretation that gave its readers and hearers encouragement to undertake further
19
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. lii–lv.
20
Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 182, 432 n. 162.
21
The Manuale sacerdotis reference is also noted for a different purpose in Spencer, English
Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 77.
biblical study.22 This was a largely parallel development, however, and there are
fascinatingly few points of intersection between the Wycliffite sermon mate-
rial and Mirk’s sermons. Instead, the Festial seems to have proved an attractive
quarry for a range of later fifteenth-century compilers of more miscellaneous
manuscript collections preserving appropriately devout vernacular reading
material, who were sympathetic to the idea of preaching with a pen but also
careful to mould sermon material for their specific needs. Some two hundred
years after the Festial had first been written, Caxton’s decision in 1483 to pub-
lish the Liber festivalis from a B-group manuscript may well have sprung from
some similar desire to promote the idea of using Mirk’s sermons as an effective
and uncontroversial means of preaching with a pen to a much broader English
reading public than had originally been envisaged. It seems to have made sound
commercial sense to do so, since there were no fewer than ten more editions
of the Liber festivalis in the 1490s by six different printers. Caxton’s successor,
Wynkyn de Worde, alone produced nine separate editions, effectively corner-
ing the market for Mirk among the sixteenth-century pre-Reformation English
reading public.23 Indeed, one might even argue that, in combination with other
works of basic pastoral instruction, the narraciones and exempla in Mirk’s ser-
mons had always been regarded as a viable safe alternative to unsupervised
scriptural reading and that their presentation in sermon form was a significant
part of the attraction these writings obviously held for many different genera-
tions of book compilers, copyists, and pre-Reformation English readers who
were not always preachers themselves.24
Nicholas Love
‘Preaching with a pen’ takes on an added new significance when we turn now
to compare Nicholas Love’s achievement as an English writer. Love was a
Carthusian monk and member of an enclosed order, so, as such, public preach-
22
For an extended comparison of the Wycliffite sermons to Mirk’s Festial as two collec-
tions with ‘mutually contradictory convictions about the nature and purpose of preaching’, see
Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 277–320. Powell is generally more cau-
tious than Spencer regarding the manner in which Festial texts may have competed directly with
the Wycliffite sermons; see Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. liv–lv.
23
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. lv–lix.
24
For the manner in which the Festial’s success in print left it exposed to sixteenth-century
reformists’ ire with regard to its focus on anecdote and legendary, see Spencer, English Preaching
in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 321–34.
ing was not an option open to him. This was a point codified early for the order,
in the 1120s, by the Consuetudines of Guigo de Ponte, fifth prior of the Grande
Chartreuse:
Libros quippe tanquam sempiternum animarum nostrarum cibum cautissime cus-
todiri et studiosissime volumus fieri, ut quia ore non possumus, dei verbum mani-
bus predicemus
(We wish books to be made with the greatest attention and guarded most carefully,
as eternal food for our souls, so that because we cannot preach the word of God by
our mouths, we may do so with our hands.)25
It was basically through the handiwork of Carthusian writers that the writing
tradition represented by the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi
(hereafter MVC) remained one of the most influential treatments of the life
of Christ in the fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century period. Perhaps
the single most important reworking of the MVC (partly because of its many
derivative vernacular versions scattered across Europe) was the Latin Speculum
vitae Christi by Ludolf of Saxony, prior of the Carthusian house at Coblenz
from 1343–48, who lived for some years after in the charterhouse at Mainz
before retiring to Strasbourg where he had originally joined the order.26 From
an English literary-historical perspective, however, the slightly later work of
Ludolph’s confrère, Nicholas Love, for his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus
Christ, stands at the head of another important vernacular corpus of MVC
material.27 In addition to its survival in over sixty manuscripts, there were
nine successive early printed editions of Love’s Mirror, starting with William
Caxton’s in 1484 and 1490, and continuing with two by Richard Pynson in
1494 and 1506, followed by the five printings by Wynkyn de Worde between
1494 and 1530.28 In terms of sheer numbers of surviving manuscripts and print
editions, therefore, Love’s Mirror might well be considered the vernacular text
25
Consuetudines xxviii.3; Guigues 1er Le Chartreux, Coutumes de Chartreuse, ed. and trans.
by a Carthusian; also quoted by Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, p. 334 n. 73.
26
The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, Introduction, pp. 20–22.
27
See Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ,
1350–1550, a collaborative research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council that offers a comprehensive investigation of the texts and manuscripts belonging to this
tradition; the electronic resources of the project can be accessed at <http://www.qub.ac.uk/
geographies-of-orthodoxy/discuss/> [accessed 10 October 2011].
28
The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, Introduction, pp. 104–11.
that almost exclusively set the terms for how the English demand for pseudo-
Bonaventuran material was met across a wide cross section of fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century vernacular reading audiences, many of whom were presum-
ably keen to learn of, and perhaps even practice, the devotional and meditative
traditions surrounding the biblical narrative of Christ’s life.29 Love’s Mirror
encourages English readers to adopt a concentrated and intense inward focus
on key gospel events. His text is written for simple souls, he tells us, yet his writ-
ing presupposes knowledge of the Church calendar and a liturgical familiarity
that will also guide and regulate the private reader, as well as, perhaps, an aware-
ness of elementary pastoral theology. Following the example set by his Latin
source, Love’s target reader is imagined early in the work as someone who will
respond to the scriptural narrative like St Cecilia:
Amonge oþer vertuese commendynges of þe holy virgine Cecile it is writen þat she
bare alwey þe gospel of criste hidde in her breste, þat may be undirstand þat of þe
blessed lif of oure lorde Jesu criste writen in þe gospele, she chace certayne parties
most deuoute. In þe which she set her meditacion & her þouht niȝt & day with a
clene & hole herte. And when she hade so fully alle þe manere of his life ouer gon,
she began aȝayne. And so with a likyng & swete taste gostly chewyng in þat manere
þe gospell of crist, she set & bare it euer in þe priuyte of her breste. In þe same
manere I conseil þat þou do.30
Love’s version of St Cecilia in the Mirror has basically been borrowed from
his source. Indeed, there is some consistency in the manner in which the tar-
get audiences for MVC treatments are characterized as having been hitherto
untutored in the art of inward meditative reading. They are as inexperienced,
perhaps, as religious novices, or unlettered holy women, or even, sometimes,
devout layfolk. As such, they are advised, in the clearest possible terms, to
set their hearts and minds to work by concentrating initially on an empathic
remembrance of the key events in Christ’s life recorded in the gospels and the
emotions surrounding them, all of which might be committed to memory. Only
after this has been embedded in their understanding might it then prove pos-
sible for such participants to leave behind the visual, aural, or written prompts
that initially trigger such narrative remembrance — the material thing such as
the image, the experience of a sermon or reading in performance, or the writ-
ten text itself. Still holding the experience of the events described deep within
29
For what the numbers might mean in the case of Love’s, see Sargent, ‘What do the
Numbers Mean?’, especially pp. 237–42.
30
The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, Proheme, p. 11, ll. 23–32.
their breasts, they might thus progress to a simple form of meditative praxis.31
In Love’s hands, therefore, part of the obvious attraction of the pseudo-Bon-
aventuran story of St Cecilia is that it illustrates and directs his audience to
the ruminative opportunities now available to meditatively inclined English
vernacular readers who remain largely untutored in the Latin theological and
meditative texts in which Love himself was so obviously well versed. It was
for this target audience, and, originally, perhaps, for a carefully circumscribed
English reading community, that Love prepared his English MVC version.
Love’s tendency in the Mirror was to build upon the example set in much
earlier vernacular pastoralia and the programmes laid out in many largely anon-
ymous confessional manuals and instructional works that claimed their work
should be regarded as authoritative and usually a self-sufficient programme of
religious learning and devotional instruction. 32 In this respect, Love might
be said to have taken to heart the example of St Edmund of Abingdon whose
Speculum ecclesie was a catechetical treatise of spiritual comfort and direc-
tion originally written in Latin and in its earliest incarnation presumably
directed at a single professed religious for whom a grasp of the fundamentals
of the Christian faith was seen as an important prerequisite for beginning a
life of contemplation. 33 Although eventually gaining much wider dissemi-
nation among English vernacular audiences, it seems an obvious point that
the very first beneficiaries of the spiritual reading programmes embedded in
St Edmund’s Speculum and its later English versions, or in Love’s Mirror, were
probably already engaged in some continuing instructional dialogue with the
English writers themselves or trusted colleagues charged with ensuring their
continuing spiritual health. Such personal instruction may have taken place not
only through the written word but also, perhaps, through some associated form
of personal advisement, supervision, or direction. It is perhaps for this reason
that Love’s Mirror describes and anticipates an imaginatively broad range of
reception possibilities for its target readers and hearers, including the idea of
31
See The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, Introduction, pp. 2–23
and references for the traditions of Franciscan spirituality and meditative training apparently
informing this process.
32
There is no evidence that Love knew of John Mirk’s pastoralia, but I think there are good
grounds for assuming his broad familiarity with the genre to which Mirk’s work belongs.
33
For the broader patterns of later vernacular reception and reading associated with
St Edmund’s Speculum see now two companion chapters: Gunn, ‘Reading Edmund of Abingdon’s
Speculum as Pastoral Literature’, and Watson, ‘Middle English Versions and Audiences of
Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum Religiosorum’.
‘total immersion’ in a form of visual imagining of the passion through the writ-
ten text, progressive and repetitive reading and/or remembrance of events in
Christ’s life, and highly selective reading of key events in the Church calendar
according to individual experience, interest, and ability.34
There are intriguing indications that brethren at Mount Grace may well have
been among the primary audience of ‘simple souls’ Love had in mind when he
first wrote the Mirror.35 And, among Love’s earliest lay readers, we know that an
early copy of the Mirror (Tokyo, Professor Takamiya Collection, MS Takamiya
8) was also presented to and owned by Joan Holland, aristocratic widow of
the patron and founder of Mount Grace, the eighth of the Carthusian charter-
houses to have been established in England.36 Such readers may well have been
busy people, perhaps even in the earliest days of the Mirror’s circulation among
layfolk, politically influential patrons and beneficiaries with many other duties
and distractions. Yet they would also presumably have been much more suscep-
tible than later readers and hearers to Love’s instruction that his text should be
read and internalized in the approved manner associated with the devotional
practices of St Cecilia, a form of simple meditative practice that may well also
have become an upper-class devotional fashion for certain fifteenth-century
English readers. On the other hand, of course, we must be careful not to assume
that such authorial strictures and restrictive logic need necessarily have applied
to any or all readers of Love’s Mirror or to the production practices and recep-
tion histories underlying later manuscript copies made on demand (even those
that seem to have been made under license), or produced speculatively and also
made commercially available, at various later stages in the complex history of
the transmission and reception of Love’s text.
Love’s Mirror was one of the few English vernacular works that in many cop-
ies carries a formal ‘memorandum of approbation’ indicating that it had been
officially read and approved ‘ad fidelium edificacionem, & hereticorum siue
lollardorum confutacionem’ (‘in confusion of alle fals lollardes, & in confort
34
All these possibilities are discussed further in my ‘Reading Miscellaneously in and
around the English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradition’.
35
The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, Introduction, pp. 40, 49–52.
36
Sargent suggests that the Mirror probably once existed in at least two interestingly diver-
gent drafts, with MS Takamiya 8 and other texts in the β-tradition representing relics of the
earlier of the two, possibly the ‘originalis copia huis libri’ referred to in the Latin memorandum
of approbation attached to some later Mirror copies; see also below and The Mirror of the Blessed
Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. xvi, and the discussion of editorial matters, Introduction,
pp. 96–153.
of all trewe louers & wirchiperes’ is how his text picks up later on the phras-
ing of the Latin authorization). 37 It seems likely that such technical approval
from the English Church in the person of the archbishop of Canterbury car-
ried with it the opportunity to promote the Mirror more widely among an elite
coterie audience in the metropolitan area than may have been originally envis-
aged when Love originally worked on his MVC translation at Mount Grace.
Indeed, it is attractive to speculate that at a later stage in its textual history,
Love’s Mirror became a useful tool for promoting the fashionable private and
exclusive forms of devotional and meditative practices that could now be asso-
ciated with texts, books, and library collections being assembled in the recently
established houses at Syon and Sheen.38 In due course, later texts of the Mirror
leaked into wider circulation, usually in less expensively-produced manuscripts
and for more widely dispersed English audiences who were temporally, also
often geographically and socially, removed from the original circumstances of
the Mirror’s production. For members of these English audiences, it remained
a generous source of religious edification, comfort, and meditative delight in
the gospel narrative. In sum, the Mirror may well always have held some con-
siderable attraction as an institutionally-approved biblical version that offered
a sure defence against the omnipresent Lollard threat to proper and carefully-
managed scriptural understanding.
A succession of mass-produced printed editions ensured that Love’s Mirror
was widely disseminated and remained commercially available during the reli-
gious turmoil and uncertainty of the Tudor period up to the difficult 1530s
period. At this point, the situation with regard to the security, safety, and
orthodoxy of religious texts took on a new urgency in the light of the religious
vacillations of an English king, who had by then learned how to flex his mus-
cles against both English heresy and also the parts of the English institutional
Church that had hitherto resisted his efforts to act as its supreme head.39 Seen
in these terms, the model of religious orthodoxy that Love’s Mirror promul-
gates through the St Cecilia anecdote assumed great importance, perhaps, but
not because it is in any way unusual or original, nor even because it may have
originally been a consciously gendered image of female religious devotion to
37
Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, Introduction, pp.
148–50, and p. 7.
38
For other aspects of this phenomenon, see Grisé, ‘“Moche profitable unto religious per-
sones, gathered by a brother of Syon”’.
39
Some of these tensions are explored in Da Costa, ‘The King’s Great Matter’.
the life and passion of Christ — both may well have been important consid-
erations at earlier stages in its transmission and reception history. Instead, by
the 1530s, the Cecilia reading model had come to represent a traditionally
approved exemplar of healthy and self-regulating devotional and meditative
scriptural understanding, one that had always remained free from the taint of
heresy because of its highly respectable European textual pedigree.
Even this cursory review of the parallel textual histories of Mirk’s Festial and
Love’s Mirror reinforces the obvious but important (and sometimes neglected)
point that, irrespective of any anxieties regarding biblical reading and interpre-
tation, the act of preaching the word of God — whether in person or by the pen
— was considered an important part of the religious vocation throughout the
later Middle Ages. Both works show vernacular English writers engaging with
issues relating directly to the religious experience and scriptural understanding
of their target audiences. That preaching remained so important in orthodox
religious circles, despite continuing controversies regarding the spread of her-
esy and the dangers of unfettered lay access to the vernacular Bible, becomes
clear when one considers the likelihood that both Mirk’s sermon collection and
Love’s meditative life of Christ were respected vernacular writings with com-
plex textual prehistories that enjoyed prolonged and wide circulation in both
manuscript and printed versions. Such works demonstrate that Dei verbum
continued to be delivered by late medieval English preachers in many differ-
ent spoken and written forms; they did so for a wide range of pedagogical and
other purposes and in many different settings. With a few notable exceptions,
the extant manuscripts containing one or other of these works were likely to
have been produced by clerical hands and intended for religious ownership.
The geography of this religious orthodoxy remains important and under inves-
tigated. We can certainly say that some second- and third-generation copies
of both Mirk’s and Love’s texts seem the product of local promotional efforts
of one kind or another, occasionally, perhaps, attempts to counter the anxiety
that their congregations might otherwise gain untrammelled access to rival and
suspect material. More often than not, however, the organized scribal work that
resulted in many such well-produced copies being made would more properly
seem to reflect the preacher’s and educator’s desire to satisfy a pious fascination
with biblical and legendary details or the parallel concern of the first commis-
sioners and readers of these book for greater scriptural knowledge of a certain
approved kind. Either before or after Arundel, there is little unambiguous codi-
cological evidence to support the notion that either Mirk or Love’s writings
became part of a fifteenth-century propaganda campaign to prevent lay access
to vernacular biblical versions.
Works Cited
Manuscript
Tokyo, Professor Takamiya Collection, MS Takamiya 8
Early Printed Texts

Love, Nicholas, [Speculum vitae Christi] The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
(Westminster: William Caxton, 1484; 1490; Wynkyn de Worde, 1494; London:
Richard Pynson, 1494; 1506; and several other editions), STC 3259–3263
Mirk, John, Liber festivalis (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483; with twenty-two fur-
ther editions and a variant between 1486 and 1532), STC 17957
Primary Sources
Guigues 1er Le Chartreux, Coutumes de Chartreuse, ed. and trans. by a Carthusian, Sources
Chrétiennes, 313 (Paris: Du Cerf, 1984)
SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007)
Love, Nicholas, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, ed. by
Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005)
2009–11)
Secondary Studies
Brantley, Jessica, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in
Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Da Costa, Alexandra, ‘The King’s Great Matter: Writing under Censure at Syon Abbey,
1532–1534’, Review of English Studies, 62 (2011), 15–29
Fletcher, Alan J., ‘John Mirk and the Lollards’, Medium Ævum, 56 (1987), 217–24
Grisé, C. Annette, ‘“Moche profitable unto religious persones, gathered by a brother of
Syon”: Syon Abbey and English Books’, in Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing
and Religion, c. 1400–1700, ed. by E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham, Studies in
Modern British History, 24 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 129–54
Gunn, Cate, ‘Reading Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum as Pastoral Literature’, in Texts
and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. by Cate
Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp.
100–14
Sargent, Michael G., ‘What do the Numbers Mean? Observations on Some Patterns
of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Design and Distribution of Late
Medieval Manuscripts in English, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney
(Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 205–44
1993)
Thompson, John J., ‘The Memory and Impact of Oral Performance: Shaping the Under
standing of Late-Medieval Readers’, in Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality,
ed. by Graham Allen, Carrie Griffin, and Mary O’Connell, History of the Book, 8
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. 9–21
—— , ‘Reading Miscellaneously in and around the English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradi
tion’, in Opening the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Middle English Lives of Christ, ed. by Ian
Johnson and Allan Westphall, Medieval Church Studies, 24 (Turnhout: Brepols,
forthcoming)
Watson, Nicholas, ‘Middle English Versions and Audiences of Edmund of Abingdon’s
Speculum Religiosorum’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in
Honour of Bella Millett, ed. by Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge:
York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 115–31
Scribal Performance in a Late
Middle English Sermon Cycle
Stephen Morrison
I
n a well-known passage, the anonymous Franciscan author of the Fasciculus
morum, a fourteenth-century manual on the seven deadly sins much used
by preachers, paints a rather unflattering picture of a medieval scribe in the
following terms:
Videmus enim quod aliquando datur scriptori exemplar, ut illa que in illo con-
tinentur in aliud volumine seu pergamentum transferat nichil addendo vel min-
uendo — quia ut communiter scriptores non sunt scioli ad libros corrigendos,
addendo vel minuendo nisi errant. Et tamen his non obstantibus scriptor falsus
quando conducitur secundum numerum linearum aut punctorum que sunt in
exemplari, adhuc tamen aliquando transilit, quia sperat quod sua falsitas non sta-
tim deprehendetur.
(We see that sometimes an exemplar is given to a scribe so that he may transfer
its contents into another volume or piece of parchment, without adding or sub-
tracting anything — for scribes are usually not sufficiently learned to correct
books by adding or subtracting anything without making mistakes. And yet, in
spite of this, a faulty scribe, when he is guided by the number of lines or points
in his exemplar, still sometimes skips material; he hopes that his fault will not be
detected.)1
1
Fasciculus Morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzel, pp. 182–83 (p. 185). The writer’s cue is
Exodus 25. 40: Inscipe et fac secumdum exemplar.
Stephen Morrison (stephen.morrison@univ-poitiers.fr) is professor of English and the

directeur-adjoint of the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the Université
de Poitiers.
118 Stephen Morrison
This ‘common, lowly view of scribes’2 was evidently shared by medieval writers,
notably by Geoffrey Chaucer, who made a point of berating his scribe, Adam, in
verse.3 For Chaucer, what was at stake was the propensity of scribes to modify
their copy, knowingly or not, and that this was necessarily a bad thing because
authorial intention was thus obscured.
However, others have more recently suggested that there is an alternative
way of characterizing this habitual practice. Building on Paul Zumthor’s work,
Bernard Cerquiglini, in his use of the coined term variance (variance), argued
that a text produced in manuscript culture is the inevitable product of inces-
sant réécriture (rewriting), which confers on it an inherently unstable linguistic
identity.4 Barry Windeatt, whose words I have just quoted, implicitly antici-
pated Cerquiglini in this observation made in the context of Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde:
[W]hen the work of individual scribes is examined, their achievements in response
to the difficulties of a text are sometimes (but not, of course, always!) impressive
and arresting. Yet it is not surprising that men who could read and write to gain
their living and who, in the very exercise of their craft, were often exposed to a
range of literary material should show some literary intelligence and feel for what
they are copying. Within their times the scribes are reading men.5
While the difficulties encountered in Chaucer’s Troilus, on the one hand, and
the sermon cycle I wish to consider, on the other, are not of the same order,
and while the ‘range of literary material’ in both will not bear comparison, it is
nevertheless noticeable that the compilers responsible for the prose sermons in
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 180 (hereafter O), and other manu-
scripts, equally display ‘literary intelligence and feel’ in their task of reproduc-
ing the texts of their exemplars to an extent which may not be entirely typical
of late medieval scribal practice. It is my intention here to review some of the
evidence supportive of this view.
In addition to MS e Musaeo 180 (O), the other manuscripts drawn on in
this discussion are: Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 50 and 51 (L, one manu-
2
Windeatt, ‘The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics’, p. 120.
3
See Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his Owne Scriveyn, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by
Benson, p. 650.
4
Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante, p. 57; English translation, In Praise of the Variant,
trans. by Wing. See also Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, who equally coined a term, mou-
vance, for this phenomenon.
5
Windeatt, ‘The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics’, p. 120.
Scribal Performance in a Late Middle English Sermon Cycle 119
script preserved in two bindings); Gloucester, Cathedral Library, MS 22 (G);

and Durham, Durham University Library, MS Cosin V. iv. 3 (D). All date from
the end of the fifteenth century. In what follows, references to ‘the scribe of
O,’ or ‘the scribe of L,’ and so on, are to be understood as referring to some
(unknown) point in the transmission of the text as it is now preserved in O, L,
and so on. References here, as in the published edition, are to sermon number,
in bold type, followed by line numbers.6 These four manuscripts, preserving
the latest stage in the development of the cycle, form a group in that they are
all the work of the same scribe, an unusual circumstance. They are associated
with three other manuscripts: Cambridge, Cambridge University Library,
MS Gg.6.16, London, British Library, MS Harley 2247, and London, British
Library, MS Royal 18.B.xxv. The Cambridge manuscript witnesses to a primi-
tive stage in the text’s development, containing nine sermons out of a total of
sixty-nine. The two London manuscripts, closely related to each other, preserve
an expanded, intermediary stage, itself subject to further development in the
OLGD group.7
Before turning to the principal subject of this essay, scribal performance, it
might be thought desirable to say something, if only briefly, about the intel-
lectual context in which these sermons were compiled and diffused, especially
since relatively few Middle English sermon collections are available today in
modern edited form. First, the existence of four copies of a text written by
the same scribe suggests that they were produced for retail, and that there was
thus a market for orthodox preaching materials in the vernacular at the end of
the fifteenth century.8 From this, it may be possible to argue that a need to
combat the content of heterodox preaching, or, generally, heterodox thought,
was still felt at that time. This, in turn, would suggest that Lollardy was not
6
The sermons are published in A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, ed.
by Morrison. For descriptions of the manuscripts, their contents, and a full discussion of their
relationships, the reader is referred to the appropriate sections of the introduction in the first
volume of the edition. Reasons for the adoption of O as the base manuscript are set out there.
There is only a little variability in content among OLG, but D contains only twelve (of which
two are incomplete) of the sixty-nine sermons that make up the full collection; consequently
examples from D cannot be provided for many of the sermons discussed below.
7
For the Cambridge manuscript see Connolly, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist
xix, pp. 174–83. For the Harley-Royal subgroup see The Advent and Nativity Sermons, ed. by
Powell. The relationships and content of the MS e Musaeo group manuscripts are set out by
Fletcher, ‘The Unity of the State Exists in the Agreement of its Minds’, pp. 154–59 and 168–69.
8
A point plausibly argued by Fletcher, ‘Unnoticed Sermons from John Mirk’s Festial’, p. 516.
the spent force that some scholars have argued, a view partly borne out by the
repeated insistence in the sermons on the correct interpretation of the doc-
trine of transubstantiation and on the obligation of sacramental confession. 9
It is true that no reference to ‘Lollards’ is ever made in the e Musaeo sermons,
unlike Mirk’s Festial,10 but the major preoccupations of the sermon compilers
coincide exactly with Lollard positions. If the evidence from this collection can
be interpreted in this way, it is probable that the mass of similar material, as yet
unedited, will contribute to the ongoing debate.
Turning now to the main concern of this essay, it may confidently be
stated that, in the process of copying, scribes display a persistent willingness
to depart from the text of their exemplars, to rewrite the text at various levels
of complexity. The most basic changes are banal, a common feature of medi-
eval scribal work, and may have been effected unconsciously. Thus, at 1/167,
O reads Dauid, while L has Dauid þe prophet; at 1/173, O’s apostil appears in
L as holy apostil; at 2/47, on the fifteen signs before Judgement Day, O’s tokens
become dredefull tokens in LD. Unremarkable, too, are the additions brought
to the concept of synne which, at 3/111, becomes fowle synne (LD) and at 4/40
(D), while pride (4/45) reappears as þe fowle synne of pride (D). When a scribe
appears to get carried away, slightly more elaborate formulations are found: at
17/136, maner of synne is transformed in G to become maner fowle fylþi spot-
tis of synne, which draws on highly conventional imagery.11 In this category
may also belong the name-switching of the type our sauiour Ihesu/the good
Lorde (11/31) which is widespread and which can, like the earlier examples, be
observed in other collections.12
Among these simple additions, two reveal rather more striking scribal reac-
tions to copy. The first, in the Epiphany sermon, has provoked the scribe of G to
embellish his text in an interesting way. In rendering closely the gospel account
of the coming of the Magi (Matthew 2. 7), the scribe of O relates how Herod
calde vnto hym þese thre kyngis (7/21), to which the scribe of G responds by
adding of Colen after kyngis. His addition is evidently a reference to a version
of the Historia trium regum, attributed to a Carthusian, John of Hildesheim
(d. 1375) (though the story is much older), in which the Magi, after having
9
On these points see Morrison, ‘Lollardy in the Fifteenth Century’.
10
In the sermons for Trinity Sunday and for Corpus Christi. See Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell.
11
It is, of course, the imagery of disease, especially that of leprosy. The subject is discussed
in Brody, Disease of the Soul.
12
See, for example, Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, Appendix III, pp. 598ff.
presented their gifts to the infant Jesus, journey to Cologne, in present-day

Germany, where they die. To judge from the number of extant manuscripts and
early printed books, the story was clearly popular, though it is unusual to see
such literary interests reflected in the work of a secular priest.13
The second case is more intriguing, harder to pin down. It is found only in
D, at the end of the opening lesson of sermon 3, on John the Baptist’s confine-
ment in prison (Matthew 11. 2–10). The words of verse 5, in which Christ lists
the miracles he has performed, is rendered thus in O: blynde men seen, croked
men gothe, meselis ben made clene, deffe men here, dede men ryse aȝene, pore men
ben taken to prechyng of the gospell (3/ 8–10), which has been extended by D to
read: gospell or be made kepars of the gospell. This association of ideas — poverty
and the custody of the biblical text — calls to mind two concerns which lay
at the heart of the fifteenth-century reform movement, Lollard or not. Thus
construed, it offers another piece of evidence for the proximity of potentially
heterodox thought in orthodox circles — and the circle in which these sermons
were compiled was robustly orthodox. If the interpretation has anything to rec-
ommend it, it should be placed alongside the evidence for the extensive use of
the Wycliffite Bible (later version) in the translation of pericopes (opening les-
sons) and other quotations embedded in the texts,14 as well as the testimony of
sermon 32 in which a passage expressing a decidedly hostile condemnation of
the sale of indulgences for wordly wynnyng (32/68) was unthinkingly adopted
by the scribes of O and G.15
While such examples may be of interest, in that they invite the reader to reach
beyond the text itself and address larger concerns, they do not give an adequate
idea of the extent of rewriting observable in the cycle as a whole. I will offer
three specimens of what may justly be called composition, or recomposition,
since they can in no way be accounted for by the normal process of copying.
13
For text and full discussion of the text see The Three Kings of Cologne, ed. by Schaer, espe-
cially pp. 27–28 on the three Middle English versions known today. It has been assumed that
the sermon compilers were seculars, though there is nothing in the manuscripts to offer proof.
John Mirk alludes to the story; see Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 283, where it is traced back
to the homilies of John Chrysostom. According to information supplied by O’Mara and Paul,
A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, via the Place Names Index, only two, possibly
three other sermon writers avail themselves of this detail.
14
On this unusual circumstance, which is not in doubt, see Morrison, A Late Fifteenth-
Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, pp. lvii–lxi.
15
The passage is commented on by Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages,
p. 315.
The first, in a sermon for Quinquagesima, is an extract from an exemplum

in which a certain Socrates must seek out and administer three healing herbs to
his wife, the emperor’s daughter, who is on the point of death (17/130–31).16
The herbs are, of course, given spiritual meaning. The first is said to be con-
triscion; thereafter the texts proceed as follows:
O And þe tother tweyne erbis is confession of mowthe and satisfaccion in dede
L And of þe tother ij erbis, þat is confession of mowthe and satisfaccion in dede.
These iij ben þe vertues erbis of penaunce þat þu schalt make for to purge þi
synful sowle by
G And the tother ij erbis is confession of mowthe and satisfaccion in dede. Þese
ben þe iij partis of penaunce þat a synner is purged by.
Even if one were to plead loss of text in the base manuscript, one would never-
theless have to recognize that L and G differ quite significantly from each other,
witnessing to conscious efforts of rewriting.
My second specimen, taken from the sermon for Sexagesima (15/23–26),
similarly displays addition, substitutions, and syntactical rearrangements which
could not have come about through diligent copying:
O for as byrdis flyethe besily abowte þe sede when it is caste vpon þe londe, ryȝt so
the devyll watchythe and wakiþe þe herttis of tru cristen pepyll to take awey þe
beleve of þe wordis of God and tru doctrine þat is prechid.
L for lyke as byrdis flyethe besily abowte þe sede when it is caste vpon þe erthe, so
in lyke wyse the devyll watchythe and wakiþe þe herttis of tru cristen pepyll for
to take awey þe very beleve of þe worde of God when it is prechyd to þem.
G for in lyke wyse as byrdis flyethe besily abowte þe sede when it is sowen vpon þe
londe, ryȝt so in lyke wyse the devyll watchythe and wakiþe ful besyly þe herttis
of tru cristen pepyll for to take awey þe very beleve of þe worde of God and þe
trew doctryne þat is prechid and techid to þem.
In this case, while it must be admitted that additions like very and lyke wyse may
be explained as nothing more than verbal ‘punctuation’ within a well-known
preaching idiom, the preferences for erthe over londe and sowen over caste, as
well as the free reworking of the last sequence all point to deliberate choice in a
conscious attempt to enliven the text.17
16
From the Gesta Romanorum, an English version of which is printed in The English
Versions of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, ed. by Herrtage, pp. 436–38.
17
Kane, in Langland, Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. by Kane, p. 126, has remarked:
My final example in this category is the most extreme, involving a total

rewriting of the base text to such an extent that that text’s linguistic identity is
wholly obscured as a result. Consider the following two passages, taken from
sermon 2/78–83, which evoke the events which will take place on the eleventh
of the fifteen days before Doomsday. The base text (followed by LG) has:
O The xjth day all þe graves and placis that pepill hathe ben beried in, that is to
sey, all tho that were dede beforne, theyre graues schall opyn and þe bodies scall
gader togeder aȝene. And þei schall be full redy to apere at þe dredful day of dome,
boþe body and sowle knyt togeder, and to answere for theire lyvyng that they haue
vsyd and ocupyed in this worlde.
In D, the latter part of the passage, that presented above in italics, reads as follows:
D all tho that were dede before schall ryse aȝene in bodijs and in sowlys togeder
redy to come to the dome wythe theyre naturall lyffe and to answere to the hyȝe
iuge criste ihesu and so to come to theyre iugement
Both passages convey three ideas: that the dead shall rise, that they shall pro-
ceed to the Judgement, and that they shall answer to God. However, while each
passage is made up exactly of forty-one words, coincidentally one supposes,
only four of those words — dome, togeder, redy, and answere — are common to
both; if the message has been preserved, the medium has been altered beyond
recognition.
Turning to another manifestation of scribal involvement, one finds abun-
dant evidence of deliberate lexical substitution, as if the scribes went out of
their way to alter what they saw in front of them.18 The following examples are
entirely typical of this widespread practice:
O (1/20–21) the company that went before and tho that sued behynde cryed (D
pepyll, folowyd)
O (7/78–79) we were wasschyd and made clene frome endles dampnacion (G

clene wasschyn, saffe)19
‘There is a prima facie improbability that all variants, whether substitutions, additions or omis-
sions, were merely careless or erratic.’
18
In comparison, the scribes of John Mirk’s Festial, while showing many instances of the
type of rewriting glanced at above, do not appear to have been so intent on the substitution of
near synonyms as the scribes of the MS e Musaeo 180 cycle. See Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii,
Appendix III.
19
Here, it would appear that the scribe decided to appropriate the adjectival clene of his
O (52/35) [a man in prayer] he muste haue a clene hert and a clene consciens (G
conscyens and a very stedfaste mynde)
If, in cases such as these, it is difficult to be sure of the motivation for textual
variation, others point to a desire for clarity lying behind the move:
O (44/38–39) a man scholde grownde hym fectually in good lyvyng (L perfytely,
G stedfastly) [where the Middle English Dictionary (MED) records only one
occurrence of the aphetic adverb (from affectually, effectually) and Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary adds only one other.20]
Another possible case of striving for clarity concerns the term peyse in the fol-
lowing extract:
O (44/84–85) þat wolde God that every man and woman wold peyse these maner
of wordys in there consciens (LG remember well). [Peyse, bearing the mean-
ing ‘to ponder or reflect upon’, clearly required here, is, according to MED,
overwhelmingly confined to poetic texts and may not have been familiar to a
sermon audience. It is also noticeable that the variant, which L and G share,
approaches the meaning of the rejected term without, however, covering that
meaning at all well.]
A final case in which transparency seems to be uppermost in the scribes’ minds

is the treatment of the term alleyved in this extract from the Nativity sermon:
O (5/63–65) But aȝenst the day and the schewyng of the sonne, the seke [the
sick man] þen is more comforted and allevyed of his sekenes and peyne (LG
lyȝttened). [The rarity of the word is not in doubt: OED gives one occurrence
from the mid-sixteenth century, s.v. alleve, while the MED records the presence
of alleviaten only.21]
The thrust of the argument developed here, that scribes, pace ‘the common,
lowly view’, cared about the coherence of what their repeated industry pro-
duced, may be bolstered by considering textual situations which seem to be
explicable only by positing the return of a scribe to his (or his predecessor’s)
work in a spirit of fault-finding and correction. Consider the following extracts:
O (10/177–83) But ȝit [þe] lufe betwene God and man passithe þis lufe, as it may
be prevyd [be] Cristis body and his lyfe þe whiche were full loþe to departe, as
he witnessiþe himselfe þat he was sorowful to þe dethe, ȝit neverþelesse he lete
exemplar and use it adverbially, thus requiring the finding of a suitable synonym of the latter term.
20
Of the full forms, however, effectualli, is reasonably well attested.
21
Four occurrences only are given in the quotations, confined to the period 1475–1550.
þem departe for þe lufe of man. This witnessiþe Ieremye þe prophete [spekyng]
in þe persone of Crist, þus: Dedi dilectam animam meam [in manibus] inimico-
rum eius; ‘I haue gefyn my lovyd lyfe into þe [hondis of þe] enmys of it.’
O (12/27–29) there cam a mayster, a doctur of law, to temp Criste, and seyde þus:
[Magister], quod est magnum mandatum in lege? ‘[Mayster], what is [a] gret[e]
commawndement in þe law?’
In both cases, incomplete Latin quotations are followed by incomplete English

translations, and in both cases the missing elements creating the incompletion
are identical: in sermon 10, in manibus and hondis, supplied by LG; in sermon
12, Magister and Mayster, again supplied by LG. The fact that these latter pre-
serve full, correct quotations demonstrates that the base text is faulty. One may
wish to dismiss this as merely coincidental; but in the light of the evidence
surveyed so far here, this judgement strikes me as improbable. Is it too fanciful
to suppose that an improving scribe, having noticed that one element in either
quotation or translation was wanting, sought to bring one text (quotation or
translation) into line with the other by removing the corresponding word or
sequence?22 Though speculative, one might say with some confidence that not
only is there nothing in the sermon cycle to cast doubt on this view, there is,
indeed, abundant evidence, albeit indirect in all cases save one, to support it.23
The one case which I interpret as supplying direct evidence for improve-
ment falls into the category of hyper-correction, that is, an attempt at suppos-
edly necessary correction which itself results in error. It occurs in the sermon
for the fourth Sunday after Trinity, in a general admonition to man to abandon
sin and adopt a ‘turn the other cheek’ spirit, thus:
Therfore and þu wilt haue þe merci of God and þe crowne of the blisse of heven,
þen muste þu leve þi synne and schewe ever merci to hem that trespassithe to the.
Therfore seythe seynt Iohn in þe Apocalipis: Tene quod habes, id est, misericordiam
et iusticiam, ne alius accipiat coronam tuam; ‘Hold’ he seythe, ‘that þu hast, þat is
to sey, þi merci and thi ryȝtwisnes þat non other take from the þe crowne of lyfe.’
This is the passage as it appears in the base text (O 45/148–54). In the course
of copying it into the manuscript now in Lincoln, the scribe would appear to
have been struck by the discrepancy between the Latin quotation and the pro-
22
The reduction of a text by a scribe along these lines is inherently more likely than an
attempt to complete by addition.
23
A third, considerably less substantial, example of this phenomenon is seen in sermon
43/87–88.
posed English translation, since he crossed through the last Latin word, tuam,
and wrote vite in the margin on the mistaken assumption that the English car-
ried greater authority than the Latin (Apocalypse 3. 11), which is unusual. His
choice may have been influenced by the many occurrences of phrases in the
Bible made up of corona, followed by an attributive noun in the genitive case.
Two other occurrences of the phrase coronam vitae itself may be noted in this
respect ( James 1. 12 and Apocalypse 2. 10). A conspicuous variant conveying
closely similar sense is corona gloriae, recorded in Ecclesiasticus 47. 7; Isaiah
28. 5, 62. 3; Jeremiah 13. 18 and I Thessalonians 2. 19.
In order to give a balanced account of scribal performance in the e Musaeo
sermon cycle, it is necessary to demonstrate that, together with such deliber-
ate textual manipulation illustrated above, unconscious, unwanted departures
from copy are frequently encountered, and it would be a highly unusual cir-
cumstance if they were not. A number of situations, many more of which are
adduced at great length by George Kane in his edition of version A of Piers
Plowman,24 may be briefly mentioned here.
Whether through carelessness or through excessive haste, scribes mistake
one letter form for another. A t is taken for a c, producing prophecyed where
prophetyd is required (9/21 (LG), answering to proficiebat, Luke. 2. 52); e is read
as o, producing overy where every is meant (1/57); another instance (20/53, L)
turns leche into loche, while a third (39/227) mirrors the latter in producing
overlastyng for everlasting.25 Confusion over w and v has led the scribe of O to
write the nonsensical no ȝeldyng I wyll for ivell for the correct reading in LG:
no ȝeldyng evyll for ivell (46/25, translating malum pro malo (i Peter 3. 9).26 A
reading of a u as n perhaps explains the presence in OLG of the form sonne
instead of soune (2/4, answering to sonitus, Luke 21. 25).27
Error induced by the absence of abbreviation marks (having fallen by the
way in the course of transmission) must lie at the heart of the following non-
sensical formulations: þu scholdiste haue a loug sowle with pite (11/109, O; LG
24
Langland, Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. by Kane, pp. 115–72. In relationship to
what follows, it is important to stress that the errors identified are, more often than not, isolative
rather than conjunctive.
25
In the case of prophecyed, the error may have been facilitated by the natural association
of Christ and prophecy. Other interesting examples of mental association are discussed below.
26
In none of the orthographic realizations of ‘evil’ is w ever used in this sermon cycle,
though substitution of v for w and vice versa is, of course, possible in Middle English.
27
However, the form chosen for emendation is sowne, since this is the form consistently
used for this term, whatever its part of speech: 22/186, 25/27, 29; 29/69, 39/220 LG.
preserve the correct louing); þei offyd myrre that Criste scholde suffyr peynefull
dethe (7/45, O, with LG preserving the correct offeryd).
Working in haste often leads a scribe to anticipate his copy, leading to con-
fusion. Among the examples I have noted, the following are instructive in that
both visual and auditory interference appears to be responsible: now þe tyme is
com þat we scholde ryse owte of synne and slepe no lengar þerin but as fast as we
make may wake into vertues lyvyng becawse of the commyng of Criste (1/80–83),
where the adjacent forms may and wake have been blended to create an intru-
sive make; the correct sequence, as preserved in L and G is but, as fast as we
may, wake into vertues lyvyng. Slightly less serious damage is done by the scribe
of sermon 21 in the following sequence, taken from an exemplum in which a
blasphemer, on hearing that the just vengeance of God shall descend on him,
laments: ‘The devyll schall haue bothe my body and my sowle for my wrechyng
lyvyng’ (21/130–31), where the ending of the last word has impinged on that
of the penultimate, obscuring the correct wrechyd, preserved in L, G, and D.
Similarly, though this time possibly involving considerations of auditory per-
ception, is this final example: þen it is so þat Criste is mercy, then this glorius
Lady, þe moder of Ihesu, sche muste nedis be the modur of mercy’ (55/12–14).
This logical ascription to Mary as the mother of mercy, stemming from the
mother-son relationship, requires, in the first half of the sentence, a conjunc-
tion answering to then. The form which most readily suggests itself is sen, evi-
dently omitted after þen, since the vowel sound is the same in both terms. L and
G preserve this precise term, making omission on the part of the scribe of O a
likely circumstance.28
My last examples of unconscious error must be attributed, it would seem,
to the workings of a scribe’s associative memory, perhaps vaguely similar to the
case of prophecyed, discussed above. The first occurs in a quotation of Matthew
8. 20 in the following passage (10/35–40):
Of hys grete poverte he witnessithe himselfe in the gospell, seyng thus: Mathei
octauo. Vulpes foveas habent, et volucres celi nubes: Filius autem hominis non habet
vbi capud suum reclinet. That is to sey: ‘Foxys hathe þer dennys and byrdis of the eyer
hathe þer nestys, but þe Sonne of man forsothe hathe not w[h]ere to rest hys hed.’
As the translation makes clear, what is required in the Latin is a word answering
to nestys, and that word is the Vulgate’s nidos, preserved in L and G. A likely
explanation for this slip is that the scribe’s natural mental association of air and
28
The distribution in the cycle of the two orthographic forms favoured by the scribe, sen
and sithe, is equal, with six occurrences each.
clouds (nubes), has proved more powerful than his capacity to read, retain and
transmit nidos, the word he almost certainly found in his exemplar.29
Finally, some measure of interference through association, or perhaps habit,
has resulted in an unwanted and unwarranted intrusion in the following pas-
sage from 47/4–11, O:
We fynde þat Criste never wrathed withe no man, but only for synne, the whiche
synne he commawnded be holsom prechyng and techyng vtterly to leve and forsake
in saluacion of there sowlis. And al tho that be vertues techyng and prechyng lefte
synne, withe hem he was [famylyar and þem he lovid, and withe þem he was] neuer
wraþe. And then on the tother party, þey ﬂat wolde not forsake þis fowle synne of
lechery, withe þem he was many tymes wrathe.
The sermon writer’s ‘theme’ is Irascimini et nolite peccare (Ephesians 4. 26), the
epistle reading for the day. The sin which is to be examined here (at consider-
able length) is the sin of wrath, making the mention of the synne of lechery at
the end of the passage incoherent and incomprehensible. While it is true that
in the teaching of the seven deadly sins it is pride that is usually given most
extensive attention, lechery occupied a prominent place in preachers’ minds,
and the frequent recourse to speak of it momentarily caught this preacher off
his guard in his mention of a sin unrelated to his immediate subject.30
By way of conclusion, it may be said that the e Musaeo 180 sermon col-
lection was transmitted by a succession of scribes who involved themselves
actively in the linguistic fabric of their texts. In so doing, they appear to have
displayed tendencies which were, in at least one way, somewhat contradictory.
On the one hand, lexical substitution — some examples of which must have
been conscious and deliberate — points to a scribe or scribes with scant respect
for the linguistic choices made by the authors or compilers of their exemplars;
instances of what appear to be correction, on the other hand, reveal a concern
for textual coherence which belies the first type of evidence. Perhaps, as some
other examples examined above have shown, their overriding concern was the
maintenance of clarity, and that the virtue of clarity could be achieved in a
29
It is noticeable that both terms are visually very similar: both are made up of five letters,
the first and fifth of which are identical; in addition, the third letter of one word is a reversed
form of that in the other, and it is possible that these circumstances facilitated the departure
from copy.
30
There are no fewer than fifty-seven occurrences of lechery and related forms in this ser-
mon cycle, an average of a shade under one occurrence per sermon. For other, interesting exam-
ples of this source of scribal error see Ogilvie, ‘Monastic Corruption’.
variety of ways in which the precise wording of the text was of only secondary
importance.
Such an observation raises a number of potentially interesting questions.
Thus, is such an attitude to copy a common feature of prose sermon compila-
tion in the fifteenth century? Do these observable practices in the approach
to composition favoured by orthodox preachers differ from those prevalent
among those of the reforming preachers’? Such questions are unlikely to yield
adequate answers at the present time of writing, for want of a substantial supply
of representative comparative material in modern edited form, particularly in
the substantial corpus of orthodox sermons, similar to those evoked here.
Finally, what impact should such compositional procedures have on today’s
editors of late medieval sermons? To what extent might the notion of ‘mou-
vance’ modulate editorial responses in the future? For, as has been noted, on the
basis of the work of Zumthor, Cerquiglini, Windeatt (and others), the recon-
struction of an ur-text may not only prove to be impracticable, it may equally
be unfeasible. Texts produced in manuscript culture lack fixity,31 and the ser-
mons in this collection display this characteristic in interesting ways which may
or may not be mirrored in the literary endeavours of other scribe-preachers.
Only when considerably more of the sermon corpus has benefited from neces-
sary editorial treatment (which it badly needs) will a balanced assessment of
scribal activity in this genre be forthcoming.
31
‘Centuries of habituation to the written word have conditioned us to conceive as fixity
what is really flux’: Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, p. 120.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.16
Durham, Durham University Library, MS Cosin V. iv. 3
Gloucester, Cathedral Library, MS 22
Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 50 and 51
London, British Library, MS Harley 2247
—— , MS Royal 18.B.xxv
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 180
Primary Sources
ed. by Susan Powell, Middle English Texts, 13 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford:
The English Versions of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, ed. by Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS, e.s., 33
(London: Trübner, 1879)
Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. by Siegfried
Wenzel (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1989)
Langland, William, Piers Plowman, the A Version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman and
Do-well, ed. by George Kane (London: Athlone, 1960)
2009–11)
The Three Kings of Cologne, ed. by Frank Schaer, Middle English Texts, 31 (Heidelberg:
Winter, 2000)
Secondary Studies
Brody, Saul Nathaniel, Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Cornell:
Cornell University Press, 1974)
Cerquiglini, Bernard, Eloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989)
—— , In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. by Betsy Wing
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
Connolly, Margaret, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xix: Manuscripts in the
University Library, Cambridge (Dd–Oo) (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009)
Fletcher, Alan J., ‘The Unity of the State Exists in the Agreement of its Minds’, in Alan
J. Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry in Late-Medieval England (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 1998), pp. 145–69
—— , ‘Unnoticed Sermons from John Mirk’s Festial,’ Speculum, 55 (1980), 514–22

Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004)
Morrison, Stephen, ‘Lollardy in the Fifteenth Century: The Evidence from Some Ortho
dox Texts,’ Cahiers Elisabéthains, 52 (1997), 1–24
Ogilvie, R. M., ‘Monastic Corruption’, Greece and Rome, 2nd ser., 18 (1971), 32–34
1993)
Windeatt, Barry, ‘The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1
(1979), 119–41
Zumthor, Paul, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972)
Sacerdotis predicacio
operibus confirmanda est:
The Lections in the Latin Martiloge
of the Syon Brethren
Vincent Gillespie
T
he endowment in 1415 of the only English house of Birgittines by
Henry V marked the last major monastic foundation of the English
Middle Ages.1 It also marked an experiment in a new kind of monasti-
cism. Along with the English charterhouses, the Birgittine house, founded as
‘the Abbey of St Saviour and St Bridget of Syon of the order of St Augustine’, rep-
resented a return to the eremitic roots of early monasticism. Birgitta’s order had
expanded quickly through Europe in the half century after her death in 1373,
spreading from the mother house at Vadstena in Östergötland, Sweden. Syon,
matched with a Carthusian foundation nearby at Sheen, and an unachieved
house of Celestines, represented a significant English royal investment in
newer, more austere, and more contemplative orders. Birgittine convents were
notable for being double monasteries, with up to sixty nuns being matched
with and served by up to thirteen priests, four deacons, and eight lay brothers.
Historically, most scholarly attention has been focused on the lives and books
of the sisters of Syon. This is perhaps because the last of the Syon brothers died
in Lisbon in 1695, while the Syon sisters survive in an unbroken catena of wor-
1
The standard account of the foundation of Syon is still Aungier, The History and Antiquities
of Syon Monastery. See also Beckett, ‘St. Bridget, Henry V and Syon Abbey’; Ellis, Viderunt eam
filie syon; Ellis, ‘Further Thoughts on the Spirituality of Syon Abbey’.
Vincent Gillespie (vincent.gillespie@ell.ox.ac.uk) is J. R. R. Tolkien professor of English
Literature and Language at the University of Oxford.
134 Vincent Gillespie
ship and service. But more recently the spirituality, scholarship, and service
of the brethren have been receiving more scholarly attention. Central to this
recent attention has been the surviving early sixteenth-century registrum of the
magnificent brethren’s library (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 141).2
Alongside the registrum, one of the greatest surviving treasures from the male
convent at Syon is its Latin martyrology (or Martiloge as it was called in the
house), now preserved as London, British Library, MS Additional 22285. The
sisters would also have had a martiloge, but it has not survived, although the
version translated and prepared for publication by the self-styled ‘wretch of
Syon’ Richard Whitford, and printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1526, may well
reflect their version, as it does not closely correspond to the surviving manu-
script book from the brethren’s side.3
The brethren’s book preserves a record of community decisions, special
liturgical observances, lists of benefactors and special friends of the house, obit
lists, and places of burial of deceased members. 4 At its heart is an historical
martyrology for the entire liturgical year, preserving a heavily conflated and
expanded version of the Usuardian model (named after the ninth-century
Benedictine monk, Usuard).5 The Syon book includes many feasts of royal and
monastic saints of specifically English, Scottish, and Irish interest, some of par-
ticular Sarum interest (such as the dedication of the cathedral at Salisbury),
some more local (the dedication of St Paul’s cathedral in London, feasts asso-
ciated with St Erkenwald), some perhaps of particular interest to enclosed
priests (such as Guthlac and Godric), and some recent (the recently canonized
St John of Beverley, St Chad, and others, such as St George, raised in dignity
by Archbishop Chichele early in his episcopacy). 6 There are also some later
2
Recently re-edited as Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie; previously edited as Catalogue of the
Library of Syon Monastery, Isleworth, ed. by Bateson. See also the essays in Syon Abbey and its
Books, ed. by Jones and Walsham.
3
Martiloge, ed. by Procter and Dewick.
4
A new edition of those parts of the Martiloge manuscript relating to the history of the
house is underway by Dr Claes Gejrot and Dr Virginia Bainbridge for the Henry Bradshaw
Society. I am indebted to Dr Gejrot for making available to me their preliminary transcrip-
tions. An important recent discussion of the book’s other contents is found in Gejrot, ‘The Syon
Martiloge’.
5
Usuard, Usuardi Martyrologium, ed. by Migne; Le Martyrologe d’Usuard, ed. by Dubois.
6
Wordsworth, The Old Service-Books of the English Church, pp. 145–51; Pfaff, The Liturgy
in Medieval England, pp. 437–42, discusses the new ‘Chichele’ feasts; pp. 529–39 discusses
Birgittine liturgy, including the Martiloge.
Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confirmanda est 135
additions by Syon hands of feasts and observances of particular significance for

the house, such as those associated with Birgitta and her daughter Katarina,
many feasts of virgin martyrs (which might particularly appeal to a foundation
of enclosed women), and also some entries reflecting new strands of English
spirituality (such as the recently established ‘solemn feast of the Name of
Jesus’).7 In addition there are interleaved pages bespoking the book for its use
in Syon’s liturgy, including preces in capitulo, notes about distinctive Birgittine
liturgical variations on certain major feast days, and some sheets of noted and
neumed prayers.8
Martyrologies are a class of books of notoriously variable contents.9 The
core of the Syon book is a collection of entries that could have been commer-
cially produced and acquired for the use of the house, as many of the fifteenth-
century innovations and additions are added or written over erasures in later
hands. But the later additions often try to counterfeit the main text hand, and
some entries of particular pertinence to Syon look original and appear to be
in the main text hand, most notably the entry for the ‘translacio sancte matris
nostre Birgitte’, and the book could just as easily have been produced in-house
or on commission, using the core of a standard local historical Martiloge collec-
tion. Robert Rook, vicar of St Laurence Jewry in London, who died in 1458,
gave to Syon ‘meum novum martilogium’ as part of a larger book, so there
could have been a locally inflected exemplar already to hand. 10 Syon enjoyed
the services of accomplished scribes (both among its own number and those of
the Sheen Carthusians), had access to professional book making skills, and it
had among the ranks of its own brethren liturgical experts such as the deacon
Clement Maidstone (d. c. 1456), who wrote successful guides to the Sarum rite
for the use of secular priests.11
But, whatever its origin, like most surviving English martyrologies, the Latin
Martiloge from Syon was frequently added to, adapted, and elaborated over the
years to reflect the particular interests and emphases of the Syon community.
7
Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England, especially pp. 62–83 (Name of Jesus).
8
The fullest description to date of this part of MS Additional 22285 is in Martiloge, ed.
by Procter, and Dewick, pp. xxvi–xxxii. The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey, ed. by Collins,
gives an overview of Birgittine liturgical books.
9
Cf. Dubois, Les Martyrologes du moyen âge latin.
10
See the note on his gifts to Syon in Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie, p. 586.
11
For recent bibliography, see Miles, ‘Scribes at Syon’; Whitwell, ‘An Ordinance for Syon
Library, 1482’; Erler, ‘Syon Abbey’s Care for Books’; The Tracts of Clement Maydeston, ed. by
Wordsworth; Ordinale Sarvm sive Directorivm sacerdotvm, ed. by Wordsworth.
The carefully calendared obit lists of members of the community and special
friends and benefactors, for example, which are of such interest and value for
the history of the house, would have been developed to allow the names entered
there to have been read at the end of the recitation of the main Martiloge text.
This list was kept up to date long after the suppression of the house in 1539,
when the book eventually passed into the possession of the nuns, who took
it with them on their travels as a portable archive of the house’s history and a
textual relic of a life and local habitation now irrevocably lost.
An unusual feature of the corporate life of the Birgittine brethren was the
requirement that they should follow the liturgical Use of their host diocese.
This inevitably created a clear distinction between their Office and that of
the sisters, to which so much attention and revelatory energy was devoted by
Birgitta and her interlocutors, divine and human.12 It also meant that the male
occupants of Birgittine houses across Europe followed different liturgical Uses.
This linkage to the host diocese reflects Birgitta’s wish that her priests should
follow a Dominican model of active ministry combined with a monastic model
of reclusion and contemplation.13 There were a number of circles to square in
this job description. In the later recensions of the Rule, the key chapter regu-
lating the brethren (chap. xiii) is headed: ‘De officio predicacionis et confes-
sionis fratrum sacerdotum’, which indicates the way that early leaders and leg-
islators of the order saw their primary functions in the spiritual economy of
the house.14 As Ingvar Fogelqvist has explored, the Birgittine brethren were
intended to have an apostolic role, working for the benefit of souls inside and
outside the community.15 But, although drawing on the fraternal model of the
Dominicans and the contemplative texture of Cistercian life, the institutional
life of the Birgittine brethren still had many undefined and unclear aspects,
especially in terms of the inevitable tensions within a mixed life of sacramental
12
Birgitta of Sweden, Opera minora, i: Regula Salvatoris [hereafter Regula Salvatoris],
chap. xii, p. 118: ‘qui cotidie de tempore missam et officium quod habetur in ecclesia cathedrali-
bus illarum terrarum in quibus huiusmodi monasteria sunt.’
13
The Regula Salvatoris invariably calls the brethren ‘sacerdoti’ or ‘fratres’, but there is
evidence that the early members of the order debated whether they were priests or monks:
Responsiones Vadstenenses, ed. by Andersson, pp. 76–77. In Andersson and Borgehammar, ‘The
Preaching of the Birgittine Friars at Vadstena Abbey’, it is noted that ‘like contemplative monks
they are to abstract themselves from all worldly tasks, but like mendicants or secular priests they
are to preach to the faithful’ (p. 211).
14
Regula Salvatoris, p. 161 (version Σ, in tertia persona); p. 198 (version Φ).
15
Fogelqvist, Apostasy and Reform in the Revelations of St. Birgitta, pp. 148–84.
ministry and contemplation. Preaching, confession, and the Eucharist are the
central areas of pastoral activity for the brethren, and the austerity and inten-
sity of their apostolic life was intended to be a key manifestation of Birgitta’s
model of a reformed clergy working in the wider Church. In Birgitta’s lifetime,
those calls for reform often struggled for a hearing in the clamour surrounding
institutional crises leading up to the Great Schism (1378–1417). But Syon’s
foundation in 1415 meant that it became bound up with the English Church’s
engaged and urgent desire for internal reform and renewed pastoral vigour,
under the leadership of Henry V (r. 1413–22) and his new archbishop Henry
Chichele (presided 1414–43). It also aligned the house with the reformist
pastoral emphases emerging from the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Constance
(1414–18), which in England at least seem to have had a galvanic effect on the
episcopacy. The bishops of this generation, many of them trained in Oxford in
the aftermath of Wyclif ’s teachings, responded energetically and in many cases
sympathetically to the critiques of the institutional Church initiated by Wyclif
and his academic colleagues. Syon was a key avatar of a new English Church,
reform minded and energetically pastoral, spiritually austere, and seeking to
recapture the zeal of the early apostolic fathers. Its brethren were to be the out-
ward facing manifestation of a new rigour, a new sense of purpose, and a new
commitment to gospel ideals.16
But, unlike the sisters who were gifted with detailed and highly idiolectal
instructions for their liturgical and communal life, Birgitta’s revelations and
Rule address the role of her order’s brethren in only tangential and elliptical
ways. The distinctive functions of the Syon brethren are described in the Regula
Salvatoris (which, typically of Birgittine legislation, gives far more space and
attention to the life of the sisters):
Thes thrittene preestis owe to entende oonly to dyuyne office and studie & prayer.
And implie them with none oþere nedes or offices. Whiche also are bounde to
expoune iche sonday the gospel of the same day in the same messe to all herers in
ther modir tounge.17
16
For new essays and a full bibliography on this period see After Arundel, ed. by Gillespie
and Ghosh, and discussion in Gillespie, ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’, and Gillespie, ‘The
Mole in the Vineyard’.
17
The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure and Other Middle English Brigittine Legislative Texts, ed.
by Hogg, ii (1978), 38 (a facsimile of Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.6.33,
fol. 57r); Regula Salvatoris, chap. 15, sect. 174, p. 121. For the passage in the Latin S-text, see
chap. 13, sect. 171 (Regula Salvatoris, pp. 161–62).
In pursuance of these duties, they are to be allowed access to books, ‘as many
as be necessary to doo dyvyne office and moo in no wyse’, and also to liturgi-
cal and academic books, ‘Thoo bookes they shalt haue as many as they wyll in
whiche ys to seruen or to studye’.18 These were to be scholar priests, pastoral
monks, monastic contemplatives, and contemplative preachers and confessors.
Humility, obedience, patience, and contempt for the world are to be the watch-
words of her brethren, as they are for the sisters. The stability, study, quality of
life, and teaching mission of the brethren are to be inextricably bound up with
their equal commitment to lives of meditative discipline and contemplative
aspiration. All this is to radiate from them in the public exercise of their sacra-
mental duties and above all in their preaching and work as confessors ab extra.
But although they were a fundamental part of Birgitta’s conception of her
order, the Birgittine brethren seem to have struggled to come to a satisfactory
definition of their role in the spiritual, pastoral, and domestic economies of their
houses. The potentially second-order status of the brethren is already there in
Christ’s opening injunction in the earliest reconstructable version (Π, in prima
persona) of the Regula Salvatoris: ‘Hanc igitur religionem ad honorem amantis-
sime Matris mee per mulieres primum et principaliter statuere volo’ (chap. 1).19
This is the version of the text preserved in Syon’s flagship collection of the
Revelationes (London, British Library, MS Harley 612). In one Middle English
version, almost certainly from the sisters’ side of the house, this becomes: ‘This
religion þerfore I wylle sette, ordeyne fyrst & principally by women to the wor-
shippe of my most dere beloued modir.’20 Interestingly, the posthumous revised
version of the Rule (version Σ, in tertia persona), incorporating Urban VI’s
December 1378 bull and the letter of Cardinal Elziarius, defers the comments
about the order’s distinctively feminine focus and begins instead with the stress
on humility, chastity, and voluntary poverty as the principles of this distinctive
18
The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure and Other Middle English Brigittine Legislative Texts, ed. by
Hogg, ii (1978), 49–50 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.6.33, fols 62v–63r).
For the Latin text (A-version), see chap. 21, sections 227–28: ‘Libri quoque, quotquot neces-
sarii fuerint ad divinum officium peragendum, habendi sunt, plures autem nullo modo. Illos
autem libros habeant, quotquot voluerint, in quibus addiscendum est vel studendum’ (Regula
Salvatoris, p. 127). The S-version, chap. 18, sects 227–28, is substantially the same (Regula
Salvatoris, pp. 204–05).
19
Regula Salvatoris, p. 105.
20
Hogg, ii (1978), 8 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.6.33, fol. 42 r). See also
The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure and a Ladder of Foure Ronges by the Which Men Mowe Clyme to
Heven, ed. by Hogg, p. 8 (a facsimile plus accompanying transcription).
Birgittine model of religious life.21 This recension was the one most widely used
at Syon for constitutional purposes and is more or less the version preserved in
the Middle English translation now in London, Guildhall Library, MS 25524,
written late in the fifteenth century by Thomas Betson, custos librarie of the
brethren.22 Perhaps over time there was a recognition at Syon that these differ-
ent versions of the Rule, though identical in fundamentals, could tactfully be
used to reflect the different vocations of the two houses.
So, while the official legislative line on the brethren’s life and work is clear
(if imprecise), it is much harder to deduce the tenor and texture of the daily life
of the brethren from the surviving evidence. This lack of explicit guidance may
have produced anxiety and tension among the brethren in the first half-cen-
tury of the order’s history. The Vadstena Liber usuum was clearly one response
to that perceived lack of direction among the Swedish brethren, though the
impetus for it seems not to have developed much before 1429, and it may have
been many years in the making.23 Liturgically, in any case, there was always an
uneasy tension between the desire to impose conformity within the order on
the model of the Vadstena brethren and the explicit requirement in the Rule
that the brethren should follow the Use of their home diocese. But the problem
was even more acute for the brethren of Syon, as various tranches of papal legis-
lation, most notably Martin V’s bull Mare Anglicanum of 1425, had established
the absolute and inviolable privilege of the English house to be independent of
oversight and control from elsewhere in the order.24
This did not, however, break off contact with the rest of the order: indeed
the Liber usuum allows Syon the unusual right to allow Birgittine visitors to stay
for up to six months rather than the two weeks that was considered acceptable
in other houses. Moreover we also have the invaluable series of responsiones pro-
duced at Vadstena in the 1420s to address a series of queries from Syon about
21
Regula Salvatoris, p. 146. The latest recension (version Φ) made between 1378 and
1433, reinstates the emphasis that the order was ‘per mulieres primo et principaliter’, Regula
Salvatoris, p. 180.
22
The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure and a Ladder of Foure Ronges by the Which Men Mowe
Clyme to Heven, ed. by Hogg, p. 83 (a facsimile plus accompanying transcription).
23
Liber usuum fratrum monasterii Vadstenensis, ed. by Risberg.
24
Tait, ‘The Brigittine Monastery of Syon’, discusses these issues with great insight and
finesse. All of us working on Syon are greatly in his debt. His thesis is now finally being revised
for publication. Tait does not think that Mare Anglicanum gave Syon special degrees of inde-
pendence from the rest of the order and from Vadstena, but, when added to English legislation
on alien priories, I think the case is clear.
the interpretation of the Rule and the texture and detail of the life.25 Most of
these probably correspond to the questions reportedly delivered to Vadstena
in 1427 by ‘duo fratres […] de Anglia petentes et reportantes raciones super
aliquibus punctis regule’.26 These were Robert Belle and Thomas Sterington,
who also took the opportunity to bring home a transcription of the Revelationes
and other Birgittine texts which served as the exemplar for Syon’s still surviv-
ing compendium MS Harley 612. Some of these questions reveal that the Syon
brethren were looking for guidance on aspects of their own life: ‘Utrum fratres
obligantur ad Ave Maria in fine horarum’ (Whether the brothers are obliged
to sing the Ave Maria at the end of hours); ‘Item numquid fratres licite habere
possunt ambitus seu claustrum in curia sua, sicut et sorores in monasterio suo,
cum dicat regula quod nulla superflue edificari debeant’ (Whether the broth-
ers lawfully may have cloisters or an enclosed area in their court, just like the
sisters in their monastery, even though the Rule says that no superfluous things
should be built); and the rather plaintive ‘Utrum fratres obligentur eciam ad
omnia que solum dicuntur de sororibus in regula’ (Whether the brothers are
obliged to follow everything that is mentioned in the Rule concerning the
sisters). Interestingly, Vadstena’s response to the last question is first to admit
that the issue ‘perplexa est’ and had been discussed at the general chapter of
the order, but then to cite Master Alfonso’s opinion that, unless specifically
excluded, the regulations for the sisters also bind the brothers. Such questions
were, of course, common currency in general chapters of many religious orders
(a particularly rich set survive in the cartae of the Carthusians). But, reading
these quaestiones, it is hard to escape the feeling that the brethren of Syon often
felt puzzled, underdirected, and perhaps even a little unloved by comparison
with their sisters for whom so much targeted advice had been supplied by the
founder and her entourage.
Like the brethren at Vadstena, the brothers of Syon seem to have had a
Liber usuum to guide and assist them in understanding of their distinctive
calling within the order, but it does not survive, and we know of it only by
passing references to it. They had had some help from the committee set up by
Henry V to draft the Additions to the Rule for both houses.27 But the surviv-
25
Responsiones Vadstenenses, ed. by Andersson, with quotations and translations below,
respectively from pp. 110, 164, and 114; Andersson, ‘Vadstena 1427’.
26
Diarium Vadstenense, ed. by Gejrot, p. 186.
27
Four versions survive of the Additions to the Rule for the English Syon: London, British
Library, MS Arundel 146 (in Middle English, for the sisters); London, Guildhall Library, MS
25524 (in Middle English, for the brethren); Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 11 (a fragmen-
ing Additions for the brethren are actually directed to the lay brethren more
than to the priests and deacons who formed the majority of the male house.
In most respects their life and their vocations remained a ‘hid diuinite’, and
this no doubt contributed to and fostered their reputation for sound doctrine
and holy living. Fortunately, some insights into the ambitious level of spiritual
aspiration which they set for themselves can be gleaned from the series of daily
lections found in the surviving Latin Martiloge of the Syon brethren.28
The evidence of the various historical additions and augmentations made at
Syon to this standard liturgical book shows that it was woven deeply into the
texture of the daily liturgical life of the brethren, combining pietas with frater-
nal pride, piety with historical positioning. The Martiloge became the written
manifestation of the house’s self-knowledge, a thesaurus of institutional mem-
ory, and an exemplar of institutional and spiritual idealisms. It is in this spirit
of exemplary lives, and of the challenge of living up to the ideals of faith and
founder, that somebody at Syon added, around the middle or third quarter of
the fifteenth century, an extensive year-long series of short lections designed
to be read aloud to the brethren each day alongside the Martiloge entries. The
margins of every page of the martyrology, covering the entire liturgical year
and spanning some 112 folios, have been filled by these sententiae and lectiones,
which are usually about three to five lines in extent. The lections are added by a
later and less-skilled hand than the scribe of the Martiloge itself. Although they
are keyed by letter to a particular day’s martyrology, they are often clumsily
squeezed into the top and bottom margins and frequently written over the pen
flourishing and decoration of the main para-liturgical work. They are a bespoke
addition to the book, expressing an in-house desire to augment the standard
martyrological text.
In keeping with the apostolic mission of Birgitta’s clerical reforms, and
reflecting the return to the ideals and emphases of the early Church found in
the English response to the Council of Constance, the lections address matters
of clerical idealism and priestly life. There is never any attribution of patris-
tic authorship in the body of the text: the lections do their work by their per-
tary Latin text for the brethren); and a post-medieval Latin version produced in Lisbon in 1607.
The first three are edited or reproduced by Hogg in The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure and Other
Middle English Brigittine Legislative Texts. For discussion, see Ellis, Viderunt eam filie syon,
chap. 3: ‘The Syon Additions’.
28
I have already referred to and quoted from these lections in several previous papers, most
notably Gillespie, ‘“Hid Divinite”: The Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren’. The discus-
sion here collects together, draws on, and further augments those earlier discussions.
tinence of their teaching rather than the authority of their source. Although
much work still remains to be done on them, I have indentified that they draw
on patristic sources, such as the De cura pastorali and the Moralia on Job of
Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), the letters of Jerome (c. 342–420), and par-
ticularly on the Sententiae of Isidore of Seville (d. 636). 29 The lections are
rarely more than two or three sentences long, offering short, often aphoristic
exhortations to remind the brethren of the significance of their task and the
severity of their vocation. They may have been drawn from the originalia (all
of which are attested in the great library collection of the Syon brethren) or
perhaps filtered through earlier intermediate collections of sententiae, such as
those of Taio Caesaraugustanus, bishop of Zaragoza from 651 to 683, or the
Forma institutionis canonicorum pseudonymously attributed to Amalarius of
Metz (c. 780 to 853).30 Both of these collections have a high degree of over-
lap with the Martiloge lections. There is, however, no trace of either of these
works in the registrum of the brethren’s library, and they are rarely (if at all)
attested in other British medieval library catalogues.31 Some passages also
occur in contemporary compilations, like the early fifteenth-century Speculum
spiritualium (composed in neighbouring Sheen Charterhouse and found in the
Syon library), and in older monastic florilegia, like the Deflorationes patrum of
Werner von Ellenbach (d. 1126); but the overlap does not appear sufficient for
them to be the primary source and probably reflects the commonplace status
achieved by many of the sententiae.32 Another possible source is one of the sen-
tential anthologies of Julian of Toledo, who drew on many of these texts in his
own compilations.33 The chances are that the compiler of the Martiloge lections
either used the originalia or some other (as yet unidentified) intermediary flori-
legium, and there are several candidates described in the registrum of the breth-
29
For example, see Isidore of Seville, Sententiae, ed. by Cazier.
30
This section draws directly on the discussion in Gillespie, ‘“Hid Divinite”: The
Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren’. For further analysis of these sources, and references
to their presence in the registrum of the brethren’s library, see notes 28–32 there. For the text of
the sentences of Taio Caesaraugustanus, see PL 80, cols 727–990; for the Forma attributed to
Amalarius of Metz, see PL 105, cols 815–934.
31
For a conspectus of the holdings in the volumes so far published in the Corpus of British
Medieval Library Catalogues, see ‘List of Identifications’, available at <http://archive.modhist.
ox.ac.uk/sharpe/list.pdf> [accessed 13 April 2013].
32
Speculum spiritualium (Paris: Wolfgang Hopyl, 1510); Werner von Ellenbach,
Deflorationes patrum, PL 157, cols 721–1256.
33
Julian of Toledo, Sancti Iuliani Toletanae sedis episcopi Opera, ed. by Hillgarth. None of
his works is attested in the Syon collection, however.
ren’s library. A good example of the kind of florilegial collection on the priestly
Office that might have supplied the lections is in i, 27 (SS1. 583b: ‘De dictis
Augustini, Ieronimi & aliorum de dignitate sacerdotum & et de aliis ad sacer-
dotes pertinentibus’), which is preceded (SS1.583a) by Chapter 139 of John of
Mirfield’s Florarium Bartholomei on ‘De sacerdotibus’.34
The lections are grouped together thematically and are unrelated to the day’s
martyrological information.35 Sound doctrine and good living are inextricably
linked together in these texts, and the lections set exceptionally high standards
for clerical behaviour. They discuss topics such: as the duties of a bishop; the
duties of a rector; the role and duties of a preacher; sound teaching and her-
esy; clerical poverty, common ownership, and handling money; dealing with
(or, more accurately, avoiding) women; sin, guilt, and confession; prayer and
contemplation; virtues, temptations, and tribulations; good judges; almsgiv-
ing; and preparation for death. The lections open with discussions of the cleri-
cal tonsure (a bodily sign of spiritual repentance and aspiration) and the his-
tory and role of the orders of deacons, priests, and bishops. They stress that
the priestly calling is a high vocation only to be approached with humility and
following careful self-analysis. This perhaps reflects the importance attached to
the year of proof required of all Birgittines, though by the time of their profes-
sion many of the brethren were already priests with significant experience in
parish life or academic life. It certainly reflects the aspiration and ambition of
the orthodox reformers under Chichele and later to improve and enhance the
quality and status of English clerical life:
Qui regimen sacerdotii contendit appetere ante in se discutiat si vita sit honori
congrua. Quod si non discrepat humiliter ad id quod vocatus est accedat. Reatum
quippe culpe geminat qui cum culpa ad sacerdotale culmen aspirat. (fol. 88v, from
Isidore, Sententiae; also in Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum)
(Whoever desires to aspire to the priestly rule, first let him examine whether his life
is fit for the honour. If it be not discordant, let him humbly approach towards his
vocation. Certainly the guilt of the offence is doubled if he aspires to the priestly
summit in a blameworthy state.)
34
Johannes De Mirfield of St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, ed. by Hartley and Aldridge.
References are to the alphabetical pressmarks in the Syon registrum and the numerical entries
in my edition.
35
An edition of these lections is greatly to be desired, alongside a full analysis of their
sources and derivations. The samples that are quoted in the body of this essay are often extracts
from longer clusters of sententiae, and are grouped together to illustrate the thematic emphases
and interests of their compiler.
Passages that might not initially seem relevant to the needs or interests of the
Syon brethren (such as those defining a good and holy bishop) are made to apply
to the circumstances of the house and of the brethren’s duties. So, for example,
the lection that a bishop must be just and holy so that he may dispense justice
to the people he leads, giving to each what he deserves (fol. 97v), might be made
to refer either to the role of the confessor-general or to the penitential functions
of the brethren themselves, and the Vadstena brethren at least had the status
of minor penitentiaries, allowing them to absolve some classes of reserved sins
denied to ordinary parish clergy and reserved to bishops.36 A recurrent emphasis
throughout the year’s worth of readings is the need to match words with deeds:
‘tam doctrina quam uita’ (fol. 93r: as the teaching, so the life) and of living what
is taught: ‘Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confirmanda est ita ut quod docet
verbo instruat exemplo’ (fol. 93v: The preaching of the priest is to be confirmed
by [his] works so that what he teaches by word he may demonstrate by example).
‘Arcus perversus est lingua docentium bene et viventium male. Et ideo quasi ex
perverso arcu sagittam emittunt, dum suam pravam vitam proprie lingue ictu
confodiunt’ (fol. 106v, from Isidore, Sententiae; also in Amalarius, Forma insiti-
tutionis canonicorum: Teaching well with the tongue and living badly is a warped
bow, and as with those who shoot an arrow from a warped bow, so those of
depraved life inflict wounds on themselves with their own tongue). ‘Qui bene
docet et male vivit tanquam es et cymbalum sonum […]. Qui bene docet et male
vivit; quod docet bene viventibus proficit, quod vero male vivit, seipsum occidit’
(fol. 107r, from Isidore, Sententiae: He who teaches well and lives badly is like
the sound of brass or a cymbal […]. For him who teaches well and lives badly, his
good teaching will be of profit to the living and by his bad living he will kill him-
self ). Money should never be taken for the exercise of priestly duties, because the
riches of the house are the chastity, justice, piety, humility, mildness, innocence,
purity, prudence, temperance, and charity of its members (fol. 118r). (This last
point echoes the assertion in the Regula Salvatoris that study, prayer and the
praise of God represent the abbey’s gold and silver.) The cultivation of humil-
ity and the avoidance of spiritual and intellectual pride are frequently empha-
sised. Integrity is all: ‘Sacerdotis Christi os cum mente concordet’ (fol. 109 v:
Let the mouth of Christ’s priest agree with his mind or Let the mouth of the
priest accord with the mind of Christ). ‘In rectore debet esse virtus humilitatis’
(fol. 98r: The virtue of humility ought to be in a leader).
36
On the Vadstena’s brethren’s penitential powers, see Liber privilegiorum Monasterii
Vadstenensis, ed. by Nygren, p. 236. They are also mentioned in Responsiones Vadstenenses, ed. by
Andersson, pp. 180 and following.
A substantial number of entries in the Martiloge lections relate to preach-

ing, a key activity of the brethren. As the pioneering work of Susan Powell has
shown, in addition to regular dominical and festal preaching, major opportu-
nities for preaching to the laity at Syon arose on those special days associated
with the various indulgences granted to those who attended the house and in
particular with the popular and generous Ad vincula indulgence.37 The pilgrim
crowds offered a large potential audience. Apart from occasional (and specially
sanctioned) spiritual guidance to high-born women (such as Margaret, duchess
of Clarence) and probably to postulants to the sisters, preaching and confession
were the main activities that would have brought the Syon brethren into public
view.38 A series of specific questions about preaching in the responsiones suggest
that Syon was keen to get this part of their vocation right.39 The Martiloge lec-
tions express a high-minded patristic evangelicalism that underlines Birgitta’s
own decided views on how her brethren should preach:
Sermo sacerdotis debet esse purus, simplex et apertus, tractans de misterio legis,
de doctrina fidei, de uirtute continentie, de disciplina iustitie, plenis grauitate et
honestate, plenus suauitate et gracia. (fol. 78v, from Isidore, De ecclesiasticis officiis;
also in Ps. Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum)
(The sermon of the priest must be pure, simple and open, dealing with the mystery
of the Law, the teaching of the Faith, the virtue of restraint, the rule of justice, full
of gravity and honesty, full of sweetness and grace.)
Teaching must be carefully targeted at the needs and abilities of the audience:
Prima prudentie uirtus est eam quam docere oporteat existimare personam. Rudi-
bus populis seu carnalibus plana atque communia non summa atque ardua predi-
canda sunt ne immensitate doctrina opprimantur potius. quam erudiantur. (fol. 99r,
from Isidore Sententiae, also in Ps. Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum)
(The first feature of Prudence is to assess the character of those who are to be
instructed. For simple and worldly people, those things to be preached must be
37
Powell, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’; Three Sermons for Nova Festa, ed. by Powell; Powell,
‘Cox MS 39: A Rare Survival of Sermons Preached at Syon Abbey?’; Powell, ‘Syon, Caxton
and the Festial’, which discusses Syon’s possible involvement with printed sermons. Tait, ‘The
Brigittine Monastery of Syon’, p. 214, notes that Bonde, Fewterer, and Reynolds all served as
university preachers at Cambridge before joining the order. See also the essay by Kari Anne
Rand in the current volume on Syon ad vincula preaching.
38
Keiser, ‘Patronage and Piety in Fifteenth-Century England’.
39
Responsiones Vadstenenses, ed. by Andersson, pp. 148–53.
plain and commonplace, not elevated or hard, nor should they be weighted down
with greater instruction than they can assimilate.)
Pro qualitate audientium formari debet sermo doctor. Vt et ad sua singulis con-
gruat et tamen a communis edificacionis arte numquam recedat. (fol. 99v, from
Bede on Matthew; also in Taio Caesaraugustanus, Sententiae)
(The sermon of the teacher ought to be shaped for the status and ability of his
hearers so that it communicates with each one individually and nevertheless never
withdraws through artifice from the edification of the people in common.)
Cum rector se ad loquendum preparat sub quanto cautele studio loquatur attendat.
Ne si inordinate ad loquendum rapitur, erroris vulnere audientium corda feriantur.
(fol. 100r, from Gregory, De cura pastorali, also in Taio Caesaraugustanus, Senten-
tiae and Ps. Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum, and in Gratian)
(When the rector prepares himself to speak, with what care he must attend to the
study of what he is to say. Let him not hastily rush into speaking, lest the hearts of
those listening be struck with the wound of error.)
Some of the entries on the priestly preaching are hard hitting, reforming in their
zeal, and perhaps surprising to find in the context of an enclosed religious order:
Sacerdos semper vocem predicacionis habeat ne superne expectacionis iudicium:
silentio offendat. Sacerdos enim in tabernaculum ingrediens moritur si de eo soni-
tus non auditur. Quia iram contra se occulti iudicis erigit si sine predicacionis
sonitu incedit. (fol. 100v, from Gregory, De cura pastorali, also in Taio Caesarau-
gustanus, Sententiae and Ps. Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum, and in
Gratian)
(Let the priest always have a preaching voice, lest his silence offend the waiting
judgement from above. For a priest entering into the sanctuary dies if no sound is
heard from him. Because the wrath of the hidden judge will be raised against him
if he proceeds without the sound of preaching.)
Perhaps accidentally (and perhaps not) Christ’s injunctions to Birgitta are

close to the kinds of arguments against ‘modern’ sermons and over-scholastic
preaching being made in England by clerical reformers like Thomas Gascoigne,
sometime and serial chancellor of Oxford University (Gascoigne was a notably
knowledgeable enthusiast for Syon and things Birgittine, and a donor of books
to the house), and Richard Flemyng (bishop of Lincoln from 1420 to 1431) in
the 1420s and 1430s. Birgittine preaching theory and English preaching prac-
tice may have been on a converging trajectory in the first half of the fifteenth
century. The public preaching duties of the Syon brethren fit perfectly within
the orthodox, high-minded ideals being articulated for the English clergy in
the conciliar period when ‘properly trained preachers of undoubted orthodoxy
were encouraged and promoted by reforming bishops’. 40 It is not accidental
that in the 1530s Thomas Cromwell was wary of the power of the preachers of
Syon to foment resistance to the Act of Supremacy (1534) and the King’s Great
Matter concerning his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to
Anne Boleyn.41
As preparation for preaching and teaching, particular stress is placed in
the Martiloge lections on the importance of reading and study, because, it is
asserted, no one who is unfamiliar with the reading of scripture will be able
to access the sense of it (fol. 149v): ‘Pastorum imperitia voce veritatis increpa-
tur’ (fol. 85v, from Gregory’s, De cura pastorali: The ignorance of the pastors is
rebuked by the voice of truth). Just as evil men and sinners are prohibited from
priestly functions, so also the uneducated and unskilled are held back from this
office. The former will corrupt good lives by their bad example; the latter will
not know how to correct evil men because of their ignorance (fol. 89v). Priests
should read the holy scriptures often, pray frequently, exercise their mind
towards God, fast and keep vigils (fol. 112r):
Tu quidem diuinas scripturas sepius lege, immo nunquam de manibus tuis sacra lec-
tio deponatur. Disce quod doceas. Obtine eum qui secundum doctrinam est fidelem
sermonem ut possis exhortari in doctrina sana et contradicentes revincere. (fol. 109v,
from Jerome’s Letters; also in Ps. Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum)
(Indeed you must read the sacred scriptures again and again, or rather never let the
holy reading be put aside from your hands. Understand what you teach. Seize those
words which are faithful to doctrine so that you may exhort in sound teaching and
subdue those who argue against it.)
40
Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, p. 255, and see similar comments
at pp. 240 and 259; Gascoigne, Loci e libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 34–35. Gascoigne is an
invaluable witness to the tenor of conservative reform in the first half of the fifteenth century.
His comments on the causes of heresy, contemporary preaching, and priestly life are fascinat-
ingly blunt: cf. pp. 28, 31, 183, 188–91. His text (perhaps a sermon) on Super flumina babilonis
(pp. 53 and following) is a jeremiad on the state of the contemporary Church. See also Bose,
‘Complaint, Prophecy and Pastoral Care in the Fifteenth Century’. On the fifteenth-century
debates about sermon form, see Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages; Wenzel,
Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England.
41
For discussion, see Gillespie, ‘“Hid Divinite’: The Spirituality of the English Syon
Brethren’, and references there.
Those who have the skill of understanding but fail to study with due engage-
ment will stand condemned (fol. 150r). Learning without grace will fill the ears
but never the heart, and those who acquire knowledge of the scriptures only
for the sake of the praise it will bring them, rather than for the glory of God,
will never touch the hidden truths, which will remain behind a cloud of pride
(fol. 151v). Because holy books are written in simple words, human eloquence
and dialectical sharpness should be avoided: ‘In leccione non verba sed veritas
est amanda’ (fol. 155v, from Isidore, Sententiae: It is Truth that is to be loved
in reading not words). For similar reasons, the studies of priests need to be
supervised and counterfeit teachings must be examined and corrected to avoid
a collocation of sins that would harm the just (fol. 168v). The proud will read
and search but will never find: only the humble will be admitted. Divine elo-
quence will never be revealed to the arrogant but will remain closed and hidden
‘in misterio’ (fol. 152v).
As the Syon brethren were contemplatives with some aspects of active min-
istry, the lections emphasize the need for reflection and contemplation as much
as study and reading:
Cecus pastor est qui superne lumen contemplacionis ignorat […]. Claudus rector
est qui quidem quo pergere aspicit sed per infirmitatem mentis vite viam perfecte
non tenere quam videt. (fol. 105r, from Taio Caesaraugustanus, Sententiae or Ps.
Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum, often attributed to Gregory)
(It is a blind pastor who ignores the light of contemplation from above […]. It is
a crippled rector who indeed catches sight of where to proceed but because of an
infirm mind does not keep to the way of perfect life which he sees.)
Naturally, prayer is the desired outcome of reading and study, and both are of
central importance in the monastic form of living implied in these lections:
Orationibus mundamur; leccionibus instruimur. Utrumque bonum est si liceat;
si non liceat melius orare quam legere. Qui vult cum deo semper esse frequenter
debet orare frequenter et legere. Nam cum oramus ipsi cum deo loquimur cum
vero legimus deus nobiscum loquitur. (fol. 149r, from Isidore, Sententiae, also in
Speculum spiritualium)
(Let us be cleansed by prayer, instructed by reading. Either is good if permitted; if

not permitted, it is better to pray than to read. He who wishes to be always with
God must frequently pray and also frequently read. For when we pray we speak to
God, but when we read God speaks to us.)
Prayer should be from the heart and not from the lips. It is better to pray silently
with the heart and without the sound of the voice (it is not clear how this would
have squared with the onerous obligations to liturgical prayer that both houses
at Syon sustained). We pray truly when we think of no other things, but there
are very few who possess such prayer. Our mind is celestial, and we can contem-
plate God only when our prayer is hindered by no earthly cares or errors. The
mind must be purged of all temporal things so that the clean and sharp point of
the heart may be directed towards God (fol. 145r).
Despite this contemplative orientation, the lections suggest that the life at
Syon is also to be an active and energetic monasticism with no time for leisure,
vain words, or other distractions. Perhaps because of the active ministry of the
brethren as preachers, the lections emphasize the essential contrast between
the active and contemplative lives, but, despite their public ministry, the pas-
sages selected suggest that the Syon brethren should regard themselves above
all as contemplatives rather than as exercising some kind of ‘mixed life’. Active
life consists in good works and pertains to the common multitude of people.
Contemplative life consists in gazing at the things above and pertains to very
few. Active life consists in using the things of the world well, contemplative life
in renouncing them to live solely in the worship and delight of God (fol. 155v).
A lection that reflects the instructions in the Regula Salvatoris insists that the
brothers must always be engaged in prayer or reading or other matters pertain-
ing to the needs of the Church, and should become erudite in ‘doctrinis sanis
[…] et diversarum artium disciplinis’ (sound teachings […] and training in vari-
ous arts) so that no one in the house may be considered to be idle or useless
(fol. 125v). Life in the monastery is to be lived in search of perfection and in a
state of purity and integrity, so that the priest may approach the altar like a vir-
gin to her bridal chamber, and the life of the community should be conducted
with an eye to the opinion and witness of those outside the house:
Ita ergo age et vive in monasterio vt clericus esse merearis, ut adolescentiam tuam
nulla sorde commacules, ut ad altare Christi quasi de thalamo virgo procedas et
habens de foris bonum testimonium. (fol. 113v, from Letters of Isidore and Jerome,
also in Ps. Amalarius, Forma insititutionis canonicorum)
(Therefore behave and live in the monastery so that you may be worthy to be a
cleric, so that you do not stain your youth with anything sordid, so that you may
proceed to the altar of Christ like a virgin to her bridal bed, and having the good
opinion of those outside the house.)
These Martiloge readings offer a conspectus of the concerns facing the fifteenth-
century Syon brethren and the pastoral and theological issues and emphases
that their compiler thought needed to be reinforced and addressed. They sug-
gest that, certainly by the middle of the century and probably before, Syon
was seeking to exercise a high-minded and idealistic model of priesthood that

stressed the importance of the lived example of priests reinforcing their teach-
ing; that valued and encouraged scholarship alongside prayer and contempla-
tion; that was fully aware of the dangers of heresy but had learned some of the
lessons of the Wyclifisti and their critiques of priesthood and monastic life.
The surviving Syon Martiloge incidentally highlights one of the liturgical
anomalies of the Birgittine life as lived by the brethren. The Rule specified that
the brethren should follow the Use of their host diocese. In Syon’s case, this was
the diocese of London. But, at the time of the first professions in 1420, London
had recently adopted the Use of Sarum, as part of Archbishop Henry Chichele’s
reform of liturgical and spiritual life in the province of Canterbury in the years
around and immediately after the ecumenical Council of Constance. So the
Syon brethren would have been expected to follow the Sarum Use. Indeed, one
of the Vadstena responsiones, answering a question about whether the brethren
‘are obliged to follow the cathedral church when it comes to the divine office,
and to observe feasts, ceremonies and customs that the same cathedral church
observes’, replies that
fratres recipiant de ecclesia cathedrali antiphonarium, legendarium, psalterium,
ympnarium, graduale et cetera substancialia.42
(from the cathedral church, the brothers are to receive a book of antiphons, a col-
lection of legends, a Psalter, a collection of hymns, a Gradual and other material
things.)
Another quaestio, concerning which pre-Communion litany should be recited,

receives a similarly localizing response:
Non potest uniformis esse propter diversos patronos regnorum. Ideo quodlibet
monasterium sequatur in hoc consuetudinem matricis ecclesie.43
(This cannot always be the same, since our countries have different patrons. There-
fore every monastery should follow the custom of their cathedral church in this
matter.)
The standard pattern of collegiate and corporate life as envisaged by the Sarum
rite is that the daily reading from the martyrology would take place as part
of the Office of the Chapter, which followed immediately after the conclu-
42
Responsiones Vadstenenses, ed. by Andersson, p. 138.
43
sion or as the second part of the Office of Prime, traditionally the first Office
of the day celebrated at about 6.00 a.m. The Sarum pattern was introduced
into the liturgical observances of some secular colleges founded during the
fifteenth century, where readings took place after Prime ‘in the manner of
Salisbury’.44 The martyrology reading would therefore play a part in shaping
the day’s spiritual agenda, offering reminders of saints, martyrs, and deceased
members of the community as exemplars and exhortations for the challenges
of the new day, even though the actual feasts were to be observed the following
day. (Whitford’s printed translation of what may have been the nuns’ martiloge
prefaces each dated entry with the heading ‘¶To morowe’. Although this indi-
cation is not found in the body of the brethren’s Latin Martiloge, this proleptic
reading, common in monastic Uses, is likely to be a reflection of Syon practice.)
However, although this Sarum link may explain why Syon acquired or had
made what may have been a pretty standard English collection of martyrology
entries, the Vadstena responsiones specifically allow the brethren to deviate from
the liturgical ordo of the host diocese in some respects:
Ad observacionem autem processionum anniversariorum et celebraciones diversa-
rum missarum fratres non tenentur.45
(The brothers are not obliged to observe the processions, the anniversaries and the
celebrations of different masses.)
The Syon Martiloge adds many feasts and memorials that are distinctive to the
house as well as reflecting new strands in contemporary liturgical piety. So the
Sarum way need not have been the pattern universally followed at Syon. On
fol. 13r of the Syon Martiloge there is a section headed ‘Modus legendi mar-
tilogium’ and the instruction ‘Martilogium legatur post de profundis cotidie
exceptis duobus diebus ante pascha et die pentecostes’. What does this mean?
The answer is not altogether straightforward, and not necessarily consistent
between the brethren and the sisters. In addition to the Sarum pattern of read-
ing the Martiloge after Prime, there are three other possible occasions when the
Martiloge and its lections might have been read at Syon.
By far the most likely occasion is after the paraliturgical Office of De pro-
fundis. This distinctively Birgittine service took place after the Office of Terce,
when the community processed to the open grave kept in the monastery for a
44
This was the case at St Gregory’s College, Sudbury, and Holy Trinity and All Saints
Arundel, see The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, ed. by Willoughby (forthcoming).
45
memento mori series of prayers and reflections. The sisters’ version of this ser-
vice is recorded in the Regula Salvatoris:
þat a pitte owȝt alle wey to be opyn in þe monastery and a bere tofore þe
entre of þe chirch into þe cloyster. Svche a pytte at lykenesse of a grave must be
hadde in the monastery in dewe place iche day opyn, to which aftir tyerys euery
day festful and ferial þe susteryn must go oute. And þe abbes castyng oute a litel
erthe of the pytte with two fingeris; they must sey this psalme De profundis with
a colete.46
As usual the Rule only refers to the practice of the sisters, and there is no
explicit statement that the brothers are also to keep this observance. Similarly,
the Syon Additions for the sisters give explicit instructions on the De profundis
Office and link it to the reading of the Martiloge of the sisters: ‘The houre of
teer ended, þei schal make ther inclynacions, and go in procession wyse to the
graue’.47 The Additions report that the abbess should sprinkle earth onto the
grave while the community recites chorically the De profundis:
After thys þe abbes schal say: Benedicite. The couente schal answer: Dominus. And
than þe chauntres schal rede the obites, yf ther be any in the martilage on the morne
[…]. And than silence is lowsed. (chap. XX)
The nuns’ breviary also refers to this service after Terce, 48 and key aspects of
the ordo are confirmed by the gloss on the Office of the sisters found in The
Myroure of Oure Ladye:
[E]che day after tyerce ye go to thys graue to brynge your dethe and youre dome to
mynde or ye begynne to speke or to be occupyed aboute eny other thynge that ye
shulde nothynge say ne do all the day after but as ye dare dye anon therwyth and
appere before oure lordes dome […]. For thoughe your contyneuall scylence be in
maner ended when oure ladyes masse ys done, yet the place that ye ar in, that ys the
quyer causyth yt to be contynued til this tyme that ye shulde begyn in goddes name
and so warely kepe you all the day after vnder hys drede as ye be alwaye redy to go
to youre graue.49
46
by Hogg, ii (1978), chap. 24, p. 57; chap. 27 or 28 in some Latin recensions, Regula Salvatoris,
pp. 132; 171–72; 209–10.
47
Hogg, iv (1980), 114–15.
48
The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey, ed. by Collins, pp. 26–27.
49
The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt, pp. 142–43.
Both these accounts offer useful insights into the nature of this service. In
particular they stress that the recitation of the De profundis and readings of
the obits marked the end of the Great Silence and the beginning of the new
day’s work. Moreover, the remembrance of death and judgment that character-
izes the service makes an appropriate context in which the martyrology might
be read, and the obits of fellow nuns recalled. The Syon additions for the lay
brethren make no substantial mention of a similar service for the brethren after
Terce, though prescriptions for most other aspects of the liturgy of the breth-
ren are covered by them. And of course there is no gloss on the brethren’s Office
comparable to The Myroure of Oure Ladye. There is, however, a tantalizing and
fleeting reference in the injunctions to the lay brethren concerning preparations
for the profession of the proctors and focaries. At the beginning of the breth-
ren’s hour of Terce, the lay brothers are instructed to perform various func-
tions relating to bells and candles in readiness for the Lady Mass and Mass of
Profession: ‘Thys done, and the martilage with preciosa endyd,’ instructions are
then given for a solemn procession.50 This implies that on such special days of
solemn profession at least, the brethren’s martiloge was indeed read after Terce.
Puzzlement about discrepant cases like this may have provoked the ques-
tions from Syon to Vadstena about local observances. But elliptical comments
in the responsiones suggest that the De profundis service was indeed intended
to be observed by the brethren as well as the sisters. One of the responsiones
(160) asks if another sister or brother can substitute for the abbess or confes-
sor-general at ‘De profundis post terciam’.51 Another comments that ‘feretrum
continue stat circa ostium, ubi sit ingressus fratrum in monasterium suum’ (a
bier is constantly placed next to the door where the brothers’ entrance to the
monastery is), suggesting that the De profundis service would have been possi-
ble to perform inside the brethren’s enclosure.52 This implies that it was practice
for it to be observed by the brethren and the sisters in both Vadstena and Syon,
even though not explicitly legislated for in the case of the brethren.
However, there are also indications that the sisters may have heard readings
from their martyrology at other occasions in the day. Most notably, the colla-
50
by Hogg, iii (1980), 132. ‘Preciosa est in conspectu domini mors sanctorum eius’ (Precious in
the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints) is the opening versicle of the preces in capitulo on
fol. 188v of the Latin Martiloge, and comes from Psalm 115. 15. Its pertinence to the martyrol-
ogy that had just been read is obvious.
51
Responsiones Vadstenenses, ed. by Andersson, pp. 186–87.
52
tion in the chapter house that preceded the final service of Compline was an
opportunity, according to the Syon Additions, for the abbess to announce the
death of ‘any brother or suster of the chapter late passed to god’. This is followed
by the recitation of the De profundis, ‘and than the legister schal rede what
someuer the abbes assygneth, after the forme expressyd in the seyd chapter.’53
This too is helpfully glossed in The Myroure of Oure Ladye:
Before Complyn ye haue a collacion where ys rede some spyrytual matter of gostly
edyfycacion to helpe to gather togyther the scaterynges of the mynde from all out-
eewarde thynges […]. And before complyn ye arraye you wyth deuoute herynge of
holy doctryne at youre collacion.54
Although not specifying the martyrology, the Myroure links these last readings
with the impending night-time silence, as good material for nocturnal reflec-
tion. As the final communal act before the end of the monastic day, this too
might have provided a convenient occasion for reading aloud materials such as
those added to the Martiloge of the Syon brethren. So it seems that the sisters
could have read from their own martyrology after Terce and at their collation.
Both have their attractions: the first starts the day with a reminder of transience
and of the example of the clouds of witnesses who have preceded the commu-
nity in death; the last encourages reflection during the Great Silence, encour-
aging them (in a phrase from the old penny catechism) to occupy their minds
with thoughts of death.
But the extent to which it is safe to extrapolate the Office of the breth-
ren from that of the sisters is unclear. Apart from the fleeting reference in the
Additions for the lay brethren, Syon sources offer very little in the way of help
or illumination about when the brethren’s Martiloge might have been read and
therefore when the appended lections would have been delivered to the com-
munity. Sarum practice might encourage us to favour Prime as the most likely
occasion, especially as many brethren joined Syon after clerical and monastic
lives elsewhere, and might have been familiar with the standard Sarum format.
Sarum service books often refer to the reading of the martyrology as taking
place ‘in capitulo’, after the clergy have processed from abbey or minster fol-
lowing the completion of Prime.55 The preces in capitulo in the Syon brethren’s
53
Hogg, iv (1980), 121–22.
54
The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt, pp. 165–66.
55
There is, in fact, remarkably little evidence for how this Sarum service in capitulo was
Martiloge might support the idea that their practice was still close to that of
the Sarum norm, albeit perhaps shifted from Prime to Terce if they observed a
version of the De profundis service in their own customs. The brethren also met
in formal chapter once a week, so these prayers could also have been designed
for use on that occasion, though their physical placement within the text of the
Martiloge makes this unlikely. Unlike the nuns, there is no clear evidence of a
collation for the brethren before their service of Compline: Syon brethren were
expected to study and read as part of their vocation, and so the provision of
improving readings as supplied for the sisters on this occasion must have been
less urgent, though readings still took place at mealtimes.56
Even within the main tradition of the Sarum rite, there are very few descrip-
tions of what such a Martiloge reading might consist. A fifteenth-century
Sarum portiforium from Norwich Cathedral reports a sequence of readings and
prayers for the dead, beginning with the martyrology proper, bracketed by the
common liturgical versicle Iube domine benedicere and Tu autem. Towards the
end of the service, provision is made for the reading of other improving mate-
rials: ‘Hiis itaque peractis puer lector legat aliam leccionem de omeliis et de
libro theologorum quam cum Iube domine incipiat et eandem Tu autem termi-
nat’ (These things being finished, the boy reader reads another reading from
homilies and from books of theologians, which he begins with ‘O Lord, grant’
and then ends with ‘Thou also’).57 A similar pattern is reported in a martyr-
ology from Exeter.58 It is, therefore, liturgically significant that quite a few of
the added lections in the Syon Martiloge themselves end with the phrase Tu
autem. Whereas I have (erroneously) suggested elsewhere that this phrase was
intended to encourage the brethren to apply the lections to their own circum-
stances, it now seems certain that Tu autem is in fact the liturgical cue for the
end of that phase of the service (‘Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis’).
The liturgical usages of the Syon brethren were, of course, unique in the
order: their customs and customaries remain very hard to reconstruct. Practice
at Vadstena as reported in the Liber usuum only seems to add further confu-
performed. The Use of Sarum, ed. by Frere, i, 217–19, reports a very thinly witnessed rubric De
modo leccionem de martilogio, but this relates only to ways of announcing the date.
56
Evidence for Sarum practice regarding Collation is also muddled: The Use of Sarum, ed.
by Frere, i, 214–16, prints an Ordo ad collacionem faciendam, but it is not widely attested. See
the variants available at Sarum Customary Online <www.sarumcustomary.org.uk> [accessed 15
May 2013].
57
Transcribed in Martiloge, ed. by Procter, and Dewick, pp. xxxliii–xxxv.
58
Wordsworth, The Old Service-Books of the English Church, pp. 147–49.
sion to the story: this suggests that Iube domine (the liturgical cue linked to
the Sarum martyrology) was also widely used at Vadstena at mealtimes (it was
a commonly used versicle), and that, to further complicate the issue, the De
profundis was also recited around mealtimes by the brethren of Vadstena. In
Chapter 36, the end of meal prayers in the church included the De profundis,
after which the brethren professed solemnly to the ‘auditorium’ (perhaps, given
the post-prandial setting, the parlour or calefactory, rather than the chapter
house as suggested by Risberg). Chapter 37, which reports the readings to be
delivered in refectory, includes an extensive cursus of scriptural texts and com-
mentaries, readings and defences of the revelations of Birgitta;
et hiis finitis legantur Vitas patrum, passiones et miracula sanctorum seu exposi-
ciones simboli et exposiciones preceptorum seu alia edificatoria ad beneplacitum
confessoris fratrum.59
(And, these being finished, let the Lives of the Fathers, passions and miracles of the
saints, or expositions of the Creeds and Commandments be read, or other edifying
things pleasing to the confessor-general.)
If the same practice obtained at Syon, the Martiloge and its added lections
might well have served this purpose. Indeed the book may have been a fre-
quently read and often referred to compendium of the brethren’s history as well
as a source of much inspiration and aspiration for their work.
On balance, however, it is probable that the brethren’s Martiloge and its
accompanying lectiones were either read after Prime in the Sarum fashion or, in
my opinion, much more probably used at the service in capitulo that followed on
from Terce and the De profundis service round the bier. Whenever it was used,
the added lections gave an extra vector of hortatory utility to the collection of
pious names and gruesome deaths that constitute the standard martyrology. It
transformed it into an embodiment of the values and ideals of the order, a sort
of mission statement and war cry for the daily work of the male community.
The ‘preachers of Syon’ were always being kept up to the mark of their demand-
ing vocation as well as to the high ideals and idiolectal liturgical innovations of
their founder: their surviving Martiloge is an eloquent witness to both.60
59
For the suggestion see Liber usuum fratrum monasterii Vadstenensis, ed. by Risberg,
p. 213, and for the quotation, p. 182.
60
I am deeply indebted to Dr Michael Tait, Professor Richard Pfaff, and Professor Susan
Powell for invaluable assistance and guidance in the preparation of this essay. Remaining errors
are my own responsibility, of course.
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Manuscripts
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.6.33
—— , MS Arundel 146
London, Guildhall Library, MS 25524
Early Printed Text

Speculum spiritualium (Paris: Wolfgang Hopyl, 1510)
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Edward A. Samuel Dewick, Henry Bradshaw Society, 3 (London: Harrison, 1893)
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1873)
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Stockholms Universitet, 2011)
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Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 2003)
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Salzburg, 1978–80)
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The Use of Sarum: The Original Texts Edited from the Mss., ed. by Walter Howard Frere, 2
vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898–1901)
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Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–64), cxxiii–cxxiv
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ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–64), clvii, cols 721–1256
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and Vadstena: Papers from a Symposium in Stockholm, 4–6 October 2007, ed. by Claes
Gejrot, Sara Risberg, and Mia Åkestam, Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets
Akademien, Konferenser, 73 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets
Akademien, 2010), pp. 104–09
Andersson, Roger, and Stephan Borgehammar, ‘The Preaching of the Birgittine Friars at
Vadstena Abbey (ca. 1385–1515)’, Revue Mabillon, 69 (1997), 209–36
Aungier, G. J., The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth and
the Chapelry of Hounslow (London: Nichols, 1840)
Beckett, N., ‘St. Bridget, Henry V and Syon Abbey’, in Studies in St. Birgitta and the
Brigittine Order, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 19, 2 vols (Salzburg: Insti
tut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1993), ii, 125–50
Bose, Mishtooni, ‘Complaint, Prophecy and Pastoral Care in the Fifteenth Century:
Thomas Gascoigne’s Liber veritatum’, in The Literature of Pastoral Care and Devotion in
Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. by Cate Gunn and Catherine
Innes-Parker (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 149–62
Catto, Jeremy, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, in The History of the
University of Oxford, ii: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. by Jeremy Catto and T. A. R. Evans
Dubois, Jacques, Les Martyrologies du Moyen Âge Latin, Typologie des sources du moyen
âge occidental, 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978)
Ellis, Roger, ‘Further Thoughts on the Spirituality of Syon Abbey’, in Mysticism and
Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. by W. F. Pollard and R. Boenig (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1997), pp. 219–43
—— , Viderunt eam filie syon: The Spirituality of the English House of a Medieval Con
templative Order from its Beginnings to the Present Day, Analecta Cartusiana, 68 (Salz
burg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1984)
Erler, Mary C., ‘Syon Abbey’s Care for Books: Its Sacristan’s Account Rolls,
1506/7–1535/6’, Scriptorium, 39 (1985), 293–307
Fogelqvist, Ingvar, Apostasy and Reform in the Revelations of St. Birgitta, Bibliotheca
Theologiae Practicae, 51 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993)
Gejrot, Claes, ‘The Syon Martiloge’, in Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and
Religion, c. 1400–1700, ed. by E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham, Studies in Modern
British History, 24 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 203–27
Gillespie, Vincent, ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval English Mysticism, ed. by Samuel Fanous, and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–93
—— , “Hid Divinite’: The Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren’, in The Medieval
Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium vii: Papers Read at Charney Manor,
July 2004, ed. by E. A. Jones (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 189–206
—— , ‘The Mole in the Vineyard: Wyclif at Syon in the Fifteenth Century’, in Text and
Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. by Helen Barr
and Ann M. Hutchison, Medieval Church Studies, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp.
131–62
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Century England, Medieval Church Studies, 21 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011)
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Religion, c. 1400–1700, Studies in Modern British History, 24 (Woodbridge: Boydell,
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(1985), 32–46
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Akademien, 2010), pp. 71–88
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—— , New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970)
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eval Sermon Studies, 52 (2008), 42–62
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—— , ‘Syon, Caxton and the Festial’, Birgittiana, 2 (1996), 187–207
1993)
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to its Monastic Uses’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1975)
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(1910), 121–23
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Punctuating Mirk’s Festial:
A Scottish Text and its Implications
Jeremy J. Smith
J
ohn Mirk, an Augustinian canon from Shropshire in the rural West
Midlands of England, wrote his Festial ‘probably in the late 1380s’: a collec-
tion of sixty-four sermons on Church feasts, largely based on the thirteenth-
century Legenda aurea of the Italian Dominican preacher Jacobus de Voragine.1
The preaching material provided by Mirk met a ready market, and its impact
was considerable, in both diatopic and diachronic terms. Some forty-three
extant manuscripts containing either a complete version of the text or excerpts
survive.2 The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English3 records fifteenth-cen-
tury versions of the Festial in a wide range of dialects, while an ‘early recension’4
— a revised version of the original text — formed the basis for some twenty-
two known printed editions which seem to have achieved a wide circulation
throughout the early sixteenth century up to 1532.5 By these means, the Festial
1
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, p. xix. See section 2 of Powell’s introduction (i, pp. xxviii–
xxxii) for an explanation of how the original concept of the sixty-four sermons in the Festial
proper was expanded; Powell’s edition contains the fullest collection of Mirk’s sermons, with a
further ten sermons (or in some cases sermon material).
2
For statistics, see conveniently Powell, ‘The Festial: The Priest and his Parish’, p. 160.
3
McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. See also
Wakelin, ‘The Manuscripts of Mirk’s Festial’, p. 103.
4
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, p. xix.
5
Powell, ‘The Festial: The Priest and his Parish’, p. 160; see also Mirk, Festial, ed. by
Jeremy J. Smith ( Jeremy.Smith@glasgow.ac.uk) is professor of English Philology at the

University of Glasgow.
162 Jeremy J. Smith
achieved ‘a prominence unique amongst vernacular sermon collections before

the Reformation’.6 The cultural impact of Mirk’s Festial is, especially as a result
of recent work by Susan Powell, being increasingly recognized by students of
late medieval vernacular religion and by those interested in the history of lit-
eracy and its uses at a crucial transitional period, both in England and beyond.7
Indeed, the Festial crossed political and cultural borders, being translated into
Welsh, copied in Hiberno-English, and printed (in English) in France. A manu-
script copy of this French edition was made in Scotland in the early sixteenth
century; this Scottish Festial will be the focus of this essay.8
Mirk’s original intention was to provide priests with texts for oral delivery to
the laity, but these sermons — as seems commonly to have happened — devel-
oped what H. Leith Spencer has called ‘an afterlife as private reading’;9 else-
where, Spencer points out that the ‘afterlife bestowed on sermons when they
are published befogs the distinction between sermons and treatises, between
public preaching and private teaching’.10 ‘Private reading’ was, moreover, some
thing undertaken by the pious laity as well as clergy.11
Susan Powell has argued that the two textual groupings of manuscripts of
the Festial, Group A and Group B, reflect a contrast between, respectively, a
text devised primarily for preaching and one devised primarily for private use.12
The printed editions of Mirk’s Festial are based on Group B.13 There are strong
associations between the early printers and religious foundations, for example,
Wynkyn de Worde and perhaps William Caxton himself, with Syon;14 how-
ever, it is clear that printers aimed to maximize their income through ‘widening
[the] appeal’ of such texts for ‘a lay as well as religious clientele’.15
Powell, i, pp. lv–lvii and references there cited.

6
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, p. xix.
7
See further, for example, Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, passim. See also Powell, ‘The
Festial: The Priest and his Parish’, passim.
8
See English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) <http://estc.bl.uk/> [accessed 13 April
2013]; the Rouen edition is S105145 in ESTC.
9
Spencer, ‘Sermon Literature’, p. 152.
10
Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 33.
11
See especially Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 53–87.
12
See Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, p. liv.
13
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, p. lv.
14
See Powell, ‘What Caxton Did to the Festial’, especially pp. 57–58.
15
Powell, ‘What Caxton Did to the Festial’, p. 58.
Punctuating Mirk’s Festial 163
The copying of the Festial is therefore a good test-case for the examina-
tion of some of the detailed processes that the negotiation from script to print
entailed, especially in relation to other emerging shifts in literacy-practices with
which printing, however uncertainly, correlated; for instance, the shift from
intensive to extensive literacy, and perhaps even the shift from public to private
reading that Elspeth Jajdelska has located in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.16 To investigate these developments, close examination will be made,
in particular, of an ‘outlying’ version surviving in Cambridge, St John’s College,
MS G.19: a manuscript copied in Scotland from an early printed edition, and
which thus offers the opportunity to engage both with technological and cross-
border complexities. Since this manuscript has no independent authority for
the text of the Festial, Susan Powell does not give it a sigil in her recent authori-
tative edition of the work. In what follows, I propose to refer to the St John’s
manuscript as MS G.19.
The Scottish Festial

The transmission of MS G.19, a manuscript copied from a printed book, illus-
trates the complex relationship between print and scribal culture. In early six-
teenth-century Scotland, consumer demand was not enough to sustain a pub-
lishing industry even when the technology became available. In 1508 Walter
Chepman and Andro Myllar set up shop in Edinburgh’s Cowgate to produce
Bishop Elphinstone’s Latin Aberdeen Breviary and a series of works in Older
Scots: poetry by the major Scots makars Robert Henryson (c. 1450–c. 1505)
and William Dunbar (c. 1420–c. 1513), and the anonymous romance Golagros
and Gawane, and (surviving only in fragmentary form) the earliest print, in
folio, of ‘Blind’ Hary’s (fl. late fifteenth-century) Older Scots epic, The Wallace.
Chepman — a merchant like his slightly earlier counterpart in England, the
wool-trader and printer William Caxton who opened his Westminster atelier
in 1476 — provided the finance, while Myllar, who had learned his craft at
Rouen in France, contributed the technical skills.17
However, this new approach to book production was not sustained in
Scotland; even in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, printing
began uncertainly, and although the industry became established in London,
the book trade even there was dominated by continental imports; London
16
See Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator.
17
Dickson and Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing.
164 Jeremy J. Smith
printing was a modest rather than a spectacular success.18 Even in the English
university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, where a ready market for books
might be assumed, printing was not sustained at an early date; Oxford printing
began in 1483 but lasted only for a few years, while ‘an attempt to set up a press
for the university in Cambridge in 1520 was equally short-lived’.19 Thus it is not
surprising that, although texts in Scots continued to be printed, sporadically,
over the next fifty years or so, they were generally produced outside Scotland.
John Gau’s The Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine, for instance, though writ-
ten in Older Scots was printed in Malmö in Sweden.20 Thomas Davidson may
have been active in the late 1530s ‘in the Fryere’s Winde’ in Edinburgh, print-
ing the Acts of the Scottish Parliament under license from James V and pro-
ducing editions of (among others) Sir David Lyndsay; there are fragments of
an Edinburgh edition, by Davidson, of Gavin Douglas’s The Palice of Honour.
However, the most complete early authority for Douglas’s poem was printed,
in Scots, by William Copland in London around 1553.21 Indeed, it is not until
the 1560s and the appearance of major figures such as Robert Leprevik and
Thomas Bassandyne that an established Scottish printing industry can be dis-
tinguished, and even then only some 350 titles were printed in Scotland by
the end of the sixteenth century. 22 During this transitional period it was not
uncommon for printed books to act as exemplars for manuscripts, as scribes
used their traditional skills to make handwritten copies. One particularly inter-
esting example is MS G.19.
MS G.19 has been authoritatively described in the second volume of Powell’s
edition.23 The manuscript was donated to St John’s College in 1635 by the
fourth earl of Southampton, whose father had acquired it from the collection of
William Crashaw (1572–1626). However, the book originated in Scotland; the
18
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, p. 125; see also n. 29 below. See also Bevan, ‘Scotland’.
19
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, p. 125.
20
John Gau or Gaw, an exiled Scottish Lutheran, died c. 1553 in Copenhagen. The Richt
Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine was a translation of Christiern Pedersen’s Danish Den rette vey till
hiemmerigis rige (1531), itself based on a German work (see Gau’s Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography entry for further information and references). The book contains extracts from the
Bible translated into Scots and is therefore discussed more thoroughly in Tulloch, A History of
the Scots Bible. The Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine was probably composed in about 1533.
21
See Douglas, The Shorter Poems, ed. by Bawcutt. For Davidson, see Bevan, ‘Scotland’,
p. 693.
22
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, p. 265.
23
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 591–92.
name ‘ser olifer sinclar of ro-, Oliuer Sinclar off Rosling knigt’, found in the man-
uscript (fols 104v, 164r), indicates that it was once owned by Sir Oliver Sinclair,
grandson of Sir William Sinclair, third earl of Orkney (d. 1480). Oliver Sinclair
was the last favourite of James V; he owned lands in Orkney and Shetland and
was at one time keeper of the formidable Tantallon Castle near North Berwick.
Sinclair, it seems, commanded the Scottish forces at the battle of Solway Moss
in Cumberland in November 1542; captured after that disastrous battle, he
was not released until early 1543, after James V’s death. Sinclair’s first wife,
Catherine Bellenden, corresponded later that year with Mary of Guise, James’s
widow, disputing the tack (that is, the rental/lease payment according to Scots
law) owed to the monarch; Mary’s ‘man of law’ (to use Catherine’s expression)
had, somewhat ungratefully it might seem, impounded Sinclair property.24
The handwriting of the scribe who copied MS G.19 has been recognized
in other manuscripts. He produced most of the text of the sole witness for an
important medieval Scottish poem: The Kingis Quair, composed — it is gen-
erally and plausibly argued — by King James I of Scotland. The Kingis Quair
survives in one manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B.24,
dating from the third quarter of the fifteenth century.25 Like MS G.19, the
manuscript was probably written for the Sinclair earls of Orkney during the
reign of James IV; the inscription ‘liber Henrici domini Sinclair’ appears on
folio 230v, presumably Oliver’s brother.26 The scribe also copied a manuscript
of the Historia Norwegiae (the Dalhousie Manuscript, once at Brechin Castle
and now Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland, GD 45/31/I–II), and the
Haye Manuscript from Roslin (Rosslyn), now Edinburgh, National Library of
Scotland, MS Acc. 9253.27 Sir William Sinclair, Oliver’s grandfather, founded
the well-known collegiate chapel of Roslin, to the south of Edinburgh, in 1447.
24
Mary of Lorraine, The Scottish Correspondence, ed. by Cameron, pp. 46–47.
25
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’, ed. by Boffey and Edwards; James
I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, ed. by Norton-Smith, p. xxxiii. Norton-Smith argues for the
identity of the first hand in The Kingis Quair with that of James Gray, priest and notary pub-
lic, but this identification has been disputed. See ‘Manuscript Description: Oxford, Bodleian
Library MS Selden B.24’, available at Late Medieval English Scribes <http://www.medievals-
cribes.com> [accessed 17 October 2011].
26
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’, ed. by Boffey and Edwards,
pp. 11–12. Henry Sinclair, who died in 1565, was bishop of Ross but primarily a distinguished
lawyer with humanist and theological interests who undertook a range of tasks for royal patrons.
27
See Chesnutt, ‘The Dalhousie Manuscript of the Historia Norvegiae’; see also The Works
of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’, ed. by Boffey and Edwards, pp. 9–10.
166 Jeremy J. Smith
The exemplar for MS G.19 was a printed edition of the work, produced
at Rouen in France in 1499 ‘per magistrum Martinum Morin […] impensis
Johannis Richardi’.28 Rouen, although possessing a smaller printing industry
than Paris or Lyon, nevertheless had a tradition of producing works for the
export market; Andrew Pettegree notes that even Latin liturgical works exclu-
sively used in England, such as Sarum rite missals, were printed abroad to such
an extent that the new English publishers found it hard to compete.29 It is pos-
sibly for this reason that Caxton concentrated on printing in the vernacular,
since the relationship in status between English and French in the sixteenth
century was the diametrical opposite to what it is today, and it is unlikely that
French readers were learning English for the privilege of reading John Mirk.
But even in this niche market, it seems, continental publishers were keen to
intervene. We have already noted Myllar’s connections with Rouen, and it is
therefore perhaps no surprise that the Rouen edition was the exemplar for the
Scottish Festial. Since the Selden manuscript, by the same scribe, is usually
dated to the end of the fifteenth century but the Rouen edition was not pub-
lished until 1499, it seems likely that the Scottish Festial was copied early in the
sixteenth century.
Examination of MS G.19, therefore, allows us to trace the complex interac-
tions between script and print and (again) script. In what follows, it is argued
that the examination of shifting punctuation practices in the transmission of
MS G.19 offers a special insight into vernacular literacy during a period of
dynamic cultural transition.
Punctuating Mirk’s Festial

To understand the punctuation practices deployed in the copying of Mirk’s
Festial, it is necessary to have a brief outline of how such practices evolved. The
term punctuation derives, of course, from ‘pointing’, the marks made in Church
service-books which guided the celebrating priest when speaking or intoning
a text. These marks correspond with rhetorical units: the period, the colon, and
28
For the Rouen printing trade, see Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, especially pp. 139–41.
Martin Morin was a printer active in Rouen c. 1490–1518; his numerous editions included, inter-
estingly, the Sarum Breviary specially printed for the English market. See Frère, De l’imprimerie
et de la librairie à Rouen.
29
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, pp. 125–26.
the comma, terms which were originally used not for punctuation-marks them-
selves but for the units which they were deployed to distinguish.
The period (periodus) was the primary unit of analysis, correlating with the
sentence (sententia). Medieval grammarians considered the sententia to be pri-
marily a semantic notion while the primary unit for analysis was the rhetorical
periodus or period, that is, ‘an utterance or complete rhetorical structure which
expresses a single idea or sententia’.30 The sentence was thus a ‘thought or opin-
ion; especially the substance or significance expressed by the words of […] a
rhetorical “period”’.31 Medieval rhetoricians distinguished divisions within the
period: the colon (plural cola) and, within the colon, the comma (plural com-
mata). Each was distinguished from each other by the greater or lesser degree of
pausing between them when the text was delivered aloud.
The comma was often marked by the virgula suspensiva or virgule </>, or
sometimes the punctus or point <.>, while the colon was marked typically by the
punctus elevatus <‫ ;>יִ‬the period was marked by a punctus but sometimes by the
use of litterae notabiliores (‘more notable letters’, i.e. capitals), or by a combina-
tion of virgule and punctus, e.g. </.>. There is also the ancestor of the question
mark, the punctus interrogativus. Virgule and punctus seem historically to have
fulfilled similar functions, and were sometimes interchangeable; only gradually
and during the sixteenth century did they become specialized, as the virgule
(later replaced by the comma) came to be used for medial pauses and the punc-
tus (that is, the full-stop) for final ones.32
Passage 1 is a diplomatic transcription of the Preface to the Festial as it
appears in MS G.19 (see Figure 1). The form ‘aurea’ is engrossed (marked by
underlining in this transcript) and written in textura, by contrast with the rest
of the manuscript which is written in a characteristically ‘spiky’ Scots form of
cursive secretary script. Passage 2 is a transcription from MS G.19’s exemplar,
the Rouen edition of 1499 (hence ‘Rouen 1499’). Passage 3 is a diplomatic
edition of the same passage as it survives, in red ink, in the ‘best manuscript’
of the Festial, London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius A.ii (hence ‘MS
Cotton’), whose principal hands can be dated to between 1400 and 1425. The
passage, as befits the opening of the text, is written in red ink in an anglicana
hand with some textura features. MS Cotton, assigned the sigil α, was used
as the base text for Susan Powell’s authoritative critical edition, and for the
30
Parkes, Pause and Effect, p. 306.
31
32
168 Jeremy J. Smith
convenience of readers I have also included Powell’s edition of the same text
(Passage 4, hence ‘Powell’).33 I have reproduced Powell’s editorial punctuation
and handling of capitals; supplied letters/corrections appear in square brackets,
and the superscript inserted ‘fore’ in ‘therfore’ is marked thus: ther └fore┘. It
may be noted that, in accordance with recent Early English Text Society policy,
contractions are expanded silently in Powell’s edition.
The lineation of the manuscripts and early printed books has been retained
in the passages transcribed here.
Passage 1 (Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.19 = MS G.19)
[folio 1r] The help and grace of almyghty god through the [besech]
ing of his blessyd moder saynt Mary be with vs at our[e]
begynnyng. help vs. and spede vs here In oure lyving and b[rynge]
vs vnto the blisse that neuer schall haue ending Amen
By myn owne symple vnderstonding I fele wele/ how It fa/

reth by other that bene In the same degre. and hauen charge
of soules/. and holden to teche theyr parisshens of all the
principall festes that come In the ȝere/. schewing vnto thame
quhat the holy seyntes suffride and did for goddes sake and for
his loue/. So that they scholde haue the more deuocioun In good
sayntis. and with the better will come vnto the chirch to serue
god. and pray his holy sayntis of thair help/. But for many
excus thame for defaute of bokis/. and also by sympilnes of con/
nyng/. Therfore In help of suche clerkis. this tretis is drawen
out of legenda aurea/. that he that lyst to studye therin/. he
schall fynde redy therin. of all the pryncipall festis of the
ȝere/. of echone a schort sermoun: nedefull for him to teche/. and
for other to lerne/. And for yat this tretis speketh of all the hye
festis of the ȝere. I will and pray yat It be callid ffestyuall/.
The quhich begynneth at the fyrst sonday of Aduent/ In worschyp of
god. and all his sayntes that ben written therin
33
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, 3.
Passage 2 (Rouen edition of 1499 = Rouen 1499)
[folio iir, column i] [column ii]

¶The helpe and grace of oute of Legenda aurea: that
almyghty god thrugh the he that lyst to studye therin:
besechyng of hys blessyd he shal fynde redy therin of
moder saint mary be wyth vs all the principall festes of the
at oure beginnynge: helpe yerre: of echeone a short ser
vs and spede vs here in ou- mon nedeful for him to teche:
re lyuynge: and brynge vs and for other to lerne. & for
vnto the blysse that neuer yat this tretis speketh of all
shall haue endinge. Amen the hye festys of the yere. I
wyll & praye that yt be cal-
[M]yn owne symple vn- led festyuall/ the whyche be
derston dynge. I fele ginneth at the fyrst sonday
wele how it fareth by oter of. Aduent in worshyp of god
that ben in the same degree and all his sayntes that ben
and hauen charge of soules: wrytten therin.
and holden to teche theyr pa
risshens of all the principal fe-
stes that come in the yere:
shewynge vnto theym w-
hat the hooly saintes suffre
den/ and deden for goddys sa
ke & for his loue. So that
thei sholde haue the more de
uocion in good saintes & wyth
the bettre wyll come vnto
the churche: to serue god and
pray hys holy saintes of ther
help. But for many excuse
hem for defaute of bokys/ &
also by simplynes of cunnyng
terfore in helpe of suche cler-
kes this tretis is drawen
170 Jeremy J. Smith
Passage 3 (London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius A.ii = MS Cotton)
[folio 3v] GOd maker of alle thing

be at oure be gynnyng
and ȝef vs alle hys blessyng
and bryng vs alle to a good endyng amen./
By myne owne febul lettrure y fele how yt faruth by

othur that bene in the same degre that hauen charge of
soulus and bene holdyn to teche hore pareschonus of alle
the Principale festus that cometh in the ȝere. schewyng
home what34 the seyntus soffreden and dedun for goddus
loue. so that thay schuldon haue the more deuocion in god
dus seyntys and wyth the better wylle com to the chyrche.
to serue god. and pray to holy seyntys of here help. But
for mony excuson ham by defaute of bokus and sympul
nys of letture ther└fore┘ in helpe of suche mene clerkus as .I. am
my selff .I. haue drawe this treti sewyng owt of legenda
aurea wyth more addyng to. so he that hathe lust to study
there in he schal fynde redy of alle the principale festis of the
ȝere a schort sermon nedful for hym to techym and othur
for to lerne and for this treti speketh alle of festis .I. wolle
and pray that it be called a festial the wyche be gynneth
the forme sonday of the aduent in worschup of god of al
le seyntis that ben wryten there in.
Passage 4 (after Powell’s edition = Powell; lineation of edition not retained)

God, maker of alle thyng,
Be at oure begynnyng,
And ȝef vs alle hys blessyng
And bryng vs alle to a good endyng.
Amen.
By myne owne febul lettrure Y fele how yt faruth by othur that bene in the same
degre that hauen charge of soulus and bene holdyn to teche hore pareschonus of
alle the principale festus that cometh in the ȝere, schewyng home what the seyntus
soffreden and dedun for Goddus loue, so that thay schuldon haue the more deuo-
34
The scribe seems to have attempted to turn the <a> into <h>, or possibly vice versa.
cion in Goddus seyntys and wyth the better wylle com to the chyrche to serue God
and pray to holy seyntys of here help. But for mony excuson ham by defaute of
bokus and sympulnys of letture, ther└fore┘ in helpe of suche mene clerkus as I am
myselff I haue drawe this treti sewyng owt of Legenda aurea wyth more addyng to,
so he that hathe lust to study therein he schal fynde redy of alle the principale festis
of the ȝere a schort sermon nedful for hym to techy[n] and othur for to lerne. And
for this treti speketh alle of festis I wolle and pray that be called a Festial, the wyche
begynneth the forme Sonday of the Aduent in worschup of God [and] of alle [the]
seyntis that ben wryten therein.
In substantives, MS G.19 and Rouen 1499 are clearly closer to each other than
to MS Cotton and hence Powell; we might note, for instance, the replacement
of the difficult reading ‘febul lettrure’ by ‘symple vnderstondynge’, although
we might note also some obvious corrections by the scribe of MS G.19 (for
example, the addition of ‘By’, omitted in error at the beginning of the body of
the Preface, and the corrections of the curious word break ‘vnderston dynge’
in Rouen 1499), and the introduction of sporadic Scotticisms (for example,
‘quhat’) and quasi-Scotticisms, for instance, ‘quhich’ (cf. more prototypically
Scots ‘quhilk’). It will be immediately observed that MS G.19 is the most
heavily punctuated of the four passages. There are correspondences between
MS G.19 and Rouen 1499 in the location of marks of punctuation, although
there are rather more used in the former. By contrast, MS Cotton is compara-
tively lightly punctuated; there are some interesting correspondences between
MS Cotton and Powell in the handling of punctus and comma respectively,
although the modern editor feels compelled to introduce extra commas as the
passage proceeds. Such ‘light’ punctuation seems to be a characteristic feature
of all the hands in MS Cotton (as may be noticed in the plates supplied by
Powell in her edition).
It would seem therefore that the Rouen 1499 printer and the scribe of MS
G.19 felt at liberty to intervene in the punctuation of the text, and it is pos-
sible to discern the principles on which that punctuation has been deployed.
Examination quickly reveals that points and the virgule-point combination
have been aligned rather well with periods, cola, and commata, as in the open-
ing lines of the body of the preface in MS G.19:
By myn owne symple vnderstonding I fele wele/ how It fa/

reth by other that bene In the same degre. and hauen charge
of soules/. and holden to teche theyr parisshens of all the
principall festes that come In the ȝere/. schewing vnto thame
172 Jeremy J. Smith
Figure 1. John Mirk’s Festial. Cambridge, St John’s College G.19, fol. 1r. Early sixteenth century.
Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.
quhat the holy seyntes suffride and did for goddes sake and for
his loue/. So that they scholde haue the more deuocioun In good
sayntis. and with the better will come vnto the chirch to serue
god. and pray his holy sayntis of thair help/. But for many
excus thame for defaute of bokis/. and also by sympilnes of con/
nyng/. Therfore In help of suche clerkis. this tretis is drawen
out of legenda aurea/.
The scribe even deploys the double punctus <:> after ‘sermoun’, a development
of the punctus elevatus which was used ‘by humanist scribes to indicate the
pause after a comma’.35 (The Rouen 1499 printer also uses the double punc-
tus, though not in this place.) The purpose is to provide a graded set of pauses
between sense-units, with commata and cola marked variously by virgule, punc-
tus, and virgule-punctus combinations; the virgule, preceded by a space in the
manuscript, is also used in place of a hyphen. By these means, the reader would
be guided as to an appropriate delivery of the text.
This guidance persists as the scribe moves to copying the sermons proper.
Passage 5 is a diplomatic transcription of the opening of the first sermon in MS
G.19, for the first Sunday in Advent (see Figures 1 and 2).
Passage 5 (MS G.19)
[folio 1r] Good men and wommen. this day is called the first sonday
in Aduent/ quherfore holy chirch maketh mencioun of the
commyng of Criste goddis sone In to this world to by man/
kynde out of the devilles bondage/. and to bring all wele
doeris Into the blisse yat euer schall last/. And also of his other
commyng that schalbe at the day of dome/. quhan he schall
come to deme all wickid doeris Into the payne of hell for euer
But the fyrst commyng of Ihesu Criste Into this world brought
Ioy and blysse wyth hym/. Therfor holy chirch vsed songes
35
174 Jeremy J. Smith
Figure 2. John Mirk’s Festial. Cambridge, St John’s College G.19, fol. 1v. Early sixteenth century.
Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.
[folio 1v] [of myrt]h as Alleluya and other./ And for the second commyng
[of Cris]te schal be so cruell/. yat no tong may tell/. therfore holy
[chirch] leyth downn songes of melodye. as Te deum. Gloria in ex
[celsis and wed]dingis ffor after that day. schall neuer be wedding more/.
[in token]ing of vengiaunce yat commyth after. Than after the first
[commyng] of Criste in to this world saint Austyn saith/. There
[be]ne thre thingis ryf In this world yat bene byrth trauaill &
[de]th/. This is the testment yat Adam oure forme fadir made
[to a]ll his of spring after him that is to be borne in sekenes /. and
[for] to lyve in trauall /. and for to deyen in drede/. But Criste
[he] cam to be oure socour of this testament and was borne &
[tr]auayled. and deyed/. he was borne to bring men out of schames
[&] to euerlasting hele/. He trauayled to bring man to euerlasting
[re]st/. he deyed to bring man to euerlasting lyf/. This was the
[c]aus of the first commyng of Criste in to this world/. Quher/
fore he yat will escape the dome that he shall come to In the
secound commyng he must ley doun all maner of pride of hert &
knowe him self a wrech of erth and holde mekenes in his hert
He must trauaill his body in good werkis/ and get trewly his
lyvelode with trauaill of his body/. and put away all ydelness
ffor he yat will not trauaill his body in good werkis as sanct
bernard saith/. he schall trauaill euer with fendes in hell/. And for
drede of deth/. he must make him euer redy to god/. quhan he will
send for him/.++36 that is to say. schriue him clene of all his synnes
and not abyde fro ȝere to ȝere/. but as sone as he falleth anoun
rys vp: and mekely take dome of his schriftfader than schall
he at that day of dome haue grete worschip/. ffor ryght as a
knyght schewith his woundes yat he hath had in bataill in moch
commending to him. ryght so the synnes yat a man hath doon. and is
schryuing of/. schalbe schewed opynly to all the world in
grete schame to him/. This is said for the first commyng of Crist
In to this world/.
In addition to the occasional Scotticism (e.g. ‘quherfore’, ‘quhan’ beside south-
ern English forms such as ‘maketh’, ‘commyth’), it will be observed that the
scribe continues to deploy a range of marks of punctuation and litterae nota-
biliores to distinguish the periodic structure of the passage. As in Passage 1, the
virgule is used preceded by a space in place of a hyphen.
36
Marginal insertion, to be placed where ‘++’ appear in body of text: ‘let a man scrive him’.
176 Jeremy J. Smith
Here for comparison is a transcription of the same passage in the Rouen

1499 print:
Passage 6 (Rouen 1499)

[folio iit, column ii] G37 Ood
men
and wi
men
this
dayis38
called
the fyrste sonday in aduent
wherfore Holy Churche ma
keth mencion of the commyng
of criste goddis sone in tothis39
worlde to bye mankinde oute
of the deuylles bondage: & to
bringe all well doers into the
[folio iiv, column i] blysse that euer shall last.
And also of hys other com-
mynge that shall be at the
daye of dome whan he shall
comme to deme. all wycked
doers in to the payne of hel-
le for euer But the fyrste co
myng of iehsus. Criste into
this worlde brought ioye and
blysse with him Therfore ho-
ly churche vsed songes of
myrth as alleluya and other
And for the seconde commyng
of christe shall be so cruell
that no tonge may tell ther-
fore Holy Churche leyth do
wne songes of melodye as
Te deum Gloria in excelsis and weddinge
37
Decorated initial taking up seven lines of text.
38
For ‘day is’.
39
For ‘to this’.
For after that daye shall ne

uer be weddinge more in to-
keninge of vengeaunce that com
meth after. Then after the
fyrste commynge of crist into
this worlde sainte Austin
sayth there ben three thin-
ges ryf in thys world that
been burth trauayll: and deth.
This is the testament that
Adam oure forme fadre ma-
de to all his ofsprynge after
him that is to be borne in se-
[column ii] kenesse: and for to lyue in tra-
uayll and for to deye in drede.
¶ But criste he came to be
oure socoure. of this testa-
ment. and was borne and tra-
uayled: and dyed. He was
borne to bringe men oute of
sekenesse into euyrlastinge
hele. He trauayled to bringe
man to euirlastinge reste. He
deyede to bringe man to euir-
lastinge lyfe This was the
cause of the firste commynge
of criste into this world wher
fore he that wyll escape the
dome that he shall comme to in
the secounde commynge he
must ley downe all maner of
pryde of herte and knowe him
selue a wreche of erthe and
holde mekenesse in his hert
he must trauayle hys body
in good werkes & gete truly
hys lyuelode wyht40 trauayll
of hys body and putte a wa-
ye all ydelnesse. For he that
40
An obvious error for ‘wyth’, corrected in MS G.19.
178 Jeremy J. Smith
wyll not trauayl hys body

in good werkes as saint bernard
sayth he shall trauaylle euir
with fendes in helle and for
drede of deth he muste ma-
[folio iiir, column i] ke him euir redy to god whan
he wyll sende for him that is
to say shryue him clene of all
his synnes and not abyde
fro yere to yere but allone
as he falleth anone ryse vp
and mekely take dome of
his shryfte fadre then shall
he at that day of dome haue
gret worship For righte as
a knighte sheweth his wo-
undes that he hat41 had in ba-
taylle in moche commendyng
to him. righte so the synnes
that a man hath doon & is
shreuen of and doth hys pe
naunce shall be moche wor-
ship to him and grete confu-
sion to the fende. And that he
hath not be shriuen of shalbe
she wed42 openly to all the w-
orlde in grete shame to him
Thys is sayd for the fyrste
commynge of criste into thys
worlde.
Punctuation is more sparing in the Rouen print than in MS G.19, and it is clear
that the scribe of G.19 has not simply transferred to his copy the usage of his
exemplar. The Rouen printer deploys litterae notabiliores fairly extensively to
disambiguate periods, alongside the punctus, and also (sparingly) the pilcrow.
The double punctus is used to mark off ‘and deth’, ‘and deyed’ from ‘trauayll’,
‘trauayled’, and after ‘sekenesse’, possibly for emphatic purposes. Word divisions
41
For ‘hath’, corrected in MS G.19.
42
That is, ‘shewed’, corrected in MS G.19.
at line ends are almost always, though not invariably, marked by hyphens. The
narrowness of the columns means that abbreviations are very commonly used.
We might now compare the parallel passage in MS Cotton (Passage 7). In
contrast with the formal script in Passage 3 from the same manuscript, Passage
7 is written in a less formal anglicana script, intermingled with secretary forms,
in brown-black ink. The superscript inserted words ‘of ’, ‘alle’, ‘so’, ‘ys’, ‘with’, ‘his’,
‘day of ’ are all marked in this transcription thus: ‘└of┘’ etc. The lineation of the
original is retained; the first six lines are shorter because of the engrossed form
of the capital <T> in the first line.
Passage 7 (MS Cotton)
[folio 4r] Thys day is kalled þe furst sonday yn þe

aduent þat ys sonday in crystes comyng ¶ w
her fore þe day holy chyrch makyng mency
on of two comynges of crist þe furst comyng
of cristes sone of heuen was. to bye monkynd
out of þe deles bondage and to bryng alle
gode doeres in to þe blysse þat euer schal last ¶ And └of┘ hys oþur
comyng þat schal ben at þe day of dome. for to deme └alle/ wykked
doeres in to þe put of helle for euer more ¶ But þe furst
comyng of crist in to þys world. brogh ioy and blysse with hym.
þer for holy chyrch vseth summe songes of melody as alleluia
& oþur ¶ And for þe secunde comyng of crist to þe dome schal be└so┘ cruel
and so yrus þat no tonge may telle þer for holy chyrch layth doun somme
songes of melody and of murth. as to domini laudamus. gloria in excelsis. And
also weddyng for aftur þat day schal neuer weddyng ben more þus holy
chyrch leyth doun songes of melody by fore in tokenyng of vengians
þat schal come aftur ¶ þen of þe furst comyng of crist in to þis world. þus
seth seint austyn þer ben hee seth þre þyngys þat ben ryvot in þis wor
ld burth. trauel and deth þys is þe testament þat adam oure fadur ma
de to al hys ofspryng aftur hym þat └ys┘ to be boren in seknes for to
lyuon in trauayl. And for to dyen in drede. ¶ But crest blessed be
he come to be excecutour of þys testament and was boren trauayled
& dyed ¶ He was boȝe for to bryng men out of seknes in to er
lastyng hele .// he trauayled to bryng men to erlastyng rest ¶ he
was ded to bryng mon in to erlastyng lyf. þat neuer schal haue en
de. ¶ þis was þe cause of þe furst comyng of crist. þer for he þat
wol voyde þe perel & þe myschyf of þe seconde comyng to þe dome
he mot legge doun al maner of pride and hyghnes of hert and kno
w hym self a wrech and slym of þe erþe. and so holde mekenes
180 Jeremy J. Smith
[folio 4v] in his herte ¶ He mote trauayle hys body in gode workes
and geten hys lyflode with swynk of his body. and put a
way al ydulnes and slowth for he þat wolnot trauayl hire with
men as seyth seynt bernard he schal travayl euer └with┘ fendes
of helle ¶ And for drede of deth he mot maken hym redy to
hys god when he wol sende aftur hym. þat ys to saye scryve
hym of alle └his┘ synnes þat ben in hys concyens not for to aby
de fro ȝer to ȝere but also sone as he feleth hymself in syn
ne to scryve hym and mekely take þe dom of hys scryffadur // þer
schal he haue at þe └day of┘ dom gret worschep for ryght as a knyght
schownet þe wondes þat he hadde in batel. in moch comendyng
to hym ¶ Ryght so alle þe synnes þat a mon hath scryuen hym
of and taken hys penans fore schul ben þer schewet to moch
honour and worschep to hym and moch confucyon to þe fynd. And
þyke þat he hath not scryven hym of schul ben schewet to
al þe worde in gret confusyoun and schame to hym. þys ys
seyde for þe furst comyng of cryst in to þe worde.
In Passage 7, the MS Cotton scribe again deploys punctuation sparingly in

comparison with the scribe of MS G.19. Double virgules preceded by a punctus,
viz. .//, have been for the most part overpainted with the pilcrow ¶ in alter-
nating red and blue, generally accompanied by following litterae notabiliores;
where the punctus-double virgule combination remains uncovered by a pilcrow
it seems to be an oversight. The punctus on its own is sporadically used to dis-
tinguish the Latin titles of the ‘songes of melody’, and, sometimes, periods, e.g.
¶ But þe furst
comyng of crist in to þys world. brogh ioy and blysse with hym.
þer for holy chyrch vseth summe songes of melody as alleluia
& oþer
or within lists, e.g. ‘burth. trauel and deth’. We might also note the custom of split-
ting <w> from the rest of the word at line end, e.g. <w|her>, <kno|w>. Hyphens
are not used by this scribe to indicate word-divisions spanning lines, e.g. <en|de>.43
43
Later scribes in MS Cotton do use, somewhat sporadically, a double hyphen to mark
word division between lines, e.g. the scribe whose stint begins on fol. 40 r, who can produce
forms such as <chyl=|deren> (fol. 41r), <a=|braham> (fol. 43r). However, that later scribe can
also produce unmarked line-divisions of a similar character to the first hand, e.g. <kno|we>
(fol. 40v), <ese|ly> (fol. 41r), <swe|ren> (fol. 47v), etc. This later scribe’s general practice of
punctuation is similar to that of the first, with sparing use of the punctus accompanied by pil-
crow-capital combinations.
It may be worth comparing the behaviour of the scribe in MS G.19 with his
practice in copying another vernacular text. Passage 8 is a transcription from
part of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B.24 (hence ‘MS Selden’)
of The Kingis Quair:
Passage 8 (MS Selden)
Quhen as I lay In bed allone waking

New partit out of slepe alyte tofore
ffell me to mynd of many diuers thing 10
Off this and that/. can I noght say quharfor
Bot slepe for craft in erth myght I no more
ffor quhich as tho coude I no better wyle
Bot toke a boke to rede apon a quhile
Off quhich the name Is clepit properly 15

Boece/. eftir him yat was the compiloure
Schewing counsele of philosophye
Compilit by that noble senatoure
Off rome/. quhilom þat was the warldis floure
And from estate by fortune a quhile 20
fforiugit was to pouert / in exile
It is noticeable that punctuation is considerably lighter in MS Selden than in

MS G.19. The scribe uses the virgule (/) and, commonly, the combined virgule-
punctus </.> to indicate periods, but only insofar as they relate to enjambment,
where periods run over line-endings. Punctuation is rarely used elsewhere in
the text, perhaps most notably not at the end of lines.
It may be noted in passing that, in many texts of Older Scots verse, stanzaic
poems in rhyme royal (such as this text) were, by the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, often provided with more comprehensive systems of punctuation than are
poems in couplets. Thus Robert Leprevik’s print of Barbour’s Bruce, from 1571,
has no punctuation as we understand it at all; clearly, punctuation was deemed
unnecessary by the compositor since the use of discourse-markers (for exam-
ple, ‘and’, ‘yat’), often correlating with the beginning of verse lines, was con-
sidered adequate for the task.44 By contrast, the complex syntax of Henryson’s
Morall Fabillis, in rhyme royal, seems to have encouraged the printer Thomas
44
See Smith, ‘Textual Afterlives: Barbour’s Bruce and Hary’s Wallace’.
182 Jeremy J. Smith
Bassandyne, in the same year, to impose an extensive repertoire of punctuation

along essentially modern lines (as a comparison with modern critical editions
demonstrates).45 It might be argued that the complex syntax characteristic of
rhyme royal made the development of more sophisticated patterns of punctua-
tion more necessary.
In the case of The Kingis Quair in MS Selden — a late fifteenth-century text
— the scribe did not feel the need to offer such comprehensive interpretative
guidance. The reasons for this difference may be speculated upon. Constraint
from the exemplar may well have played a part, but — since the evidence is that
the scribe did not hold back from intervening in his exemplar’s usage when
he copied the Rouen 1499 print of the Festial — other possibilities commend
themselves. Perhaps the person for whom the manuscript was intended was more
familiar with verse than prose, and therefore needed less guidance; James V was
notoriously more interested in the arts of court culture than in sustained moral
improvement, and it seems possible that Sinclair shared his master’s tastes. It
may be that Sinclair was very familiar with this particular poem, and that the
text in the Selden manuscript was more an aide-mémoire than the presentation
of a novelty; such a situation might account for the difference between the com-
parative lack of punctuation in the Selden manuscript in comparison with the
more comprehensive systems in later printed versions, which would be provided
for readers coming to verse texts as something new. Perhaps the overt didacti-
cism of the Festial would have required a more explicit system of interpretative
guidance than was the case with more ‘creative’ writing such as verse.
Whatever the reason for the difference between his usage in MS G.19 and
in MS Selden, it is clear, in MS G.19 of Mirk’s Festial, that a fairly compre-
hensive set of punctuation marks has been introduced, and that these usages
contrast with those adopted in MS Cotton of the same text. It is to the possible
reasons for this difference that we might now turn.
Punctuation and the Evolution of Literacy

As we have seen, according to Susan Powell and H. Leith Spencer, the two ver-
sions of Mirk’s Festial may be regarded as primarily ‘public’ and ‘private’ respec-
tively. MS Cotton is clearly ‘public’, being designed for delivery by a preacher,
whereas MS G.19 belongs, like the Rouen edition of 1499 which was its exem-
plar, to the ‘private’ group.
45
See Smith, Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader.
It might seem logical to argue that this difference of function accounts

for the contrasting punctuation practices adopted in MS Cotton and MS
G.19. But there are at least two problems with such an interpretation. First,
there is no necessary correlation between the two groups and the absence or
presence of complex punctuation. Thus (for instance) a Group A text, such
as London, British Library, MS Harley 2403 dating from the middle of the
fifteenth century, seems to distinguish periods quite carefully, using the punc-
tus; and whereas a Group B manuscript, such as London, British Library, MS
Harley 2391 dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, harnesses a
fairly sophisticated mixture of punctus, punctus elevatus, and litterae notabilio-
res, other Group B manuscripts, such as London, British Library, MS Harley
2371 dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, seem to be largely inno-
cent of punctuation.46 Secondly, there is strong evidence that the Festial con-
tinued to be used as the basis of public preaching well into the sixteenth cen-
tury; we know, for instance, that in 1589 a ‘licensed Reader’, John Minet of
East Drayton, Nottinghamshire, was charged with ‘takinge vpon him to preach
in the church and for preachinge of false and erronius doctrine’; Minet seems
to have used a printed version of the Festial.47 And as we have seen the Rouen
print is comparatively lightly punctuated.
More plausibly — and in line with the use of punctuation elsewhere in Middle
English vernacular prose — it could be argued that more sophisticated practices
of punctuation aligned with the emergence of what might be termed more ‘exten-
sive’ literacy. Mirk originally conceived of his work as part (along with his poem,
the Instructions for Parish Priests) of a comprehensive pastoral programme. It was
intended that the preacher would use the text repeatedly: ‘to be read often, not
thrown into a corner but kept by the priest’s side throughout his daily life’.48 MS
Cotton may therefore be presumed as clearly part of an intensive reading culture,
where the reader would have become deeply acquainted with the text. When
texts are read repeatedly, they become aides-mémoires rather than opportunities
for encounters with new information, and intensive reading cultures typically
place less emphasis on punctuation. Thus in antiquity, for instance, scriptio con-
tinua was commonly used, in which not only was no punctuation deployed, but
46
For datings and descriptions of these three Harleian manuscripts, Mirk, Festial, ed. by
Powell, ii, 540–41 and 554–55.
47
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. lviii–lix. This case was first brought to light in O’Mara,
‘A Middle English Sermon Preached by a Sixteenth-Century “Athiest”’.
48
Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, p. xxviii.
184 Jeremy J. Smith
there were even no divisions between words.49 Scriptio continua offered a text
which was a prompt to memory-based performance and did not force the reader
into a particular interpretation; in that sense, the performer, prompted by scrip-
tio continua, took a full part in the creation of the text.50
It may even possibly be that the quite common splits of words such as
<w|her>, <kno|w>, and <en|de> indicate that the reader of MS Cotton was
intended to read the work letter-by-letter, tracing the text in a linear sequence
rather than, as in modern mature reading, as a series of ‘blocks’; this practice
is not found in MS G.19. But perhaps not too much should be made of this
last usage, since it does also occur in the Rouen print — although it is worth
noting that the practice in the Rouen print is comparatively rare and possi-
bly influenced by the shortness of the lines in the double-column page. The
Rouen printer also commonly — though not invariably — employs a hyphen.
Furthermore, the letter <w> in the Cotton MS, which seems to be quite com-
monly separated in this fashion, is written somewhat floridly in the anglicana
fashion, which might have encouraged its separation.51
The sophisticated punctuation of MS G.19, then, might seem to relate to
the emergence of a more extensive reading culture where readers (and indeed
preachers) may be presumed to have read more books, but where they read each
of these books less often. In such circumstances, demand for texts drove sup-
ply, through new technology (such as printing) or through large-scale importa-
tion; the development also had implications for punctuation. Extensive read-
ers frequently encounter unfamiliar texts, and thus more guidance for private
reading and for public performance is needed; as a result, more comprehensive
49
Parkes, Pause and Effect, p. 307. In scriptio continua, typically a text was written down bou
strophedon (that is, ‘ox-turning’, ‘turning an ox’, as in ploughing), allowing the guiding finger or
pointer to move uninterrupted across the page.
50
The reference to memory-based performance is important. The role of memory in ancient,
medieval, and early modern cultures has of course been much discussed, notably by Mary Carruthers,
and it is clear that many people were capable of what, for many modern Westerners, would seem
prodigious feats of memory. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory. However, even in societies which
encouraged the development of — by our standards — remarkable abilities in memorization, there
are limits. These limitations of memory in relation to the emergence of more extensive reading prac-
tices probably encouraged an earlier technological breakthrough: the replacement of the scroll by
the more convenient codex. Scrolls are acceptable as aide-mémoires, but users cannot find their way
about them easily, marking a place is not possible, and the codex is clearly a more convenient object
for those persons needing to consult many books. Codices, moreover, can house more text more
conveniently than can a scroll.
51
I owe this observation to Katie Lowe.
programmes of punctuation are required. Comparison of MS G.19 with MS

Cotton would seem to show such a step-change in the use of punctuation.52
The text of MS G.19, therefore, shows the repurposing of an old text for a cul-
tural environment where literacy was — no doubt uncertainly — becoming
more extensive: a response which is both traditional (drawing upon an older
text) and innovative (presenting that text in a new way).
Such reworking fits rather well with what seems to have been happening
in the expression of late medieval Christian vernacular culture. Until quite
recently, it was commonly held that one of the main distinguishing features
between Protestant and Catholic religious expression is between the individual
and the group, between private/personal and collective/ritualized encounters
with God. But, as Eamon Duffy has argued eloquently in his The Stripping of
the Altars,53 there is evidence that, in the pre-Reformation period, Catholicism
could value both older tradition and cultural innovation and was able therefore
to harness technical developments for its own purposes. Duffy has drawn atten-
tion to how printing flourished in the period before the Reformation, and that
the market for printed books of religious instruction was lay as well as clerical.
As Richard Pynson stated in his preface to The Kalendar of Shepherdes (1506),
the book was ‘very profytable bothe for clerkes and laye people’, and such a dual
readership fuelled the demand for books which led, inter alia, to the techno-
logical innovations which characterize the period. 54
It seems therefore that, in the punctuation of late copies of Mirk’s Festial such
as MS G.19, we are encountering an interesting development correlating with
the emergence of more extensive literacy practices. The development, it might
be argued, is an emergent rather than a sudden one, in the sense that we may
observe a process rather than a sudden change, and there will be many reversions
to older practices. It is for this reason perhaps not surprising that in the same
scribe’s version of The Kingis Quair, rather more traditional, ‘punctuation-light’
practices may be observed, although of course in verse page layout is also rel-
evant. The virgule-punctus combination is of course introduced mid-line in the
52
Intensive literacy still, of course, exists, and some have preferred to use the term ‘varied lit-
eracy’ in place of ‘extensive literacy’, for instance, Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination. Indeed,
the expression ‘varied literacy’ would seem to encapsulate not only the reading of new things but
also the repeated re-reading of texts which characterized, for instance, Renaissance literacy practice.
See, for example, Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, p. 181. The issue seems to be not one of replacement
of intensive by extensive literacy but of complementarity, and the boundary is not a precise one.
53
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, especially pp. 77 and following.
54
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 83.
186 Jeremy J. Smith
Selden Kingis Quair, but, as has been suggested above, other rhetorical breaks are
marked simply by the scribe moving to a new line. With a prose text such as that
in MS G.19, more punctuation had to be deployed for the guidance of readers.
Speech-Like Texts
We might conclude by taking this argument in a further, perhaps even more
speculative direction. It is fairly clear from the correlation of punctuation
marks with periodic structure in MS G.19 that the scribe saw it as important
to make the text ‘speech-like’ even in a ‘private’ text. But the question which
emerges is: spoken to whom? This question leads us into the vexed issue of the
development of silent reading.55
Elspeth Jajdelska has pointed out that silent reading was known in late
antiquity, and she relates St Augustine’s famous anecdote about St Ambrose
(Confessions vi. iii): ‘When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his
heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent’.56 Augustine
speculated, in a somewhat puzzled fashion, as to what was going on:
We wondered if he [i.e. Ambrose] read silently perhaps to protect himself in case
he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to
expound the text being read if it contained difficulties, or who might wish to
debate some difficult questions. If his time were used in that way, he would get
through fewer books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which
used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading.
Augustine clearly perceived one of Ambrose’s goals as being to ‘get through’ a

large number of books; Ambrose was therefore, it may be presumed, an early
extensive or varied reader. However, Augustine is also clear that Ambrose was
unusual; most readers clearly read aloud. It seems that, since Augustine’s time,
there was some sort of ‘turning-point […] when the balance of emphasis moved
from reading aloud to reading silently’.57 Jadelska argues that this turning-point
came (finally) in the seventeenth century, although she notes that such prac-
55
The term ‘speech-like’ to refer to medieval and early modern English texts has been used
by several scholars; see most notably Culpeper and Kytö, Early Modern English Dialogues. The
usage is a useful one, reminding us that the dividing-line between speech and writing is perhaps
not as clear-cut as it might seem.
56
Cited in Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, p. 5.
57
Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, p. 5.
tices were already developing within medieval monasteries.58 She then suggests
that such practices are reflected in the evolution of punctuation.
Now, modern punctuation is commonly conceived of as primarily a visual
expression of grammar: a kind of parsing. We use commas to mark lists, paren-
thetical statements, and apposed qualifiers, and to separate subordinate from
main clauses. We use semi-colons as an alternative to coordinating conjunc-
tions, to link main clauses, and we use colons (rather sparingly) to introduce
lists. However — and clearly deriving from the medieval and early modern sys-
tem described earlier in this essay — there is a parallel rhetorical use of punc-
tuation which still exists and which relates written text to spoken performance
or interpretation: children are still commonly instructed to insert a comma
‘when you breathe’. Jajdelska, drawing upon modern psychological as well as
historical research, argues that modern ‘silent reading’ is not simply grammati-
cal interpretation; silent reading, she suggests, entails the ‘silent hearing’ of an
‘imagined writer’s words’, and this observation has implications for how a text
is presented.59
By the end of the fourteenth century there is some evidence that silent as
well as spoken reading existed. Famously, Geoffrey Chaucer gave examples of
them both in Troilus and Criseyde. In Book ii, lines 82–83, we are told that
Criseyde with two of her ladies:60
Herden a mayden reden hem the geste
Of the siege of Thebes, while hem leste.
And in Book iii, lines 978–80, Pandarus leaves the lovers alone
And with that word he drow hym to the feere,
And took a light, and fond his contenanunce,
As for to looke upon an old romaunce.
In the latter example there is some uncertainty as to whether Pandarus is actu-

ally reading at all, or simply being a discreet voyeur — ‘fond his contenaunce’
may be glossed as ‘assumed the appearance’ — but the attitude he is adopting
is presumably plausible as suggesting private, silent contemplation of a book.61
58
Jajdelska cites Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 202–04.
59
Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, passim.
60
Both passages are cited from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson.
61
It could be argued that Pandarus, while reading, is perhaps muttering to himself as he
reads and then listening to his own mutterings. Such an interpretation might, however, seem
188 Jeremy J. Smith
It is likely, of course, that the expression ‘private reading’ encapsulates a great

variety of encounters with texts, extending from solitary perusal in silence to
the more sociable, familial event which seems to be mirrored in the description
of Criseyde. Such a variety of approaches persisted in later centuries; Francis
Bacon recommended to Fulke Greville the practice of instructing a servant to
read to an aristocratic listener, and at the end of the seventeenth century, and
more humbly, Samuel Pepys ‘was read asleep by his boy Tom’.62 Such experi-
ences prefigure, of course, the modern use of the audio-book.63
It could be argued that the shift in punctuation practices, from those found
in MS Cotton of Mirk’s Festial to those found in MS G.19, can be related not
only within a transition from intensive to extensive reading but also to continuing
demands for speech-like performance, even within the context of private encoun-
ters with the work. Some of these encounters may well have been familial but
some will have been silent and personal, even if (as befitted the origins of the text)
still ‘speech-like’: solitary readers would have encountered imagined speakers
conceived of as expressing themselves rhetorically. In sum, an emerging intensive-
extensive shift in combination with the continuing demand for ‘speech-like’ texts
would account for the punctuation practices adopted in MS G.19: more, and
more sophisticated, punctuation aligned with periodic, ‘rhetorical’ structures.64
Such a combination of innovation with tradition would seem to align also,
rather well, with Eamon Duffy’s description, already cited, of late medieval
religious practice. For Duffy, this innovatory character is something to cele-
brate, and, somewhat controversially, he perceives the Reformation to be — for
the most part — a sad act of destruction of a still fruitful tradition. But the
combination, it might be argued, contained the seeds of that destruction. The
implausible, since arguably such behaviour would be potentially distracting to the lovers in bed
nearby. Of course, such a view might well presume overmuch on Chaucer’s having a naturalistic
intention and on the audience’s lacking a capacity to suspend disbelief; in the Canterbury Tales,
Chaucer invites us to accept ‘wel nyne and twenty’ pilgrims listening, while travelling on horse-
back, to stories told in formal verse.
62
Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, p. 73.
63
See Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, p. 271, for the discussion of reading in Pepys’s ‘bou-
doir’. Sharpe draws the clear parallel with ‘[l]istening to books on tape as we negotiate the
morning traffic on the school run […]’ (p. 272). Sharpe notes that Pepys was capable of learning
long quotations through listening.
64
Although outside the argument of this essay, it is perhaps worth noting that such tension
between ‘grammatical’ and ‘rhetorical’ punctuation continued into, for example, the ‘elocution-
ist’ punctuation of the eighteenth century, which correlated with another so-called ‘reading
revolution’. See Parkes, Pause and Effect, pp. 91–92, and references there cited.
emergence of private reading at the end of the Middle Ages was fairly clearly a
precursor of the personal, private encounters with devotional texts which are,
of course, a feature of ‘godly reading’, that is, Protestant literacy. It is an argu-
ment of this essay, therefore, that such reading practices were already underway
amongst the pious, literate laity during late medieval times, and that the transi-
tion may be discerned through the close study of ‘accidental’ features in certain
widely circulated medieval vernacular texts, such as John Mirk’s Festial. Further
work of a similar character on a wider range not only of manuscripts and early
editions of the Festial but also of other texts with comparable afterlives seems
likely to be a fruitful future programme of research.65
65
I am extremely grateful for the invaluable assistance of Kathryn McKee, who supplied
me, in her own time and at short notice, with the initial digital images of Cambridge, St John’s
College, MS G.19. I am also most grateful for the comments of the editors of this volume, who
have very considerably sharpened the argument and to Elspeth Jajdelska, Ian Johnson, Merja
Stenroos, and John Thompson for discussion about the matters raised. Early versions of this
essay were delivered as talks to audiences in Japan and Glasgow, and I am grateful to the audi-
ences on these occasions for their comments, especially to Yoko Iyeiri, Akibono Tani, Juulia
Ahvensalmi, Graham Caie, and Katie Lowe. Any errors remaining are my own.
190 Jeremy J. Smith
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.19
Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland, GD 45/31/I–II
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Acc. 9253
London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius A.ii
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B.24
Early Printed Texts

‘Blind Hary’, [The Wallace] (Edinburgh: Chepman and Myllar, c. 1508), a fragment, STC
13148
Douglas, Gavin, The palis of honoure compyled by Gawayne dowglas Byshope of Dunkyll
(London: Copland, c. 1553; Edinburgh: Davidson, c. 1540), STC 7073
Dunbar, William, Here begynns ane litil tretie intitulit the goldyn targe compilit be Maister
Wilyam dunbar (Edinburgh: Chepman and Myllar, c. 1508), STC 7349
Elphinstone, William, Breviarium Aberdonense (Edinburgh: Chepman and Myllar, 1510),
STC 15791
Gau, John, The richt vay to the Kingdom of heuine (Malmö: Hochstraten, 1533), STC 19525
Henryson, Robert, The traitie of Orpheus kyng (Edinburgh: Chepman and Myllar, c. 1508),
STC 13166
The knightly tale of Golagros and Gawane (Edinburgh: Chepman and Myllar, c. 1508),
STC 11984
Mirk, John, Liber festivalis [and] Quattuor sermones (Rouen: Martin Morin for Jean
Richard, 1499), STC 17966
The nevv actis and constitutionis of parliament maid be the rycht excellent prince Iames the
Fift Kyng of Scottis (Edinburgh: Davidson, 1542), STC 21878.5
Primary Sources
—— , The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’: Facsimile of Bodleian Library,
Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B.24, ed. by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1997)
Douglas, Gavin, The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. by Priscilla Bawcutt, 2nd edn
(Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2003)
James I of Scotland, James I of Scotland: The Kingis Quair, ed. by John Norton-Smith
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
Mary of Lorraine, The Scottish Correspondence of Mary of Lorraine: Including Some Letters
from 20th February 1542–3 to 15th May 1560, ed. by Annie I. Cameron (Edinburgh:
Constable, 1927)
2009–11)
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Gameson and others, 6 vols to date (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–),
iv: 1557–1695, ed. by John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (2002), pp.
687–700
Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(London: Harper Collins, 1997)
Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Chesnutt, Michael, ‘The Dalhousie Manuscript of the Historia Norvegiae’, Opuscula, 8
(1985), 54–95
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö, Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction
as Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Dickson, Robert, and John Philip Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing, from the Intro
duction of the Art in 1507 to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge:
Macmillan and Bowes, 1890)
Frère, Edouard, De l’imprimerie et de la librairie à Rouen, dans les xve et xvie siècles, et de
Martin Morin, célèbre imprimeur rouennais (Rouen: Brument, 1843)
Jajdelska, Elspeth, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007)
McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medi
aeval English, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986)
O’Mara, Veronica, ‘A Middle English Sermon Preached by a Sixteenth-Century “Athiest”:
A Preliminary Account’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 34 (1987), 183–85
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West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992)
Pettegree, Andrew, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)
Powell, Susan, ‘The Festial: The Priest and his Parish’, in The Parish in Late Medieval
England: Proceedings of the 2002 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Clive Burgess and
Eamon Duffy, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 14 (Donington: Tyas, 2006), pp. 160–76
192 Jeremy J. Smith
—— , ‘What Caxton Did to the Festial: From Manuscript to Printed Edition’, Journal of
the Early Book Society, 1 (1997), 48–77
Saenger, Paul, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford
Sharpe, Kevin, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
Smith, Jeremy J., Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader (Woodbridge: Scottish Text Society,
2012)
—— , ‘Textual Afterlives: Barbour’s Bruce and Hary’s Wallace’, in Scots: The Language and its
Literature, ed. by John Kirk and Iseabail Macleod (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming)
1993)
—— , ‘Sermon Literature’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 151–74
Tulloch, Graham, A History of the Scots Bible (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1989)
Wakelin, Martyn F., ‘The Manuscripts of Mirk’s Festial’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 1
(1967), 93–118
Dating Wynkyn de Worde’s Devotional,
Homiletic, and Other Texts, 1501–11
Joseph J. Gwara
I
n his illustrated monograph on the English and Scottish printing types of the
sixteenth century, Frank Isaac identified many of the typographical features
that scholars now use to date the undated post-1500 output of Wynkyn de
Worde (d. 1534/5).1 (For illustrations of Isaac’s letter forms, which I reference
throughout the present study, see Figure 3. I have updated his nomenclature
with the addition of early w2 and hooked w2.) As Isaac pointed out, when De
Worde moved from Westminster to London in late 1500 or early 1501 (pre-
sumably to join the Stationers’ Company and solidify his commercial advan-
tage in the London book trade, then in the vicinity of St Paul’s Cathedral), he
brought with him two texturas (Gothic or ‘black letter’ fonts) that he employed
routinely for both English and Latin printing: (1) Duff 4, introduced during
1
Isaac, English and Scottish Printing Types, unpaginated section on Wynkyn de Worde. This
monograph supersedes two other studies by Isaac: ‘Types Used by Wynkyn de Worde, 1501–34’,
which mistakenly reproduces early w2 for small w2 in the keyplate (p. 397), and English Printers’
Types of the Sixteenth Century, which omits many details. On Wynkyn de Worde, who inherited
William Caxton’s Westminster printing business and turned it into one of the most success-
ful printing operations in London, see Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade, pp. 173–74;
Duff, The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of Westminster and London, pp. 23–37, 129–40;
Blake, ‘Wynkyn de Worde: The Early Years’; and Blake, ‘Wynkyn de Worde: The Later Years’.
For ease of reference I use the following abbreviations throughout the present article: BMC xi
= Catalogue of Books Printed in the xvth Century Now in the British Library, Part 11: England;
Hodnett = Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535; and STC = Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-
Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Joseph J. Gwara (gwara@usna.edu) teaches Spanish language, literature, and culture at the
United States Naval Academy.
194 Joseph J. Gwara
s2 s3 w1
STC 21430 [1507], STC 18779 [1505?], STC 5199 (1506),
sig. A2r sig. A5v sig. S3r
early w2 small w2 hooked w2

STC 15377 (1503), STC 6034 (1507), STC 6033.5 (1506),
sig. 2A5r sig. [B]2r sig. A5r
w5a w3 large w2
STC 24878.5 STC 23876 STC 15398
(4 Sept. 1507), (14 Sept. 1510), (10 Dec. 1507),
sig. g1v sig. 2B6r sig. N4v
y1 y2
STC 15377 (1503), STC 6033.5 (1506),
sig. 2A5r sig. A4r
Figure 3. Letter Forms Referenced in the Present Study.
the course of 1493, and (2) Duff 8, first seen in STC 11602 (19 April 1499)
(for illustrations of these fonts, see Figures 4 and 5, respectively).2 Duff 4, Isaac
explained, lasted only a few years, but Duff 8 soon became De Worde’s ‘work-
2
The Duff type numbers come from Duff, Fifteenth Century English Books, pls XIV (Type 4)
and XVIII (Type 8). An updated version of this catalogue has been published as Printing in
England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Hellinga. The dates by which De Worde introduced
these fonts can be found in BMC xi (pp. 371–74, 377), which mistakenly gives 9 April 1499 as
the colophon date of STC 11602 (p. 377). (For an index to the STC items referenced through-
out this study, see Appendix 1.)
Dating Wynkyn de Worde’s Texts, 1501–11 195
horse’ textura and remained in near constant use until the printer’s death and
beyond, in the hands of his successor, John Byddell (d. 1545?). For Duff 8 in
particular, Isaac established a broad chronology for the replenishment of sorts
for s, w, and y — three letter forms that commonly serve as font discriminants in
early English printing. These typographical benchmarks allowed later scholars
to assign approximate production dates to many of De Worde’s undated books
and fragments. The editors of the revised STC, for instance, combined Isaac’s
findings with the evidence of woodcuts (especially the states of De Worde’s
devices and larger illustrations) to date many previously unstudied examples
of the printer’s sixteenth-century output. Understandably, however, Isaac’s
approach had its limitations. His research was based on the corpus of De Worde
items in the British Museum during the 1920s, and his goal of describing the
types used by all the sixteenth-century printers of England and Scotland meant
that no font could be studied in detail. Despite the value of Isaac’s discoveries,
therefore, we are far from reaching the point of diminishing returns when it
comes to dating the sixteenth-century De Worde.
In the present study I reassess the evidence for dating De Worde’s undated
output from 1501 to 1511, an eleven-year period representing the first third
of his time in London. Focusing on STC items printed in De Worde’s two
main textura fonts, I refine Isaac’s methodologies and propose new dating tech-
niques. In Section I, I discuss the dating implications of font subsets — discrete
texturas that have been misidentified as the same owing to their superficial sim-
ilarities. Since, as I show, these types invariably lasted only two or three years, it
is possible to redate certain books and fragments if their STC dates fall outside
the documented period of use for the types in question. In Section II, I analyse
more fully the evolution of Duff 4 and Duff 8 based on the typographical char-
acteristics of approximately 175 books, broadsides, and fragments. Examining
items line by line and letter by letter, I track the emergence and disappear-
ance of foul sorts — individual pieces of cast-metal type which do not belong
to a given font or which stand out as anomalies in a given type case — in De
Worde’s earliest London corpus. Such foul sorts serve as reliable discriminants
for the fonts and cases that De Worde used over an extended period of time.
On the strength of this evidence, I propose revised dates for more than forty
STC items and assign two others to a different printer.3 Finally, in Section III,
I discuss the dating evidence provided by the characteristic set of five-line gro-
tesque initials that De Worde used in the items printed at his Fleet Street shop.
Depicting fanciful animals, distorted human faces, or exotic foliage, these let-
ters often incurred significant damage during use, owing in part to the fineness
3
A complete list of the STC items for which I propose new dates is given in Appendix 2.
196 Joseph J. Gwara
Figure 4. STC 15377 (1503), sig. D3r (reduced), illustrating Duff 4 with s1, early w2, y1,
and large w2 (as capital). Reproduced by permission of the Library of Congress.
of their carving. I show how the states of certain cuts, which reflect the progres-
sive deterioration of the blocks themselves, can be used to corroborate the dates
proposed for several books on the basis of their types.
In providing a more accurate calendar of De Worde’s London output, this
study promises to refine our understanding of the broader trends and cycles in
printing and book consumption in early Tudor England, especially in the area
of religious literature, a publishing category in which De Worde seems to have
specialized. A survey of the titles printed at De Worde’s printing office (on Fleet
Street, at the sign of the Sun) reveals the degree to which religious texts con-
sumed the shop’s resources. For decades, De Worde issued moral and devotional
works for a literate lay audience, liturgical and doctrinal works for the clergy, and
spiritual works with crossover appeal to lay and religious readers alike.4 Sermons
and manuals for preachers occupied high-profile positions on De Worde’s ‘list’,
pointing to the existence of a ready market for pastoral aids. For example, the
celebrated sermon collection of John Mirk, The festyuall, must have provided the
Sun with a steady income: two editions were issued between 1501 and 1512 —
STC 17971 (11 May 1508) and 17971.5 (1 August 1511) — with several oth-
ers to follow.5 The major source of Mirk’s sermons, the Legenda aurea, illustrates
the gradual expansion of De Worde’s business during this period, with a quarto
excerpt dating from c. 1503 (STC 24880.5), an unabridged folio edition shared
with Richard Pynson in 1507 (STC 24878.3–5), and a second folio edition that
De Worde issued on his own in 1512 (STC 24879). These larger books stand as
critical guideposts amid the vast confusing swirl of smaller undated tracts, mainly
religious, that emanated from the presses at the sign of the Sun. Obviously,
the efficient production of all these items required the management of finite
resources, and the present study aims to answer a few basic questions about the
allocation of these resources. In this regard, a more precise chronology of De
Worde’s early London output — a reflection of the nuts and bolts of his newly
established operation — can help us determine how effectively he responded to
the ebb and flow of consumer demand for reading material a decade after acquir-
ing Caxton’s business.6
4
For general comments on De Worde’s output, see Bennett, English Books & Readers, 1475
to 1557, pp. 69–70, 182–93. Only educational works rivalled De Worde’s religious output in
quantity.
5
On the printed editions of Mirk’s collection, see Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, i, pp. lv–lvii.
We cannot discount the possibility that De Worde printed other editions of The festyuall that
have disappeared without trace.
6
Three considerations are essential to the chronological arguments made in the following
pages. First, I accept the conclusion that De Worde dated his books from 1 January, at least
198 Joseph J. Gwara
Figure 5. STC 17971 (11 May 1508), sig. F3r, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, small w2, y2,
foul w1, and foul early w2 sorts. Reproduced by permission of the Library of Congress.
I. Duff 8: A Collection of Fonts

Since the days of Duff and Isaac, scholars have regarded Duff 8 as a unitary font,
one that De Worde regularly replenished with new sorts until his death. As late
as 2007, for instance, the authors of BMC xi confidently asserted that Duff 8
‘continued in use with some replacements’ up to 1534. 7 Notwithstanding the
wide acceptance of this position, however, the label ‘Duff 8’ actually conceals
an assortment of superficially similar texturas, most of which have never been
adequately distinguished. These fonts were deployed alongside the real Duff
8, a 95 mm textura that evolved regularly over the years. A fine example of a
pseudo-Duff 8 font is the ‘spiky’ 93/94 mm textura with s2, w3, and y1 sorts that
was used to print ten De Worde items dated between c. 1518 and c. 1521: STC
10628 [1518?], 11721.7 [1518?], 14077c.83 [c. 1518], 23956 [1518–19?],
14043.5 (3 January 1519), 17973.5 (5 May 1519), 20894.7 (1519), 10631
[1520?], 23111.5 [1520?], and 7725.9 [1521?].8 Significantly, these items also
exhibit a brand new set of grotesque initials and a newly cut printer’s device.9 As
I argue elsewhere, this font and its associated woodcuts were probably acquired
in late 1518 to replace older material that had left the Sun with Robert Copland
in 1515 and John Scolar in 1517.10 Given that this ‘spiky’ textura disappears by
between 1498 and 1509, as demonstrated by Duff, The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of
Westminster and London, pp. 31, 134–35. My own survey of De Worde’s books from 1501 to
1511 substantiates this claim, although I am unaware of more recent studies of the phenom-
enon. Second, many books incorporate surplus sheets from earlier editions, a practice that has
the potential to skew dating results based on types, especially if the editions are separated by only
a year or two. In a few cases, I draw attention to the likely reuse of earlier sheets in later editions,
but my findings will have to be validated by additional research — either an analysis of paper
stocks or a more nuanced type study. Finally, as recognized by STC, De Worde’s corpus con-
tains at least four books whose colophon dates were repeated from earlier editions used as copy:
(1) STC 22409 (8 December 1508), printed c. 1516; (2) STC 10903a (12 June 1509), printed
c. 1514; (3) STC 10904 (12 June 1509), printed c. 1519; and (4) STC 23427a.7, printed c. 1514
but containing a preface dated ‘ad Idus Aprilis Anni.M.D.X.’ (sig. π1v). To this list I am able to
add only one item, which falls outside the chronological range of my study corpus: STC 17973.5
(5 May 1519), whose mensual date may well have been copied from STC 17972 (5 May 1515).
7
BMC xi, 377.
8
Since this font has not been classified, I describe it by the standard measurement (in mil-
limetres) of twenty consecutive lines of type and by its characteristic sorts (following Isaac’s
nomenclature).
9
The new device is McKerrow no. 20, which replaced McKerrow no. 19. See McKerrow,
Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, pp. 7–8.
10
See Gwara, ‘Three Forms of w and Four English Printers’, pp. 204–07. The font was origi-
200 Joseph J. Gwara
1521 and that Duff 8 begins exhibiting large concentrations of w3 and y1 sorts
as early as March 1520, I conclude that the 93/94 mm font had been distrib-
uted throughout all the Sun’s Duff 8 cases by that time. This deduction would
suggest that STC 7725.9 was actually printed between 1518 and early 1520.
For the period 1501 to 1511, I have identified one subset of De Worde
items whose typographical characteristics have an impact on their dating and
attribution. Fourteen books and fragments are printed in a 91/92 mm Norman
textura characterized by variants of s2 and y2 and by an oversized lowercase
w similar (but not identical) to w3: STC 15579.4 [1505?], 23140.5 [1507?],
10902 (16 June 1508), 20875.5 (4 February 1508), 10900 (1509), 10901
[1509–10], 10903 (12 June 1509), 15258 (1509), 18566 (23 March 1509),
23164 (1509), 23195.5 [1509? B3:4 and quire C only], 15908.5 (1510; cal-
endar only), 24240 [1510? Huntington and Folger copies only], and 25707.5
[c. 1515] (see Figure 6).11 Judging by the dated books, this font must have been
used for only a short time, between 1508 and 1510, when De Worde’s printing
activity was at its peak. Consequently, I would revise the conjectural dates of
STC 15579.4 [1505?], 23140.5 [1507?], and 25707.5 [c. 1515] to [1508–10?],
while acknowledging that the font may have been used slightly earlier, though
almost certainly not later.
The origin of this 91/92 mm textura is a mystery, but it may be related to
a font used by Richard Pynson (d. 1529/30) for legal printing.12 As illustrated
by STC 21430–30a [1507] and STC 24878.3–8.5 (4 September 1507), De
Worde and Pynson were engaged in joint publishing ventures as early as 1507,
and it is conceivable that their business relations continued beyond that time. I
suspect, in fact, that they may have shared printing for Margaret Beaufort (b. 31
May 1443), the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII, who is
known for her patronage of the early printers, including Caxton, De Worde,
nally used by the partnership of Henry Watson and Hugh Goes, who together set up a printing
business at Charing Cross around 1512.
11
The types in STC 13075 [1509], which I have been unable to measure, resemble the
91/92 mm textura referenced here, but I suspect that the font is actually Richard Pynson’s
130 mm textura. I would tentatively ascribe this broadside to Pynson.
12
Cf. Isaac, English and Scottish Printing Types, unpaginated section on Richard Pynson,
fig. 19. Pynson, a Norman immigrant who specialized in legal printing and who had assumed the
post of king’s printer by 6 January 1506, was also a major figure in the early English book trade.
Together, he and De Worde dominated the English market in printed books until the 1530s.
For an up-to-date biography see the entry in the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
<http://www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 23 May 2013]. The best introduction to Pynson’s early
printing remains Johnston, ‘A Study of the Career and Literary Publications of Richard Pynson’.
Figure 6. STC 10902, sig. 2a2r, illustrating De Worde’s 91/92 mm textura with s2, y2,
and oversized w. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
202 Joseph J. Gwara
and Pynson.13 Such a partnership would explain why this font disappeared in
1510, less than a year after Lady Margaret’s death in June 1509 (the calendar
of STC 15908.5, in fact, may have been printed as early as 1509).14 Another
possibility is that the font left the Sun around 1509 when Henry Watson, De
Worde’s first London apprentice, was freed. Perhaps De Worde gave or sold
Watson old printing material — including this font — to launch his own print-
ing business, arguably as a condition of his apprenticeship.15 If so, no books
printed with this textura and bearing Watson’s own colophon have survived.
II. A Preliminary Survey of Duff 4 and Duff 8

As I have observed, a comprehensive re-examination of the two major texturas
used by De Worde in the sixteenth century, Duff 4 and Duff 8, is long overdue.
In the following section, I discuss the post-1500 evolution of both these fonts,
focusing on the abrupt disappearance of Duff 4 between 1503 and 1505 and
the related emergence of Duff 8 as De Worde’s ‘workhorse’ textura. I go on
to itemize several of the typographical characteristics of Duff 8 at the level of
the individual STC item — book, broadside, or fragment — for every year
from 1501 to 1511, using sorts for s, w, y, and capital W as approximate guides
to dating and classification. In rare instances, I break down the typographical
evidence by quire or forme, allowing me to make preliminary observations on
the distribution of Duff 8 among various pairs of type cases. As time allows, I
plan to refine these conclusions, eventually classifying all the sixteenth-century
types employed at the Sun as well as the type cases that housed them. For now,
however, my analysis must remain provisional and incomplete, especially as it
concerns Latin books, which do not generally require w-sorts, the single most
important discriminant in De Worde’s pre-1514 printing. (The appearance of a
new s-sort in 1514 greatly simplifies the analysis of Duff 8 in De Worde’s Latin
books after this time, a significant advantage given the volume of elementary
Latin grammars that he began printing around 1515.)
13
On Margaret Beaufort’s relations with De Worde and Pynson, see especially Powell,
‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, pp. 211–39. Also useful is Jones and Underwood, The
King’s Mother, pp. 182–87.
14
The strongest evidence that these types were used at the Sun — and not at Pynson’s shop
(at the sign of the George) — is a single foul small w2 sort, De Worde’s usual lowercase w start-
ing in late 1506 or early 1507. Perhaps De Worde acquired the types from Pynson.
15
For details, see Gwara, ‘Three Forms of w and Four English Printers’, pp. 200–04.
1501–04
To my knowledge, the last dated De Worde books printed in Duff 4 are STC
15377 (1503) and STC 17249 (1503).16 Theoretically, therefore, De Worde
could have ceased using this font as early as 1503, after completing work on
these two items. At the same time, however, no direct evidence proves that
Duff 4 was not in use at the Sun in 1504, and it is conceivable that one or
more of the numerous undated books and fragments printed in this font were
issued in that year. Significantly, the remnants of Duff 4 were in the hands of
the York printer Hugh Goes by 1505, the date referenced in STC 14077c.81
[1505], which I recently identified as the earliest dated example of York print-
ing (see Figure 7).17 At minimum, then, all sixteenth-century De Worde items
printed in Duff 4 predate 1505, leading me to propose a revised date range of
[1501–04?] for two Duff 4 fragments imprecisely dated by STC: STC 19207a
[c. 1505] and 19208 [c. 1505]. By the same token, the date of [1507] assigned
to STC 13685.5, which is also printed in Duff 4, is far too late. As I discuss in
Section III below, the presence of the grotesque initial A on sig. [aA]1v suggests
a date of [1502–04?]. Similarly, STC 24880.5 [1501?], which is also in Duff 4,
is too early by at least a year, given that another variant of grotesque A appears
on sig. A8v. Although I am confident that the sixteenth-century books that
De Worde printed with Duff 4, as well as many other items from the fifteenth
century, could be dated with greater precision, I have not undertaken a detailed
examination of the evidence. The remainder of this section will therefore con-
cern the evolution of Duff 8.
1505–06
In almost all books printed in Duff 8 before 1507, the usual lowercase w is early
w2, which is also the standard lowercase w-sort in Duff 4. Six pre-1507 items
also exhibit a tiny number of foul hooked w2 sorts similar to those employed by
16
The conflicting dates of STC 15377 (1503) and STC 15376 (1502) have never been
adequately explained. A cursory comparison reveals that these editions have no substantive dif-
ferences except for their dates. Unless ‘1502’ is simply a misprint that was corrected during the
course of printing, I assume that the date was altered for some other reason, perhaps because the
edition straddled the calendar year.
17
Gwara, ‘Three Forms of w and Four English Printers’, p. 169 n. 22. Also printed by Goes
is STC 1987 [1505–09?], which is misdated to [1500] and wrongly attributed to De Worde
by STC, BMC xi (p. 91), and Coates and others, A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth
Century Now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ii, 700–01 (B-591). The earliest known edition of
Sir Bevis of Hampton is now STC 1987.5 [c. 1500].
204 Joseph J. Gwara
Hugh Goes: STC 20439.3 [1502?], 3295 [1505?], 788 (1506), 12139 [1506?],
17033.7 [1506?], and 21298 [1506?].18 With the obvious exception of STC
788, these books likely predate 1505, which is demonstrably true in the case of
STC 3295, as I discuss in Section III below. Five other dated books from 1506
also have foul hooked w2 sorts, but they are commingled with foul w1 sorts:
STC 6033.5 (1506), 9357.4 (1506), 12381 (1506), 14863 (1506), and 21259
(1506) (see Figure 8). The blend of early w2 with foul w1and foul hooked w2
sorts is unique to books from 1506, confirming the conjectural date assigned
to STC 11721.5 [1506?] and suggesting a revised date of [1506?] for five other
books and fragments with the same foul-sort profile: STC 12945 [1504?],
15579.5 [1507?], 20107 [1509?], 20034 [1510], and 22597.5 [c. 1510].19
The foul w1 sorts in De Worde’s 1506 textura cases arguably came from another
font in use at the Sun between 1504 and 1506, a 95mm textura with a blend of
w1 and early w2 sorts in the lowercase w-box (see Figure 9). This font was used
to print several items, most notably STC 792 (21 January 1505), 7761 [1505],
and 5199 (1506). I strongly suspect that these types, either an entire case or a
supplement of w1 sorts, were obtained from Richard Pynson, whose own 95 mm
textura (Duff 7) is virtually identical to De Worde’s, at least in some states.20
Certainly, w1 is a typical Pynson w-sort during this period, and the types seem to
disappear from the Sun after 1506, suggesting that the cases were removed from
the premises late that year. This evidence, though admittedly inconclusive, leads
me to speculate that when Hugh Goes departed for York around 1504 in posses-
sion of Duff 4, the Sun was left with a deficit in type. Under the circumstances,
De Worde had to obtain a temporary font until a replacement for Duff 4 could
be cast or purchased. His source, evidently, was Richard Pynson, suggesting that
their well-known collaboration, documented only in 1507 (STC 21430–30a,
24878.3–5), may have begun a few years earlier than previously supposed, and
lasted a few years longer, as we have seen. Confirmation of this deduction will
require a closer examination of Pynson’s sixteenth-century output.
The earliest known De Worde book printed in this w1/early w2 textura is
STC 7016.2 [1503–04], a slim Donatus that uses two w1 sorts for ‘wynandum
de worde’ in the colophon. The presence of these sorts makes it more likely that
this item was printed in 1504–05, since w1 is not attested in De Worde’s out-
18
These hooked w2 sorts may have come from a case of Latin type, judging by STC 14863
(1506), in which they appear to have been used intentionally as capitals.
19
I would also assign STC 14505.5 [c. 1510] to De Worde, redating it to [1506?]. STC
attributes the book to Richard Pynson.
20
See BMC xi, 377, 405–06.
Figure 7. STC 14077c.81 [York: Hugh Goes, 1505] (reduced), illustrating Duff 4
with hooked w2 sorts. Reproduced by permission of Nottingham University Library.
206 Joseph J. Gwara
Figure 8. STC 6033.5 (1506), sig. A5r, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, early w2, y2, and
foul hooked w2 sorts. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 9. STC 5199 (1506), sig. A5v, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, y2, w1, and
early w2 sorts. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
208 Joseph J. Gwara
Figure 10. STC 6034, sig. B2r (mis-signed ‘A2’), illustrating Duff 8 with s2, small w2, y2,
and foul w1 sorts. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
put as early as 1503. By the same token, STC 792 (21 January 1505), a folio of
seventy-one edition sheets (the total number of sheets in an ideal copy of a given
edition), must have been in production toward the end of 1504, whereas STC
5199 (1506), a thick quarto of 54½ edition sheets, could have occupied composi-
tors and pressmen in late 1505, if the book had been published in the first few
months of 1506. As the editors of the revised STC recognized, therefore, two
undated fragments that commingle w1 and early w2 sorts almost certainly date
from 1505–06: STC 13603.7 [1505?] and STC 1805.7 [c. 1505]. A later state of
this case is attested in STC 5728 [1505?], 13689 [1506?], and 7502.5 [1508?], all
of which were most likely printed in late 1506, after De Worde had begun using
his new textura. Aside from w1 and early w2, these items exhibit a number of foul
small w2 sorts, the standard form of lowercase w in this recently acquired font.21
1507–08
In late 1506 (or possibly early 1507), early w2 was replaced with a new lower-
case w, commonly referred to as small w2, which remained the primary form
of lowercase w at the Sun until De Worde’s death in 1534/5.22 As a matter of
fact, all books dated (or datable to) 1507 are characterized by these small w2
sorts in conjunction with low-density w1 fouling: STC 6034 (1507), 15398
(10 December 1507), 21430–30a [1507], and 24878.3–5 (4 Sept. 1507) (see
Figure 10). The last three books also exhibit rare early w2 fouling, with an
appreciably lower concentration of sorts for early w2 than for w1. Significantly,
the distribution of foul w-sorts in STC 24878.3–5 indicates that this mas-
sive folio of 203 edition sheets (omitting the thirty-edition-sheet supplement
found only in the Pynson variant, STC 24878.5, which I have not examined)
was actually set from two or more pairs of cases. At least one case and possibly
a second had w1 and early w2 fouling, as seen in most other dated books from
1507; another case is characterized by w5a sorts. These w5a sorts were set rou-
21
Another book assigned to this period — STC 18779 [1505?] — was most likely printed
around 1515. This fragment has Hodnett no. 1121 (p. 292) in its fully cracked state, as seen in
1518, while the font exhibits a handful of foul s3 sorts, a characteristic of books from 1514–16.
The early date was first suggested by Mead, ‘A New Title from De Worde’s Press’, p. 45. Also poten-
tially much later is STC 14077c.14a [c. 1505], but the typographical evidence is more equivocal.
22
Some early w 2 sorts may have survived in cases reserved for printing Latin books.
Anomalous examples appear in the colophons of STC 254 (19 March 1510) and STC 268.3
(29 April 1510) and in the running heads of STC 20436 (17 January 1510). Otherwise, I have
not encountered the consistent use of early w2 sorts in any De Worde item after 1506.
210 Joseph J. Gwara
Figure 11. STC 24878.3 (4 September 1507), sig. O6r (reduced), illustrating supplemental w5a sorts.
Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Library.
tinely after ‘tall s’, most often in the words ‘answered’ and ‘sweet’; they were also
used infrequently to supplement the lowercase w-box (e.g., f7r, k6v, m6v, n5r,
y7r, y8r, L2r, O1r, O5v, O6r, O7v, O8v, X7v, 2A6r, 2E1v) (see Figure 11). Given
that w5a sorts are more typical of Pynson’s typography, it is possible that De
Worde obtained a certain quantity of these letters from Pynson, perhaps as sup-
plements to facilitate the production of this mammoth volume.
Two quartos dated 1508, STC 9351a (1508) and STC 17971 (11 May
1508), share the typographical profile of most books from 1507: s2, small w2, y2,
large w2 for capital W, fairly routine w1 fouling, and rare early w2 fouling. STC
3289 (1508) has a single foul w1 sort (sig. A5r) but no foul sorts for early w2,
perhaps owing to the relatively small size of the type sample. Surprisingly, no
dated book from 1508 exhibits w5a sorts, but STC 13604 [1508] indicates that
another case was employed at the Sun, one with no foul w-sorts of any kind.
This case was also used to set quires B–E of STC 12091 [c. 1510], a book dat-
able to c. 1508 on the basis of the early state of the device. In contrast, the first
quire of this volume — tellingly signed ‘a’ (lowercase) instead of ‘A’ (uppercase)
— was set from a parallel case, this one with w5a sorts, as seen in the first half of
STC 24878.3–5. Pending a more detailed analysis of the evidence, I speculate
that De Worde owned a minimum of four pairs of cases for English books, two
with foul w1 and/or early w2 sorts, one with small w2 sorts only, and one with
small w2 and foul w5a sorts. It is conceivable that the w5a case used to set por-
tions of STC 24878.3–5 was redistributed into two cases after the completion
of that folio, with w5a sorts being placed into one case but not the other.
In view of the distinctive typographical features of books from 1507–08, I
am able to corroborate the conjectural dates proposed by STC for STC 3263.5
[1507?], 3543 [1507?], 23164.2 [1507?], 7706 [1508?], and 25007 [1508?],
although a date range of [1507–08?] would be more accurate. To this period
I would also assign STC 12943.5 [1509?], 24541.3 [1509?], 17012 [1510?],
17030.5 [1510?], 21286.3 [c. 1510], 24133.5 [1510?], and 14806 [1511?].
It should be noted that STC 15257.5 [c. 1507], a two-folio fragment of The
Fifteen Joys of Marriage, could not have been printed before 1507, since it has
small w2 sorts and one foul w1 sort (sig. C4v); in the absence of further evi-
dence, I would date this fragment to [1507–08?].
1509
Dated books and broadsides from 1509, one of De Worde’s most productive
years, differ significantly from those printed in 1507–08. One subset of STC
212 Joseph J. Gwara
items exhibits foul w1 and/or foul early w2 sorts along with w5a sorts: STC
12943 (1509), 14546.3 (1509), 19305 (1509), and 21007 (1509) (see Figure
12). The distribution of foul w-sorts in STC 21007, the longest book in this
group, supports the deduction that De Worde owned two very similar pairs
of cases, one with w5a plus foul w1 sorts (quires A–H) and the other with w5a
plus foul w1 and early w2 sorts (quires I–Q). This division may reflect the states
of two of the cases used for STC 24878.3–5 (4 September 1507), granting
the deliberate addition of w5a sorts to each of their lowercase w-boxes. By all
appearances, STC 4592 [1509?] and STC 17537 [1509–10?] were set from
one or the other of these cases, as was STC 5456.3 [1519?], which has w1, early
w2, and w5a fouling.
A second subset of books or portions of books was obviously set from the
same cases used for STC 13604 and for the last four quires of STC 12091, as
they contain no foul w-sorts of any kind: STC 3547 (6 July 1509), quire A
and the full sheet of quire B of STC 23195.5 [1509?], STC 24571.3 [c. 1510],
and STC 5609.5 [1519?]. I suspect that all undated items in this group were
printed between 1508 (possibly 1507) and the middle of 1509. The parallel
case with small w2 and w5a sorts, in contrast, was used to set a handful of books
and portions of books: STC 20881.3 [c. 1510], quires B–F of STC 17841
(1510), and STC 14649 [c. 1515]. This case may also have been used to set
STC 7761.7 [1509] and STC 13075.5 [1509], but the type sample in each of
these items — both fragmentary broadsides — is too small to know for certain.
As I discuss in the following section, the case with w5a sorts was evidently modi-
fied again in 1510.
A third subset of books from c. 1509 is characterized by the use of sorts for
w , a brand new style of w intermediate in size between small w2 and large w2.
3
This sort was evidently introduced as a capital, but it routinely appears with
lowercase w-sorts due to pervasive fouling. Three STC items exhibit w3 sorts
only, as both capitals and lowercase letters, in combination with sorts for s2
and y2: STC 7761.3 [1509], 7762.3 [1509], and 23155.9 [1509?]. These typo-
graphically anomalous items, two broadside proclamations and a Stanbridge
grammar, may have been set from cases intended for Law French (the archaic
language used in the English legal tradition) or Latin. Significantly, we find w3
exclusively, together with s2 and y2, in a series of four Law French books which
STC dates to [1510–11?] but which may have been printed as early as 1509:
STC 9612 [1510?], 9613a [1510?], 9615.7 [1510?], and 23878.5 [1511?].23 As
23
A fifth book in Law French, STC 9912.5 [1510?], may have been set from the same
cases, but I have not examined the types in detail.
Figure 12. STC 21007, sig. A2r, illustrating Duff 8 with s2, small w2, y2, foul w1,
and foul w5a sorts. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
214 Joseph J. Gwara
I shall discuss, De Worde occasionally deployed his Law French cases for parts
of English books in 1510. Similarly, quires A–B of STC 23142 [1510?], which
use w3 exclusively as a capital letter and small w2 exclusively as a lowercase let-
ter, may have been set from a Latin case, since I have not encountered this exact
type combination in any other De Worde book in English. Nevertheless, these
four items may have been set from the same English case if we assume that all
the w-sorts used in STC 7761.3, 7762.3, and 23155.9 came from the capital
box, perhaps because the lowercase box had been depleted in setting a concur-
rent project or because the w-sorts had been divided between two cases.
Another c. 1509 book, STC 10891 [1509], has a blend of w 3 and large w2
in the capital box and a single foul w3 in the lowercase box (with small w2).
This distribution pattern is also seen in quire C of STC 23142 [1510?], a book
I would redate to [1509?] on the basis of the w 3 evidence. The same case may
have been used to set STC 14522 [1510–13], which could have been printed in
1509 as well, judging by the state of the device. As I shall discuss with respect to
books from 1510, the case used to set STC 10891 and quire C of STC 23142
apparently evolved from the one that originally had no foul w-sorts of any kind.
It should be noted that STC 12953 [1509] has w 3 sorts as well, but only in
conjunction with w5a fouling. This book, ostensibly the first edition of a poem
written by Stephen Hawes on the occasion of Henry VIII’s coronation, may
well be a 1510 reprint, perhaps intended as an anniversary token.
1510
Books from 1510 again show significant differences from those printed the
year before, partly because De Worde seems to have retired his older cases with
foul w1 and early w2 sorts. Especially noteworthy is the wide diffusion of w3
sorts, which had made their way into all of the Sun’s cases by this time, either
by accident (as fouls) or by design (as supplements). Broadly speaking, books
fall into three recognizable categories suggesting different pairs of cases or dif-
ferent states of the same cases. One complete book and two fragments, for
example, have a tiny number of foul w3 sorts in the lowercase box while using
large w2 exclusively as a capital letter: STC 708.5 (28 February 1510), 14648
[1510], and 19596 (1510) (see Figure 13).24 Another group of items exhibits
24
Bibliographers have not noticed that STC 708.5 is represented only by quires C and
H and by G3–6; the remainder of this book was printed around 1532. These facts explain the
otherwise baffling presence of wormholes in Hodnett no. 1090e (formerly no. 1486) on sig. B3r
a variable mix of w3 and large w2 sorts in the capital box but no w3 fouls in the
lowercase box: quires E–G of STC 14518 [1510?], STC 17026 [1510?], and
sigs. A2r, A7v, A8r, A8v, H1r, and H4v (at least) of STC 14864 (1510). By all
appearances, the types used to set these books were also employed for STC
23876 (14 September 1510), the first edition of Andrew Chertsey’s celebrated
translation of The floure of the commaundementes of god. This massive folio of
144 edition sheets exhibits a variable number of w3 sorts in both lower- and
uppercase positions across all gatherings. Given that STC 708.5 was completed
on 28 February, it is possible that the cases with foul w3 sorts were used for full-
length books until the spring of 1510, after which time they were reserved for
STC 23876 except when they may have been needed for smaller projects of
only a few sheets.
A second group of books from c. 1510 exhibits foul w3 sorts in conjunction
with foul w5a sorts: STC 12953 [1509], 14323 [1510?], quires A–D of STC
14518 [1510?], STC 15345 [1510?], 17016 (1510), quire G of STC 17841
(1510), and STC 23164.6 [1510?]. The fact that the types used to set the first
four quires of STC 14518 differ from those used to set the last three substanti-
ates my deduction that the Sun had a minimum of two pairs of English cases.
The one used for this particular subset of books most likely evolved from the
c. 1508 case containing foul w5a sorts, as seen in quires B–F of STC 17841
(1510). Significantly, quire A of this book has sorts for w 3 mixed in with a
smaller number of sorts for small w2, large w2, and w5a. This quire, therefore,
must have been set from an entirely different case, ostensibly the one used for
Law French but in a later state, with supplemental w-sorts. In addition, sig. E3v
of STC 17841 exhibits an unusual concentration of twelve w3 sorts in the first
sixteen lines of the text, whereas quire G has thirty-three w3 sorts, with a maxi-
mum of twelve per forme. Presumably, the w3 sorts on sig. E3v were introduced
as type supplements — perhaps from the Law French case — and re-emerged in
quire G. I suspect that a high percentage of foul w5a sorts and a smaller number
of w3 sorts were purged after the completion of STC 17841; certainly, no later
book exhibits the same high concentrations of foul w5a sorts. By this logic, STC
17016, the only other book from 1510 with a similarly large number of foul w5a
sorts, must have been printed just before STC 17841.
Rounding out the year 1510 are two items which, like quire A of STC
17841, were set from De Worde’s Law French case in a later state, containing
sorts for small w2, large w2, w3, and w5a: STC 14864 (1510) (except for sigs.
of STC 708.5 (Hodnett, ‘Additions and Corrections’, p. 3).

216 Joseph J. Gwara
Figure 13. STC 708.5, sig C4r, illustrating Duff 8 with foul w3 sort (l. 18: ‘was’).
Reproduced by permission of the British Library, London.
A2r, A7v, A8r, A8v, H1r, and H4v) and the outer sheet (signed ‘A’) of quire 2A
of STC 15579.6 [c. 1510]. The rest of STC 15579.6, the quired-in sheet of 2A
(signed ‘AA’) plus quires 2B–2E, was printed with a different case stocked with
small w2 sorts in the lowercase box. The state of the printer’s device in this book
leads me to think that it was actually printed in 1511–12 and that the sheet
signed ‘A’ of quire 2A comes from an earlier edition.
1511
Dated books from 1511 exhibit recognizable fouling patterns that coincide
with the type cases I have provisionally identified for 1510. At least three books,
for example, exhibit only foul w3 sorts, a sign that they were probably set from
the case(s) used for STC 23876: STC 6573 (1511), 20108 (1511), and 21336
(1511). Four other dated books from 1511 exhibit a combination of foul w3
and w5a sorts, as seen in the parallel English case: STC 5574 (1511), 17971.5 (1
August 1511), 18567 (1511), and 22409.5 (1511). The fouls in the last item,
however, occur only in quire C, suggesting that the rest of the book could have
been set from the cases with foul w3 only. The typographical landscape of De
Worde’s 1511 books will only become clear following an in-depth analysis of
STC 24879 (15 February 1512), a new edition of the massive Legenda aurea
that must have been in production for most of 1511.
III. Ornamental Initials: The Grotesques

The classification of ornamental initials in early sixteenth-century English
printing, together with the identification of their various states, remains virgin
territory. Writing in 1924, Henry R. Plomer commented that a conspectus of
such initials was long overdue, a remark that remains valid to this day.25 In De
Worde’s corpus, a single family of ornamental letters, the grotesques, illustrates
the practical value of analysing such initials in dating undated books and frag-
ments. Although many early books exhibit grotesque capitals, including some
printed by De Worde in Westminster, the alphabet under discussion here con-
sists of twenty-three letters, the modern English alphabet minus J, U, and X,
which measure approximately 23 × 20 mm (five full lines of type in Duff 4 or
25
Plomer, English Printers’ Ornaments, pp. 90–91.
218 Joseph J. Gwara
Duff 8).26 Each initial existed in multiple blocks, and the gradual deterioration
of their design features, coupled with the dates of their acquisition or disposal,
can provide critical evidence for dating purposes, suggesting (at minimum) a
relative order of printing. An excellent example of this phenomenon is pro-
vided by one of the two variants of grotesque N in STC 21430–30a, the 1507
edition of The Boke of the Royall shared by De Worde and Pynson (see Figure
14, row A). On sig. A6r of this book, the outline of the foliage inside this let-
ter is complete, which is also how it appears in STC 792 (21 January 1505)
and STC 12412.5 [1506]; in subsequent quires of STC 21430–30a, however,
the foliage is broken, a feature encountered in all later books that incorporate
the same block. Aside from illustrating the general principle that a single book
can contain different states of the same initial, this grotesque proves that STC
items with the letter in its broken state necessarily postdate STC 21430–30a,
including, among undated items before 1512, STC 3263.5 [1507?].
The earliest dated books containing De Worde’s grotesques are STC 15376
(1502), 15377 (1503), and 16255 (12 April 1503). STC also lists three slightly
earlier books, all undated, which incorporate one initial each from the same
alphabet: STC 20878 [1500], 24224 [1500], and 24880.5 [1501?]. Since the
grotesque initials in books from 1502–03 are used selectively, it stands to rea-
son that compositors were plundering isolated cuts from a complete alphabet.
In all likelihood, this alphabet was acquired for an edition of The Ship of Fools
(now lost), a book that incorporates the grotesques as a part of its moralizing
illustration scheme. Only the slightest wear to some of these letters points to
their possible use before 1502–03, however, and I remain unconvinced that De
Worde owned them as early as 1500–01. Consequently, STC 20878, which has
a grotesque D on sig. A1r, and STC 24224, which has a grotesque T on fol. 1v,
were most likely printed in or after 1502 — but before 1505, given that both
are set in Duff 4. This conclusion has been corroborated, to a certain extent,
26
Many other English printers — Robert Copland, Henry Pepwell, Julian Notary, John
Skot, and Robert Wyer, to name a few — used such five-line grotesques, which were probably
of Parisian origin. The majority had originally belonged to De Worde, though some were prob-
ably acquired from his continental source or copied in London by local craftsmen. For sample
images, see Isaac, English and Scottish Printing Types, figs 28 ( Julian Notary), 47 ( John Scolar),
48 (Henry Pepwell), 58 (Robert Redman), 69b (Robert Wyer), and 80 (Thomas Godfray).
The most comprehensive assortment of De Worde’s five-line grotesques can be seen in STC
21430–30a [1507], 3547 (6 July 1509) and 23876 (14 September 1510). On grotesques in De
Worde’s incunables, see BMC xi, 378 (set 8: F, L, O, P) and 379 (singleton H). These letters
evidently came from the Low Countries.
by independent typographical analyses.27 Also set in Duff 4 is STC 24880.5,

which has a variant of grotesque A on sig. A8v (see Figure 14, row B). The state
of this cut reflects that in STC 15376 (1502) and 15377 (1503), although the
block remained in stable condition for many years afterwards. As with STC
20878 and STC 24224, I would redate this book to [1502–04?], although the
use of Duff 4 makes 1502–03 a more plausible date range. The same conclu-
sions apply to STC 13685.5, which exhibits another variant of grotesque A
on sig. [aA]1v, in conjunction with Duff 4 (see Figure 14, row C). The earliest
known state of this initial, which is also attested in STC 12381 (1506), shows
a crack to the serrated design at the top of the block; this part of the cut had
broken off by 23 March 1509 (STC 18566).
For the period 1501–11, the revised dates that I have proposed for at least
four books can be corroborated by the states of their grotesque initials. My
first example is STC 3295 [1505?], an edition of The Boke of Comforte whose
foul hooked w2 sorts suggest that it was printed before 1505. In this item, the
grotesque O on sig. A2r has decorative foliage in the upper and lower right-
hand corners of the block (see Figure 14, row D). In STC 792 (21 January
1505), however, and in all later books that incorporate the same cut — STC
21430–30a [1507], 3547 (6 July 1509), 19596 (1510), and 3547a (20 June
1517) — this foliage is absent. The gap in the outline to the right of the foliage
(by the figure’s snout) indicates that the block had sustained considerable dam-
age prior to 21 January 1505, a logical terminus ante quem for STC 3295. On
the strength of this evidence, therefore, I would assign STC 3295 a provisional
date of [1504?], which is consistent with its typographical characteristics.
My second example is STC 14806 [1511?], which I have grouped with STC
items datable to 1507–08 on the basis of their foul w1 and early w2 sorts. In this
book, sig. A2r has a variant of grotesque F, a cut that appears in much the same
state in STC 12381 (1506), 21430–30a [1507], and 17971 (11 May 1508)
(see Figure 14, row E). In STC 3547 (6 July 1509), however, the block is badly
broken, the right-hand figure and the lower right-hand crossbar having disap-
peared. Though obviously serviceable until July 1509, this cut must have been
discarded immediately afterwards, for it never appears again in English print-
ing. Under the circumstances, therefore, STC 14806 must have been printed
before STC 3547, substantiating the date of [1507–08?] that I have proposed
for this item.
27
In a study of De Worde’s fifteenth-century typography, Lotte Hellinga concludes that
STC 20878 was printed after 1500; see ‘Tradition and Renewal’, p. 30. Although Hellinga does
not include STC 24224 in this article, she firmly dates the book ‘after 1500’ in BMC xi (p. 92).
220 Joseph J. Gwara
A.
STC 21430 [1507], STC 21430 [1507], STC 3263.5 [1507?],

sig. A6r sig. P6v sig. Y2r
B.
STC 15377 (1503), STC 24880.5 [1501?],
sig. 2B5v sig. A8v
C.
STC 12381 (1506), STC 13685.5 [1507], STC 18566 (23 Mar. 1509),
sig. b1r sig. [aA]1v sig. A2r
D.
STC 3295 [1505?], STC 792 (21 Jan. 1505), STC 21430 [1507],
sig. A2r sig. 2B1r sig. S1v
E.
STC 14806 [1511?], STC 17971 (11 May 1508), STC 3547 (6 July 1509),
sig. A2r sig. P1v sig. G2v
F.
STC 15377 (1503), STC 12139 [1506?], STC 20057 [1508?], STC 3547 (6 July
sig. 2A5r sig. a1v sig. A4v 1509), sig. 2G4r
Figure 14. Grotesque Initials in Some of Wynkyn de Worde’s Books.

My final two examples, STC 21286.3 [c. 1510] and STC 25007 [1508?],
were demonstrably printed before STC 3547 as well. Each of these books con-
tains the same grotesque letter I, a block that De Worde used regularly for at
least thirty years, from 1502 (STC 15376) to 1532 (STC 17975, 25421.6) (see
Figure 14, row F). Owing to its frequent use, this cut is found in numerous
states, four of which are relevant to the present discussion:
(1) state a, attested in STC 15376–77 (1502–03). The block is intact, with minor
wear to the fifth triangle from the top in the right-hand serrated border.
(2) state b, attested in STC 792 (21 January 1505) and STC 12139 [1506?]. The
fifth triangle in the serrated border has broken off, leaving a wide gap in the
design.
(3) state c, attested in STC 21286.3 and STC 25007. The triangular design at
the top has broken off, with visible splintering.
(4) state d, attested in STC 3547 (6 July 1509). The inner outline of the figure’s
leg has a tiny nick, while the serrated border is worn and indistinct.
Since the nick to the animal’s foot does not appear in STC 21286.3 nor in
STC 25007 and since the cut’s serrated border in these items is relatively crisp,
I conclude that both these books were printed before 6 July 1509 (STC 3547),
a deduction that validates my revised date of [1507–08?].
* * *
Refining the chronology of Wynkyn de Worde’s output is only one of the many
benefits of the kind of typographical analysis undertaken here. Further study
has the potential to illuminate critical aspects of his business, providing infor-
mation not only on his type inventory, but also — indirectly — on his labour
force (compositors, pressmen), professional relationships (partnerships), pro-
duction standards, and overall capacity of his shop. No less important is the
prospect that a revised printing date will lead to the recovery of a work’s lost
cultural context. A case in point is STC 14547.5, recently identified as the
only surviving example of an English printed birth girdle, a type of amulet roll
intended to protect parturient women.28 Originally dated c. 1520 by STC, this
broadside was actually printed c. 1533, as it was typeset in a distinctive 70 mm
font that De Worde introduced in that year. This dating, coupled with the char-
acter of the document, suggests that the girdle may have been marketed as a
28
See Gwara and Morse, ‘A Birth Girdle Printed by Wynkyn de Worde’.
222 Joseph J. Gwara
spiritual aid for Anne Boleyn, who was pregnant with the future Elizabeth I
when she married Henry VIII in January 1533. The public could have repeated
the girdle’s prayers during Anne’s pregnancy, or immediately afterwards, when
it became clear that the English nation still needed a prince. In the absence of
a revised STC date, this cultural context would have have been lost to scholar-
ship, at least in the short term. As this broadside illustrates, therefore, a reli-
able date can provide critical evidence in reconstructing the cultural setting of
England’s earliest printed works. A new longitudinal analysis of De Worde’s
titles between 1501 and 1511 may well yield similar discoveries, showing how
the early English printers reacted to the historical events and the broad cultural
trends of their day.
Appendix 1
STC Items Referenced in the Present Study
Note: Items followed by an asterisk are redated and/or reattributed as specified
in Appendix 2.
STC no. (STC date) Author and Title

254 (19 March 1510) Alanus de Insulis, Alanus de parabolis. Alias doctrinale altum /
cum luculenta glosarum expositione.
268.3 (29 April 1510) Thomas von Erfurt (attrib.), Modi significandi Alberti sine quibus
grammatice noticia haberi nullo pacto potest.
708.5 Kynge Appolyn of Thyre, trans. by Robert Copland. Quires A, B, D, E, F,
(28 February 1510) and the outer sheet of quire G were printed c. 1532.
788 (1506) Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called ars moryendi.
792 (21 January 1505) The crafte to lyue well and to dye well, trans. by Andrew Chertsey.
1805.7 [c. 1505]* [Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesly.]
Four folios only (mutilated), the first beginning ‘These gates
be shyt so wonderly well’.
1987 [1500]* [Sir Bevis of Hampton.] Two folios only, the first beginning ‘In all the
londes of crystyente’.
1987.5 [c. 1500] [Sir Bevis of Hampton.] Part of one folio only, beginning ‘[L]Ordynges
lysten & holde you styll’.
3263.5 [1507?] [Meditationes vitae Christi (English), trans. by Nicholas Love.]
3289 (1508) Here begynneth the boke of keruynge.

3295 [1505?]* Here begynneth the boke of comforte agaynste all trybulacyons.
3543 [1507?] Here begynneth the Iustes of the moneth of Maye parfurnysshed & done
by Charles Brandon. Thomas knyuet. Gyles Capell / & Wyllyam Hussy.
The .xxii. yere of the reygne of our souerayne lorde kynge Henry the seuenth.
3547 (6 July 1509) Sebastian Brant, The shyppe of fooles, trans. by Henry Watson.
3547a (20 June 1517) Sebastian Brant, The shyppe of fooles, trans. by Henry Watson.
4592 [1509?] Here begynneth a treatyse agaynst pestelence & of the infirmits.
5199 (1506) Thordynary of Crysten men, trans. by Andrew Chertsey.
5456.3 [1519?]* [Cock Lorell’s Boat.] Part of B1 plus B3–4 only.
5574 (1511) The thre kynges of Coleyne.
5609.5 [1519?]* Complaynt of the soule.
5728 [1505?]* [Pierre Gringore, The Complaint of Them that Be Too Late Married,
trans. by Robert Copland.] B1, B4 only.
6033.5 (1506) Here begynneth a lytell treatyse of the dyenge creature enfected with
sykenes vncurable with many sorowfull complayntes.
6034 (1507) [The Dying Creature.]
6573 (1511) The demaundes Ioyous.
7016.2 [1503–04]* Aelius Donatus, Incipit Donatus minor cum Remigio ad vsum
pusillorum anglicanarum scolarium.
7502.5 [1508?]* [A Tale of King Edward and the Shepherd.] A3–4 only.
7706 [1508?] Modus tenendi Curiam Baronis. cum visu franem plegii.
7725.9 [1521?] Modus tenendi unum hundredum sive curiam de recordo.
7761 [1505] The proclamacion of the coyne.
7761.3 [1509] [A proclamation confirming Henry VII’s final pardon.]
Fragments only, beginning ‘The Kyng our souuerain Lord Henry’.
7761.7 [1509] The newe proclamacyon. [Confirming Henry VII’s final pardon.]
Fragments only, beginning ‘The Kynge our souuerayn lorde Henry’.
7762.3 [1509] [A proclamation confirming Henry VII’s final pardon.] Fragments
only, beginning ‘These be the articles’.
9351a (1508) Statuta .vii. perlamentorum Henrici .vii.
9357.4 (1506) Anno .xix. Henrici .vii.
224 Joseph J. Gwara

9612 [1510?]* De termino Michaelis Anno .xi. Regis Henrici quarti.
9613a [1510?]* Annus .xiiii. Henrici quarti.
9615.7 [1510?]* De Termino Pasche Anno nono Henrici quinti.
9912.5 [1510?]* Anno secundo Richardi .iii.
10628 [1518?] [ John Peckham, Exornatorium curatorum.]
10631 [1520?] John Peckham, Exornatorium Curatorum.
10891 [1509] Saint John Fisher, Here after foloweth a mornynge remembraunce
had at the moneth mynde of the noble prynces Margarete countesse of
Rychemonde & Darbye moder vnto kynge Henry the .vii. & grandame
to oure souerayne lorde that nowe is/ vppon whose soule almyghty god
haue mercy.
10900 (1509) Saint John Fisher, This sermon folowynge was compyled & sayd in the
Cathedrall chyrche of saynt Poule within the cyte of London by the ryght
reuerende fader in god Iohan bysshop of Rochester / the body beynge
present of the moost famouse prynce kynge Henry the .vij. the .x. daye of
Maye / the yere of our lorde god .M.CCCCC.ix.
10901 [1509–10] Saint John Fisher, This sermon folowynge was compyled & sayd in the
Cathedrall chyrche of saynt Poule within the cyte of London by the ryght
reuerende fader in god Iohan bysshop of Rochester / the body beynge
present of the moost famouse prynce kynge Henry the .vij. the .x. day of
Maye / the yere of our lorde god .M.CCCCC.ix.
10902 (16 June 1508) Saint John Fisher, This treatise concernynge the fruytfull saynges of Dauyd
the kynge & prophete in the seuen penytencyall psalms. Deuyded in seuen
sermons was made and compyled by the ryght reuerente fader in god
Iohan fyssher doctour of dyuynyte and bysshop of Rochester.
10903 (12 June 1509) Saint John Fisher, This treatyse concernynge the fruytfull saynges of
Dauyd the kynge & prophete in the seuen penytencyall psalms. Deuyded
in seuen sermons was made and compyled b[y] the ryght reuerente fader
in god Iohan fyssher doctoure of dyuynite and bysshop of Rochester.
10903a [c. 1514] Saint John Fisher, This treatyse concernynge the fruytful saynges of Dauyd
Iohan fyssher doctoure of dyuynyte and bysshop of Rochester.
10904 [c. 1519] Saint John Fisher, This treatyse concernynge the fruytful saynges of Dauid
Iohan fyssher doctour of dyuynyte and bysshop of Rochester.

11562.7 [1513?] [The gardyners passetaunce touchyng the outrage of fraunce. London:
Hew Goes and Henry Watson.]
11602 (19 April 1499) [ John of Garland, Liber equivocorum quorundam vocabulorum
secundum ordinem alphabeti.]
11721.5 [1506?] [The History of the Excellent Knight Generides.] X3–6 only.
11721.7 [1518?] [The History of the Excellent Knight Generides.] G3–6 only.
12091 [c. 1510]* The gospelles of dystaues, trans. by Henry Watson.
12139 [1506?] Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called the gouernall of helthe with the
medecyne of the stomacke.
12381 (1506) Pierre Gringore, The castell of laboure.
12412.5 [1506] Petrus Gryphus [Griffi]. Oratio. Petri gryphi Pisani / nuncii apostolici
recedentis a serenissimo Anglie rege.
12943 (1509) Stephen Hawes, The conuercyon of swerers.
12943.5 [1509?]* [Stephen Hawes, The Conversion of Swearers.]
12945 [1504?]* Stephen Hawes, Here begynneth the boke called the example of vertu.
12953 [1509]* Stephen Hawes, A Ioyfull medytacyon to all Englonde of the coronacyon of
our moost naturall souerayne lorde kynge Henry the eyght.
13075 [1509] [Elegy on the death of Henry VII, possibly by Stephen Hawes.
Attributed to Wynkyn de Worde by STC, but more likely printed by
Richard Pynson.]
13075.5 [1509] [Elegy on the death of Henry VII, possibly by Stephen Hawes.]
13603.7 [1505?]* [ John Holte, Lac puerorum.] Part of one folio only (probably sig. E5),
beginning ‘Here is to be noted’.
13604 [1508] John Holte, Lac puerorum .M. holti Mylke for chyldren.
13685.5 [1507]* Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called the Lucydarye.
13689 [1506?] Here begynneth a lytell geste of Robyn hode.
14077c.14a [c. 1505] [Indulgence: Image of Pity. First line of letterpress: ‘Though I am not
present before your eye’.]
14077c.81 [1505]* [Indulgence: Hospital of the Holy Trinity, Walsoken, Norfolk.]
14077c.83 [c. 1518] [Indulgence: Confraternity of St Cornelius, Westminster.]
14043.5 (3 January 1519) [Walter Hilton, Scala perfectionis (English).]
226 Joseph J. Gwara

14323 [1510?] Thystory of Iacoby and his twelue sones.
14505.5 [c. 1510]* Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called the rewle of saynt Iherome.
Attributed to Richard Pynson by STC.
14518 [1510?] The dystruccyon of Iherusalem by Vaspazian and Tytus.
14522 [1510–13]* Here begynneth a mery geste of the frere and the boye.
14546.3 (1509) The .vii. shedynges of the blode of Ihesu cryste.
14547.5 [c. 1520] [Birth girdle (amulet roll), beginning ‘A deuout inuocacyon & prayer
of all the blyssed names of […] Chryst’.] Actually printed c. 1533.
14648 [1510] [Jean d’Arras, Melusine.] Six fragments: Q1, Q2, Q5, R1, R3, and one other.
14649 [c. 1515]* [Capystranus.] A2–C3 only.
14806 [1511?]* [H]ere after foloweth a treatyse taken out of a boke whiche somtyme
Theodosius the Emperour founde in Iherusalem in the pretorye of Pylate
of Ioseph of Armathy.
14863 (1506) The boke of Iustyces of peas the charge with all the processe of the cessyons
/ warrantes supersedias & all that longeth to ony Iustyce to make
endytementes of haute treason petyt treason felonyes appeles trespas vpon
statutes / trespas contra Regis pacem Nocumentis with dyuers thynges
more as it appereth in the kalender of the same boke.
14864 (1510) The Iustyces of paes. The boke of iustyces of peas the charge with all the
processe of the cessyons / warrantes supersedias and all that longeth to
ony Iustyce to make endytementes of haute treason petyt treason felonyes
appeles trespas vpon statutes / trespas contra Regis pacem Nocumentis
with dyuers thynges more as it appereth in the kalender of the same boke.
15257.5 [c. 1507]* [Antoine de la Sale, The Fifteen Joys of Marriage,
trans. by Robert Copland (?).] C4–5 only.
15258 (1509) Antoine de la Sale, The fyftene Ioyes of maryage,
trans. by Robert Copland (?).
15345 [1510?] The .iiii. leues of the trueloue.
15376 (1502) Raoul Lefèvre, The recuyles or gaderinge to gyder of the hystoryes of Troye
how it was destroyed & brent twyes by the puyssaunt Hercules & the
thyrde & generall by the grekes, trans. by William Caxton.
15377 (1503) Raoul Lefèvre, The recuyles or gaderinge to gyder of the hystoryes of Troye
how it was destroyed & brent twyes by the puyssaunt Hercules & the
thyrde & generall by the grekes, trans. by William Caxton.

15398 Jacques Legrand, The boke of good maners,
(10 December 1507) trans. by William Caxton.
15579.4 [1505?]* Carta feodi simplicis cum littera atturnatoria.
15579.5 [1507?]* Carta feodi simplicis cum littera atturnatoria.
15579.6 [c. 1510]* Carta feodi simplicis cum littera atturnatoria.
15908.5 (1510) Hore beatissime virginis marie ad consuetudinem insignis ecclesie Sarum
/ nuper emaculatissime multis orationibus pulcherrimis annexis.
16255 (12 April 1503) [Psalterium cum antiphonis dominicalibus & ferialibus suis locis insertis,
vna cum hymnis ecclesie Sarum. & Eboracensis deseruientibus.]
17012 [1510?]* John Lydgate, Here begynneth the chorle and the byrde.
17016 (1510) John Lydgate (attrib.), The courte of sapyence.
17026 [1510?] John Lydgate, The prouerbes of Lydgate.
17030.5 [1510?]* John Lydgate, Stans puer ad mensam.
17033.7 [1506?] John Lydgate, Here begynneth the temple of Glas.
17249 (1503) [ John Mandeville (attrib.), Itinerarium (English).]
17537 [1509–10?] The lamentacyon of our lady.
17841 (1510) Here begynneth a lytel treatyse of the byrth & prophecye of Marlyn.
17971 (11 May 1508) John Mirk, The festyuall.
17971.5 (1 August 1511) John Mirk, The festyuall.
17972 (5 May 1515) John Mirk, The festyuall.
17973.5 (5 May 1519) John Mirk, The festyuall.
17975 (23 October 1532) John Mirk, The Festyuall.
18566 (23 March 1509) Nychodemus gospell.
18567 (1511) Nychodemus gospell.
18779 [1505?]* Here begynneth Octauyan the Emperoure of Rome. A8B4 only.
19207a [c. 1505]* [Pierre de la Cépède, Paris et Vienne, trans. by William Caxton.]
D1–4 only.
19208 [c. 1505]* [Pierre de la Cépède, Paris et Vienne, trans. by William Caxton.]
C1–4 only.
19305 (1509) The parlyament of deuylles.
228 Joseph J. Gwara

19596 (1510) In the name of god here begynneth the Rule of the lyuynge of the bretherne
and systers of the order of penytentes.
20034 [1510]* Here begynneth a lytell geste how the plowman lerned his pater noster.
20107 [1509?]* [The Noble History of King Ponthus, trans. by Henry Watson (?).] D1–4 only.
20108 (1511) [The Noble History of King Ponthus, trans. by Henry Watson (?).]
20436 Galfridus (Anglicus), Promptuarium paruuolorum clericorum quod apud
(17 January 1510) nos Medulla grammatice appellatur Scolasticis quam maxime necessarium.
20439.3 [1502?] Here begynneth the Proprytees and medycynes for hors.
20875.5
[The Remedy against the Troubles of Temptations.]
(4 February 1508)
20878 [1500]* Remigius of Auxerre, Dominus que pars [a grammatical text].
20881.3 [c. 1510] William Lichfield, The remors of conscyence. Here begynneth certayne
demonstracyons by our lorde to all synfull persones with the remors of
mannes conscyence to the regarde of the bounte of our lorde.
20894.7 (1519) Returna brevium.
21007 (1509) Kynge Rycharde cuer du lyon.
21259 (1506) Rycharde Rolle hermyte of Hampull in his contemplacyons of the drede
and loue of god with other dyuerse tytles as it sheweth in his table.
21286.3 [c. 1510]* Gesta romanorum.
21298 [1506?] Here begynneth thystorye of the .vii. wyse Maysters of rome conteynynge
rygh[t]e fayre & ryghtioyous narracions. & to the reder ryght delectable.
21336 (1511) The Rote or myrroure of consolacyon and conforte.
21430–0a [1507] Laurent (Dominican), The boke named the Royall,
trans. by William Caxton.
22409 [c. 1516] The kalender of shepeherdes, ed. by Robert Copland.
22409.5 (1511) [The Shepherds’ Kalendar, ed. by Robert Copland.]
22597.5 [c. 1510]* John Skelton, Here begynneth a lytell treatyse named the bowge of courte.
23111.5 [1520?] Here begynneth vndo your dore. A1, 2, 7, 8 only.
23140.5 [1507?]* John Stanbridge, The accydence of mayster Stanbrydges owne makynge.
23142 [1510?]* John Stanbridge, [Accidence.]

23155.9 [1509?] John Stanbridge, Gradus comparationum : cum verbis anomalis. simul et
eorum compositis ex Stanbrigiana editione.
23164 (1509) Longe paruula.
23164.2 [1507?] John Stanbridge, Paruulorum institutio ex stanbrigiana collectione.
23164.6 [1510?] John Stanbridge, Paruulorum institutio ex stanbrigiana collectione.
23195.5 [1509?] John Stanbridge, Vulgaria stanbrige.
23427a.7 [1514?] Joannes Sulpitius Verulanus, Quinta recognitio atque additio ad
Grammaticen Sulpitianam Cum textu Ascensiano in quam pluribus locis
presertim de syllabarum quantitate et de figuris et preceptis orthographie
illustrato emuncto atque aucto : nullo prorsus vtili dectracto.
23876 The floure of the commaundementes of god with many examples and
(14 September 1510) auctorytees extracte and drawen as well of holy scryptures as of other
doctours and good auncient faders / the whiche is moche vtyle and
prouffytable vnto all people, trans. by Andrew Chertsey.
23878.5 [1511?]* Tenir per seruice de chiualer.
23956 [1518–19?] A full deuoute & gostely treatyse of the Imytacion & folowynge the blessyd
lyfe of our most mercifull sauior cryst.
24133.5 [1510?]* [Torent of Portyngale.] Parts of two folios, the first beginning ‘For why
I wyll the saye’.
24224 [1500]* Here beginneth a lytel treatyse that sheweth how euery man & woman
ought to faste and absteyne them from flesshe on the wednesday.
24240 [1510?] Here begynneth a treatyse of a galaunt.
24541.3 [1509?]* Here begynneth the lyf of Saynt Ursula after the cronycles of englonde.
24571.3 [c. 1510]* [The History of Valentine and Orson, trans. by Henry Watson.] B3–6 only.
24878.3–5
Jacobus de Voragine. Legenda aurea, trans. by William Caxton.
(4 September 1507)
24879
Jacobus de Voragine. Legenda aurea, trans. by William Caxton.
(15 February 1512)
24880.5 [1501?]* [An extract from Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea (Adam–Judith).]
25007 [1508?] Walter de Henley, Boke of husbandry.
25421.6 (1532) The pomander of prayer, ed. by Richard Whitford.
25707.5 [c. 1515]* [King William of Palermo.] P3–4 only.
230 Joseph J. Gwara
Appendix 2
Revised Dates for Wynkyn de Worde’s Output, 1501–11
STC STC Date Revised Date Notes

1987 [1500] [1505–09?] [York: Hugh Goes.]
20878 [1500] [1502–04?] Duff 4: s1. Grotesque D.
24224 [1500] [1502–04?] Duff 4: s1, early w2, y1; large w2 as capital. Grotesque T.
24880.5 [1501?] [1502–04?] Duff 4: s1, early w2, y1. Grotesque A.
7016.2 [1503–04] [1504–05?] Pynson Duff 7 [?]: s2, w1, y2.
12945 [1504?] [1506?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1 and hooked w2 sorts. Grotesque I.
1805.7 [c. 1505] [1505–06?] Pynson Duff 7 [?]: s2, w1, early w2, y2.
3295 [1505?] [1504?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul hooked w2 sorts. Grotesque O in c. 1504 state.
5728 [1505?] [1506?] Pynson Duff 7 [?]: s2, w1, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul small w2 sorts.
13603.7 [1505?] [1505–06?] Pynson Duff 7 [?]: s2, w1, early w2, y2.
14077c.81 [1505] [1505] [York: Hugh Goes.]
15579.4 [1505?] [1508–10?] 91/92 mm textura.
18779 [1505?] [1514–16?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; w3 and large w2 as capital.
Foul s3 and w3 sorts. Hodnett no. 1121 in c. 1518 state.
19207a [c. 1505] [1501–04?] Duff 4: s1, early w2, y1; no capital W.
19208 [c. 1505] [1501–04?] Duff 4: s1, early w2, y1; large w2 as capital.
13685.5 [1507] [1502–04?] Duff 4: s1, early w2, y1; large w2 as capital. Grotesque A.
15257.5 [c. 1507] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital. Foul w1 sort.
15579.5 [1507?] [1506?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1 and hooked w2 sorts.
23140.5 [1507?] [1508–10?] 91/92 mm textura.
7502.5 [1508?] [1506?] Pynson Duff 7 [?]: s2, w1, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul small w2 sorts.

12943.5 [1509?] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1 and early w2 sorts.
12953 [1509] [1510?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; w3 and large w2 as capitals.
Foul w3 and w5a sorts.
20107 [1509?] [1506?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital. Foul w1 and
hooked w2 sorts.
24541.3 [1509?] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, large w2 as capital.
9612 [1510?] [1509?] Law French: s2, w3, y2.
9613a [1510?] [1509?] Law French: s2, w3, y2.
9615.7 [1510?] [1509?] Law French: s2, w3, y2.
9912.5 [1510?] [1509?] Law French: s2, w3, y2.
12091 [c. 1510] [1508?] Duff 8, as follows: Quire a: s2, small w2, y2; large w2
as capital. Foul w5a sorts. Quires B–E: s2, small w2, y2;
large w2 as capital. No foul w-sorts of any kind.
14505.5 [c. 1510] [1506?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2. Grotesque T.
Based on an examination of a1v and a2r only.
Attributed by STC to Richard Pynson.
14522 [1510–13] [1509?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; w3 and large w2 as capital.
No foul w-sorts of any kind.
15579.6 [c. 1510] [1511–12?] Duff 8: s2, small w2 only. Foul large w2 sorts.
The sheet signed ‘A’ from an earlier edition?
17012 [1510?] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
17030.5 [1510?] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital. Foul w1 sorts.
20034 [1510] [1506?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1 [?] and hooked w2 sorts.
21286.3 [c. 1510] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
22597.5 [c. 1510] [1506?] Duff 8: s2, early w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1 and hooked w2 sorts.
23142 [1510?] [1509?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; w3 only as capital.
232 Joseph J. Gwara

24133.5 [1510?] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul early w2 sorts.
24571.3 [c. 1510] [1509?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
14806 [1511?] [1507–08?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1 and early w2 sorts. Grotesque F in c. 1508 state.
23878.5 [1511?] [1509?] Law French: s2, w3, y2.
14649 [c. 1515] [1508–10?] Duff 8: small w2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w5a sorts, no w3 sorts.
25707.5 [c. 1515] [1508–10?] 91/92 mm textura.
5456.3 [1519?] [1509?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
Foul w1, early w2, and w5a sorts.
5609.5 [1519?] [1509?] Duff 8: s2, small w2, y2; large w2 as capital.
STC items not examined or examined only in part: 21286.2 [1502?], 15901.5 [c. 1503], 16255 (12
April 1503), 23427.7 (19 December 1504), 1008 [c. 1505], 14077c.15 [c. 1505], 6033.5 (1506), 6034
(1507), 23140.5 [1507?], 4839.4 (15 August 1508), 7016.4 [1508–09], 16182a.5 (27 April 1508),
23164.4 [1508?], 954.5 [1509?], 12946 [1509?], 12948 (11 January 1509), 922.2 [c. 1510], 9912.5
[1510?], 14323.3 [1510?], 23178 (1510), 23885.5 [c. 1510], 23164.8 [1511?], 25479 [1511?].
Works Cited
Early Printed Texts

See Appendix 1.
Primary Source
Mirk, John, John Mirk’s ‘Festial’: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II., ed. by
Susan Powell, EETS, o.s., 334–35, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–11)
Secondary Studies
Bennett, H. S., English Books & Readers, 1475 to 1557: Being a Study in the History of
the Book Trade from Caxton to the Incorporation of the Stationers’ Company, 2nd edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)
Blake, N. F., ‘Wynkyn de Worde: The Early Years’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1971), 62–69
—— , ‘Wynkyn de Worde: The Later Years’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1972), 128–38
Catalogue of Books Printed in the xvth Century Now in the British Library, Part 11:
England (’t Goy-Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2007)
Coates, Alan, and others, A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Duff, E. Gordon, A Century of the English Book Trade: Short Notices of All Printers, Sta
tioners, Book-Binders, and Others Connected with It from the Issue of the First Dated
Book in 1457 to the Incorporation of the Company of Stationers in 1557 (London:
Bibliographical Society, 1905)
—— , Fifteenth Century English Books: A Bibliography of Books and Documents Printed in
England and of Books for the English Market Printed Abroad, Illustrated Monographs,
18 (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1917; repr. Hain: Meisenheim, 1964)
—— , The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of Westminster and London from 1476 to
1535, Sandars Lectures, 1899, 1904 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1906;
repr. New York: Blom, 1971)
Gwara, Joseph J., ‘Three Forms of w and Four English Printers: Robert Copland, Henry
Pepwell, Henry Watson, and Wynkyn de Worde’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America, 106 (2012), 141–230
Gwara, Joseph J., and Mary Morse, ‘A Birth Girdle Printed by Wynkyn de Worde’, The
Library, 7th ser., 13 (2012), 33–62
Hellinga, Lotte, ed., Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century: E. Gordon Duff ’s Biblio
graphy, with Supplementary Descriptions, Chronologies, and a Census of Copies (London:
Bibliographical Society, British Library, 2009)
—— , ‘Tradition and Renewal: Establishing the Chronology of Wynkyn de Worde’s
Early Work’, in Incunabula and their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the
Fifteenth Century, ed. by Kristian Jensen (London: British Library, 2003), pp. 13–30
234 Joseph J. Gwara
Hodnett, Edward, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535, Illustrated Monographs, 22, rev. repr.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1973)
Isaac, Frank, English and Scottish Printing Types, 1501–35 * 1508–41, Facsimiles and
Illustrations, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society,
1930)
—— , English Printers’ Types of the Sixteenth Century (London: Milford, Oxford University
Press, 1936)
—— , ‘Types Used by Wynkyn de Worde, 1501–34’, The Library, 4th ser., 9 (1928–29),
395–409
Johnston, Stanley Howard, Jr, ‘A Study of the Career and Literary Publications of Richard
Pynson’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 1977)
Jones, Michael K., and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret
Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992)
McKerrow, Ronald B., Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, 1485–1640,
Illustrated Monographs, 16 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1913; repr. Mansfield
Centre, CT: Martino, 2003)
Mead, Herman R., ‘A New Title from De Worde’s Press’, The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954),
45–49
Plomer, Henry R., English Printers’ Ornaments (London: Grafton, 1924)
Powell, Susan, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, The Library, 6th ser., 20 (1998),
197–240
Preachers in Pictures
from Manuscript to Print
Martha W. Driver
I
n a miniature or woodcut illustration, a preacher may be distinguished by
his speaking gestures or by reading from an open book to a group of people.
He is sometimes shown in his pulpit, which functions as a marker or attrib-
ute of his calling, though pictures of preachers in their pulpits are surprisingly
rare in the pre-Reformation period. This essay examines images of preachers
and preaching as disseminated in English manuscripts and printed books in
the late medieval and early Tudor periods. Beginning with seminal preaching
scenes, manuscript miniatures of Christ preaching from the pulpit as found, for
example, in the Sherborne Missal, the essay traces the ways in which preachers
and preaching are presented, whether generically or as specific author portraits,
briefly surveys pictures of preachers from manuscript to print, and looks more
generally at the intersections of fiction and history, book history, and pre-Ref-
ormation Church politics.
In manuscripts, preaching and performance become conflated in more
secular contexts, perhaps the most famous example being the illumination
of Chaucer reciting from a pulpit to a courtly company in the Troilus manu-
script, thought by some scholars to represent an actual historical moment. A
similar trajectory occurs in printed illustrations of preachers. While Christ is
not shown preaching from a pulpit in the earliest English printed books, he
is represented as a wise teacher in several early examples; there are also depic-
tions of preaching saints, most notably of John the Baptist, who is sometimes
Martha W. Driver (mdriver@pace.edu) is distinguished professor of English and Women’s and

Gender Studies at Pace University.
236 Martha W. Driver
found painted on actual fifteenth-century pulpits.1 In print, generic woodcuts

of preachers (usually without pulpits) appear in religious texts and in books
like the Golden Legend. Woodcuts of historical preachers in printed books
include representations of John Alcock, bishop of Ely, and John Fisher, bishop
of Rochester and cardinal, which, like the Chaucer frontispiece, are intended
to illustrate contemporary historical events. Other depictions of preachers in
print are satirical. Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, printed in English transla-
tion by Richard Pynson, includes a woodcut of a fool preaching from a pulpit,
and in the curious A Lytell Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe Called Alcaron, printed
before the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century by Wynkyn de
Worde, the prophet Mohammed is shown wearing a fez and holding a sword
as he preaches from the pulpit to a group of veiled women (who are shown
as nuns) and laypeople. These, along with other examples, will be discussed in
some detail below. With the English Reformation, images of preachers in their
pulpits became even more politically charged.
Some two hundred medieval pulpits survive in England, the earliest dating
from the mid-fourteenth century with the majority from the fifteenth century,2
‘a remarkable number which does suggest a growth in the perceived importance
of preaching as part of parochial life’.3 Images of priests in pulpits in English
books are comparatively rare, however. Most surviving manuscript examples are
French, and many illustrate the preaching of Crusades, politicizing the pulpit in
a way that does not occur in England until later.4 Prior to the fifteenth century,
1
Cox, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English Churches, reproduces pictures of pul-
pits with panel paintings or sculptures of saints in Harberton, Devon (p. 15), in Burnham
Norton, Norfolk (p. 23), in Dittisham, Devon (p. 37), in Frampton, Dorset (p. 39), in Kenton,
Devon (p. 55), and elsewhere. Plummer, ‘Restoration of a Fifteenth-Century English Pulpit’,
pp. 168–70, describes a pulpit in the church of South Burlingham, Norfolk, with the painted
inscription ‘inter natos mulierum non surrexit maior Johanne Baptista’ (among them that are
born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist), which has been ‘orna-
mented with red capitals on a white ground’. Alexander, ‘The Pulpit with the Four Doctors’,
p. 199, describes two pulpits in Norfolk with panels painted with the figures of the Four Doctors
(Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Ambrose).
2
Cox, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English Churches, p. ix, cites about sixty surviving
pre-Reformation stone pulpits, the earliest from the fourteenth century, with about a hundred
more of wood. See also Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, pp. 160–61 (p. 161 n. 1).
3
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 57. But as Cox, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English
Churches, p. 1, comments, ‘it is a complete mistake to imagine that preaching was neglected in
the mediaeval Church, or that sermons were in the main a product of Reformation days’.
4
Pearsall, ‘The “Troilus” Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience’, reproduces an illumination
Preachers in Pictures from Manuscript to Print 237
English pulpits were often simply platforms that could be erected outside or
inside a church, allowing for a ‘variety of sites necessary to suit the various audi-
ences to be addressed’.5 Pulpits, in other words, were like medieval dining tables
which were placed on trestles to be put up or taken down as required, but in
the fifteenth century, they became a more permanent part of Church furniture,
made of wood or stone. From the pulpit, a priest could give instructions, make
announcements ‘of an ecclesiastical, semi-ecclesiastical, or purely civil character’,
bid the bedes (say bidding prayers, generally in English, for individuals and com-
munities, a form still in practice in the Anglican Church), or preach a sermon.6
Both pulpits and platforms are featured in the spectacularly illuminated
Sherborne Missal (London, British Library, MS Additional 74236), a mon-
umental, forty-pound manuscript produced between 1396 and 1407. As the
model for all preachers, Jesus is shown preaching as both boy and man in sev-
eral pictures in this book, which has been described as the ‘last of the great
fourteenth-century manuscripts’. 7 The book was produced for Sherborne
Abbey by a Benedictine scribe, John Whas, and a team of illustrators, chief of
whom was the Dominican limner John Siferwas. In this missal, which contains
the main Bible passages, instructions, and prayers required for the Mass, all of
the illuminations of Jesus preaching appear in the temporale, the segment of
the book that contains the texts required for the Christological feasts of the
year (Christmas, Easter, Ascension, for example), along with related feast days
of a cardinal preaching a Crusade from the Chroniques de France (London, British Library, MS
Royal 20.C.vii, fol. 47r), pl. 2, and another illumination of the archbishop of Rouen preaching
a crusade (Royal 20.C.vii, fol. 76v), pl. 3. Another famous example of the political uses of the
pulpit is the illumination of Archbishop Arundel preaching in support of Henry Bolingbroke
in Jean Creton’s Chronicle, illuminated in Paris (London, British Library, MS Harley 1319,
fol. 12r), cited by Alexander, ‘The Pulpit with the Four Doctors’, p. 202 n. 15, and also discussed
and copied in Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 9.
5
Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 161. Alexander, ‘The Pulpit with the Four Doctors’,
p. 202, also comments: ‘Representations of preaching in manuscripts or in paintings often show it
taking place out of doors and on wooden structures which were presumably temporary’.
6
Cox, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English Churches, p. 22; Owst, Preaching in
Medieval England, p. 161. Bidding prayers are said, for example, on Good Friday in the
American Episcopal and Anglican churches; The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of
the Sacraments, pp. 277–79.
7
Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, ii, cat. no. 9, p. 53. See also Backhouse, The Sherborne
Missal, p. 5, describing it as ‘the most spectacular service book of English execution to have
come down to us’. See also ‘The Sherborne Missal’, British Library Online Gallery <http://www.
bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/sherborne/accessible/introduction.html> [accessed 13 April 2013].
of saints. The Boy Jesus is shown preaching in the Temple for the Sunday after
Epiphany (p. 55); he sits in a chair with the doctors seated around him prop-
ping books on their reading desks.8 The scene here, and customarily, lacks a for-
mal pulpit but makes the transition from manuscript to print: a woodcut of the
Boy Jesus seated before an open book at a lectern and teaching the doctors in
the Temple appears later in vernacular instructional books for the laity as well
as in many editions of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.9
In the Sherborne Missal, Jesus is shown in a pulpit preaching to seated men
(p. 66) in illuminations illustrating texts for the Sunday before Septuagesima
(the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany). A detail illustrating the text accompany-
ing the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost shows Christ teaching his apostles and
observed by scribes and Pharisees (p. 301). A simple illumination of Christ
holding an orb and preaching illustrates the text for the Twelfth Sunday after
Pentecost (p. 313). For the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, a marginal
illumination illustrating the feeding of the five thousand (p. 356) shows Jesus
standing on a raised platform, preaching to the apostles and a group of peo-
ple below. While images of Christ preaching or teaching are not unusual in
manuscript depictions that generally illustrate actions described in the text,
the pulpit is usually omitted. An exception, however, is a miniature in Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 165 (III, 739, fol. 466v) of Christ gesturing
from a canopied pulpit to a group of seated men (see Figure 15).10 The picture
in this Latin gospel commentary by William of Nottingham, made in England
between 1375 and 1390, accompanies text and gloss of Luke 21. 37–38, which
describes Jesus teaching in the temple.
8
Backhouse, The Sherborne Missal, p. 16.
9
Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535 (hereafter Hodnett), item 318, p. 144, fig. 8,
locates this illustration in editions of the Mirror of the Blessed Life published by Caxton in 1486
and 1490 (STC 3259, 3260), in Caxton’s edition of Book Named the Ryal printed about 1488
(STC 21429), and in the Doctrinal of Sapyence of Guy de Roye (STC 21431), published after
7 May 1489. It also appears in De Worde’s multiple editions of Love’s Mirror printed in 1494,
about 1507, and in 1517, 1525, and 1530 (STC 3261, 3263.5, 3264, 3266, 3267), and in two
editions of Book Named the Royall (STC 21430, 21430a) printed in 1507, one of which was
apparently a joint production with Richard Pynson, along with other related texts. Pynson uses
a close copy of this woodcut in his editions of Love’s Mirror of 1495 and 1506 (STC 3262,
3263); see Hodnett, item 1455, p. 339. STC numbers are taken from Pollard and Redgrave, A
Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
10
Dennison and others, An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of
Chaucer to Henry VIII, item 649, pp. 75, 82.
Figure 15. ‘Christ Preaching from a Canopied Pulpit’. William of Nottingham,

Commentary on the Gospels, Luke 21. 37–38, c. 1375–90. Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Laud misc. 165 (III, 739), fol. 466v. By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The Sherborne Missal further includes historical portraits of preachers,

including those of Robert Brunyng, the abbot of the community in 1385
(d. 1415), and Richard Mitford (or Medford), bishop of Salisbury (d. 1407),
and of the book’s main makers, the scribe Whas and the chief illustrator
Siferwas. 11 The artist Siferwas also included his self-portrait in the Lovell
Gospel Lectionary (fol. 4 v).12 And though most preaching scenes in manu-
scripts are generic, some depict historical preachers. The best-known example
is the author portrait of Petrus de Aureolis, archbishop of Aix (1321–22). This
preacher is depicted in an illustration decorating a Bible compendium made by
February 1422 in Lincoln and London (London, British Library, MS Royal 8
G.iii, fol. 2r), the only miniature in this book. The bishop is shown wearing his
mitre and preaching from a draped pulpit to a group of seated and standing
clerics. Behind him is a mountain that a layman and a monk are climbing as
God sits in majesty above, flanked by angels.
This illustration of the archbishop as the author of his book as the scene of
his discourse unfolds above has been seen as compositionally similar to the por-
trait of Chaucer reciting to a courtly company, the frontispiece of Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College, MS 61, of Troilus and Criseyde, made between 1415
and 1425 (fol. 1v). Both illuminations are ‘associated with the early fifteenth-
century English ateliers influenced by Herman Scheere’.13 The Troilus frontis-
piece is said to record an actual historical moment, marked by the royal pres-
ence of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, the two most prominent figures
standing among Chaucer’s auditors.14 Chaucer speaks from the pulpit above,
11
Backhouse, The Sherborne Missal, p. 5. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, ii, no. 9, p. 53,
finds five artists at work in the volume. Portraits of Siferwas appear in the Missal on pp. 81, 216
(reproduced in Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, i, ill. 48), and 276, and possibly elsewhere (see
Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, ii, no. 9, p. 53).
12
Christianson, A Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans, p. 161. The inscrip-
tion ‘ffrater Johes Siferwas’ appears below the illumination. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts,
ii, no. 10, p. 62, debates the identification with Siferwas, commenting ‘because no precedent
(or indeed sequel) is known for a Presentation scene between donor and illustrator in English
book illustration of this period, the monk should perhaps be identified as either the abbot of the
Benedictine house responsible for producing the Lectionary or as one of the regular canons of
Salisbury Cathedral’.
13
Pearsall, ‘The “Troilus” Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience’, p. 72.
14
Galway, ‘The Troilus Frontispiece’; for comment on Galway’s misguided attempt to iden-
tify Chaucer’s audience fully, see Pearsall, ‘The “Troilus” Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience’,
p. 70 n. 1. David, The Strumpet Muse, p. 9, identifies ‘the couple standing immediately to
the poet’s right hand [as] almost certainly Richard II and Queen Anne’. Salter, ‘The Troilus
‘with his right hand slightly raised in the conventional gesture of a preacher, a
modification of the traditional gesture of blessing’. 15 Other likely sources for
placing a poet in a pulpit are French. The author Guillaume de Deguileville is
shown this way in several manuscripts of his Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, aptly
described by Michael Camille as a doctrinal allegory that was ‘one of the most
popular vernacular texts of the late Middle Ages’.16 A pen-and-ink drawing on
the first folio of London, British Library, MS Additional 38120, for example,
portrays the poet-narrator as a monk in a pulpit preaching to a group of seated
and standing men and women, layfolk along with cowled monks.17
Another rich visual literary source for the Troilus frontispiece may be illu-
minations of Genius preaching his sermon in the Roman de la Rose, the widely
circulated medieval classic written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.
The text describes Genius mounting a platform to read the scripture of Dame
Nature to a courtly company and preaching God’s will for men and women that
they procreate; the scene is illustrated in sixty-eight extant Rose manuscripts.18
The echoing of the scene of Genius preaching (which surely could be read as a
satire or upending of the sort of preaching one might expect more convention-
ally) in the Troilus frontispiece is said to link Chaucer’s text with the Roman de
la Rose ‘as a source of the late medieval culture of love’.19
Other literary figures shown preaching in English manuscripts include
Jonah preaching to the Ninevites preceding the text of Patience in the Gawain
manuscript (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, fol. 82v). In this
Frontispiece’, pp. 21–22, calls into question attempts to identify Chaucer’s listeners precisely,
tracing the frontispiece iconography to continental models. Most recently, Coleman, ‘Where
Chaucer Got his Pulpit’, p. 121, identifies in the miniature ‘the gold-clad Richard II’ along with
his mother, Joan of Kent, while ‘the young woman sitting “down-stage” from Richard wears a
more elaborate and revealing dress, and likely represents Richard’s queen, Anne of Bohemia.
The rest of the audience includes three young wooing couples, a female attendant on Anne, and
either other men.’
15
David, The Strumpet Muse, p. 10.
16
Camille, ‘Reading the Printed Image’, p. 260.
17
This is reproduced in Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, p. 205, fig. 65; and in Salter, ‘The Troilus
Frontispiece’, p. 18, fig. 8; David, Strumpet Muse, p. 8, fig. 2; and Coleman, ‘Where Chaucer Got
His Pulpit’, p. 110, fig. 3.
18
Coleman, ‘Where Chaucer Got His Pulpit’, p. 114. See reproductions on p. 116, fig. 5;
p. 117, fig. 6; p. 118, fig. 7; and, p. 119, fig. 8.
19
Coleman, ‘Where Chaucer Got His Pulpit’, p. 117; for more on the medieval culture of
love and Troilus, see Windeatt, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’.
Figure 16. ‘Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites’. Patience, Gawain MS, c. 1375–1400. London,
British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, fol. 82v. By permission of the British Library.
drawing (see Figure 16), Jonah is depicted as simply standing and talking to
three people and gesturing to indicate he is preaching. He is the largest figure
in this group and looms over a standing woman in the scene, so he is either very
tall or he is on an unseen platform. Patience is itself a poetic homily, with the
plot taken mainly from the Vulgate account of Jonah, and Jonah’s sermon to
the repenting Ninevites is in effect a sermon within the larger sermon of the
poem itself.20 In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the character of Dobet,
one of three personified stages of holiness, is also described and shown as
preaching. The poet says Dobet ‘is ronne into religioun and hath rendred þe
bible | And precheth to þe peple’ (C.x.88–89).21 In a miniature in Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, a manuscript made in 1427, Dobet appears
as a tonsured religious in a gown and draped hooded mantle standing in a pul-
pit (fol. 47r).22 Dobet is represented as a personification of clerkly virtues, an
artistic rendering of an ideal priest.
While the French example of Genius preaching from a pulpit is clearly
satiric, the figures of Chaucer, Jonah, and Dobet might be seen as exemplary
figures of their type, good teachers and good preachers; de Deguileville also
fits this model. Most surviving English manuscript representations are thus on
some level straightforward, either evocative of preaching or showing preachers
themselves in action, though in other contemporary media, for example, mis-
ericords and wood carvings in choir stalls, one finds foxes or demons placed in
pulpits, mocking the sanctity of preaching.23
With the transition from manuscript to print, Christ is again frequently
depicted as a wise teacher or instructor, and a pulpit is generally not in evi-
dence. For example, Jesus is shown teaching the apostles the Lord’s Prayer (see
Figure 17) without a pulpit in several vernacular instructional books printed by
Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson.24 Woodcuts of preaching saints illus-
20
The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. by Andrew and Waldron, pp. 17–21. Pearsall, Old
English and Middle English Poetry, p. 170.
21
Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. by Pearsall, pp. 183–84. Donaldson, ‘Piers Plowman: The
Religious Allegory of the C Text’, identifies Dobet as a personification of spiritual illumination
(p. 131) and of charity (p. 163).
22
Langland, Piers Plowman: A Facsimile, intro. by Pearsall, pp. lix–lx.
23
Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 86, reproduces a carving of the ‘preaching fox’
from Christchurch Priory, Hants. See also Kraus and Kraus, The Hidden World of Misericords,
pp. 171–72.
24
For example, The Crafte to Lyue Well and to Dye Well, fol. xvr (STC 792); The Floure of the
Commaundements of God, fol. xxxvir (sig. F6r) (STC 23876). Reproduced in Driver, Image in
trate vernacular religious texts and books such as the Golden Legend and the
Vitas patrum, again sans pulpit. In William Caxton’s books, John the Baptist,
another iconic speaker of sermons, is shown decapitated or facing the viewer
holding a lamb and book.25 Books printed by De Worde illustrate John simi-
larly, though there are added scenes of John baptizing Jesus.26 Richard Pynson,
De Worde’s competitor after the death of Caxton, also illustrates John the
Baptist holding the lamb, cross, and pennon. 27 There is, however, a binding
stamp associated with Pynson’s print shop and likely of English origin (though
drawn from French models) that shows John the Baptist preaching to six men
and women; John is shown standing behind a pulpit-like structure, a crossbar
made of vines and sticks. An example is found on the Legenda maior S. Francisci
published by Pynson in about 1513, one of six sixteenth-century English blind-
tooled bindings in the collections of the Morgan Library & Museum.28 There
is, however, no pulpit.
Printing allows for the ready reuse of illustration, and in some cases, one
preaching bishop may represent another. A generic figure of a preaching
bishop holding a crozier with one hand and blessing with the other represents
Print, p. 51, figs 24, 25. Hodnett, item 477, p. 182, fig. 46, cites several other volumes in which
this woodcut appears, along with a related woodcut employed by Julian Notary (item 2078,
p. 408) in three volumes of sermons by the Dominican friar Joannes Herolt, published 22 June
1510 (STC 13226).
25
Hodnett, item 287, p. 138; item 366, p. 158. These woodcuts of John the Baptist are
found either in copies of the Golden Legend or in the books of hours (STC 15875, 15876),
as well as in a treatise promoting fasting on Wednesdays printed by De Worde in 1500 (STC
24224).
26
Hodnett, item 573, p. 199. Scenes of John baptizing Jesus are cited in Hodnett, item
436, p. 174, fig. 61; there is a onetime use of a woodcut to illustrate John Ryckes, Ymage of
Loue, printed about 1532 (STC 21472). Other examples of the baptism of Christ are Hodnett,
item 641, p. 213, used to illustrate two editions of the Myrrour of the Chyrche by St Austin of
Abingdon (1521, STC 965; 1527, STC 966) as well as the Fruyte of Redempcyon, ascribed to
Simon Appleby, the anker of London (also attributed to Richard Whitford), published in 1530
(STC 22559). This woodcut is a close copy of Hodnett, item 737, p. 231, used in two earlier
editions of the Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514, STC 22557; 1532, STC 22560).
27
Hodnett, items 1446, 1447, p. 337.
28
New York, Morgan Library & Museum, PML 20935, STC 3270. Hobson, Blind-
Stamped Panels in the English Book-Trade, pp. 13–14, fig. Ivb: ‘St John the Baptist preaching,
[…] with a wide border of hunting and gardening scenes copied from Pigouchet. […] these are
Parisian types, but they were probably engraved in England.’ M. Robert Brun, cited in Hobson,
p. 14, also ascribes the St John the Baptist panel to Pynson, and Hobson suggests Pynson may
have inherited it from William de Machilinia.
Figure 17. ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. The Floure of the Commaundements of God.
London, Wynkyn de Worde, 1510. STC 23876. London, British Library,
Huth 30, fol. xxxvir (sig. F6r). By permission of the British Library.
St Nicholas in Caxton’s Legenda aurea (that is, the Golden Legend) printed after
20 November 1483.29 This was later copied to illustrate Nicholas in De Worde’s
1493 and 1498 editions of the Golden Legend.30 The same figure also serves to
portray John Alcock (1430–1500), bishop of Rochester, Worcester, and Ely
and founder of Jesus College, Cambridge. Alcock served under Edward IV,
Richard III, and Henry VII.31 The Nicholas woodcut stands for Alcock in
two editions printed by De Worde of Alcock’s Mons perfectionis, the Hyll of
Perfeccion, of 23 May 1497 (see Figure 18) and 27 May 1501, a sermon Alcock
29
Hodnett, item 258, p. 134, fig. 11. STC 24873.
30
STC 24875, 24876.
31
Alcock was Bishop of Rochester (1472–76), Bishop of Worcester (1476–86), and Bishop
of Ely (1486–1500). Eleven editions of sermons delivered by Alcock are extant, and three ser-
mons appear in editions published before his death. De Worde published four different ser-
mon editions by Alcock between 1496 and 1497. See Smith, ‘An Image of a Preacher in Late
Fifteenth-Century England’, p. 301. See also the essay by Veronica O’Mara in the current volume.
Figure 18.
‘St Nicholas as John Alcock’.
John Alcock, Mons perfectionis.
Westminster, Wynkyn de Worde,
1496. STC 278. Title page.
By permission of the Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
preached to the Carthusian monks in the house of St Anne in Coventry, which

was then printed by De Worde at the request of their prior.32 Nicholas repre-
sents Alcock again on the title page of Sermo Iohannis Alcok, an English sermon
on the text: ‘Qui habet aures audiendi, audiat’ (Luke 8. 8, STC 284–85), an
undated text in Latin and in Middle English. The woodcut reappears on the
verso of the title page.33
The ability to repeat images afforded by print sometimes created networks
of meaning that could be unintentional. It is likely to be coincidence, for exam-
ple, that both St Nicholas and Alcock are also portrayed in stained-glass win-
32
STC 279, 281.
33
STC 284, 285.
dows in Worcestershire churches — Nicholas in windows in the parish church

at Warndon, Worcestershire, as well as in the priory church at Great Malvern,
and Alcock shown in glass at Little Malvern and Worcester, as well as with the
royal family in Worcester Cathedral, a portrait that has not survived.34 Both
Nicholas and Alcock seem to have been popular figures in the same area, but
in the case of early imprints, the conflation of the two figures seems simply to
suggest that a woodcut of a bishop could represent any bishop.
There are, however, also two distinct portraits of Alcock, which were very
likely drawn from life (and thus are the earliest known woodcut portrait illus-
trations in English books), in volumes printed by Pynson. A standing frontal
figure of Alcock with distinctive facial features, resplendent in his bishop’s
regalia, holding a crozier and making the sign of blessing, appears on the title
page of Pynson’s edition of Mons perfectionis printed about 1497.35 Another
portrait prefaces Richard Pynson’s 1498 edition of Alcock’s sermon Gallicantus
Johannis Alcok (‘Cock-crow of John Alcock’). In the prefatory portrait, Alcock
is shown with the same distinctive facial features as in the Mons illustration.
He is standing in a draped pulpit flanked by two columns with a cock mounted
on each. Eleven monastic auditors have turned their backs on him, perhaps so
the artist can show their faces — a bit of artistic license — but the action also
alludes to the closed minds and hearts and the denial of Christ to which Alcock
refers in his sermon text. This woodcut is repeated on the verso of the title page,
faced by the bishop’s rebus of a black cock with a white comb, which opens the
text of the volume.36
Both portrait woodcuts were used only once and were clearly intended for
the books they illustrate, the latter incorporating symbols of roosters which
figure in Alcock’s title and in his sermon and also pun on his name. From this
evidence ‘of custom touches which plainly suggest Alcock’s patronage of the
edition’, S. H. Johnston conjectures that Pynson may have known Alcock
directly.37 Julie Smith further shows that the Gallicantus portrait has visual
allusions to the subject of Alcock’s sermon, which refers to the ‘grief of the
34
See ‘Picture Archive’, Corpus Vitreatrum Medii Aevi: Medieval Stained Glass in Great
Britain (CVMA), available at <http://www.cvma.ac.uk/> [accessed 13 April 2013]. See also
Smith, ‘An Image of a Preacher in Late Fifteenth-Century England’, p. 313.
35
Hodnett, item 1346, p. 323, fig 131. STC 280. Smith, ‘An Image of a Preacher in Late
Fifteenth-Century England’, p. 303, first put forward the notion that this is not a generic wood-
cut but was intended as a portrait.
36
STC 277, Hodnett, item 1354, p. 324, fig. 123; item 1484, p. 344.
37
Johnston, ‘A Study of the Career and Literary Publications of Richard Pynson’, p. 31.
Figure 19.
‘John Fisher’s Eulogy
for Margaret Beaufort’.
John Fisher, A mornynge
remembrau[n]ce. London,
Wynkyn de Worde, 1509.
STC 10891. Title page.
By permission of the Morgan
Library & Museum.
preacher-prophet Ezekiel on witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem, and the

remorse of Saint Peter at the crowing of the cock announcing his triple denial’.38
The sermon itself is directed at preachers and was presented to Alcock’s diocese
and clergy at Barnwell Priory on 25 September 1498; copies were subsequently
owned by a John Samon, who describes himself as a preacher, and the copy now
in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was part of Matthew Parker’s bequest
of 1579.39 This prefatory woodcut brings Alcock to life, placing the priest in his
pulpit at Barnwell and recording a historical moment in great detail, even to
the lack of interest evidently shown by his monastic audience.
Another realistic title-page portrait depicts John Fisher (c. 1469–1535),
bishop of Rochester and cardinal, a consummate preacher who with Lady
38
39
Margaret Beaufort promoted the founding of St John’s College, Cambridge; his

statutes for the college ‘made the training of preachers one of its express aims’.40
Fisher is portrayed preaching from his pulpit in St Paul’s on the title page of A
mornynge remembrau[n]ce (see Figure 19), Fisher’s eulogy for Lady Margaret
Beaufort, mother of Henry VII and Countess of Richmond and Derby, printed
by De Worde in 1509.41 The woodcut appeared first in De Worde’s 1509 print-
ings of Fisher’s Sermon for Kynge Henry VII on the occasion of the king’s funeral.
Unlike the illustrations of Alcock, which were used only once, the Fisher por-
trait woodblock was designed for reuse and recurs over a period of about twenty
years in books by Fisher, representing the cardinal each time.42
For the title page of Fisher’s funerary sermon for Henry, there is an effigy
of a king with a crown, sceptre, and orb lying on a pall, a picture literally illus-
trating Fisher’s sermon, which was delivered, as the text says, ‘the body beynge
present’ (sig. A1r). The woodblock was subsequently adapted to suit Fisher’s
sermon honouring Margaret, preached at the ‘month’s mind’, or thirty days
after her death (see Figure 19). The king’s effigy was cut out of the left side of
the block, and a cloth-covered coffin with four candles neatly supplied in the
open space.43 The lower left segment of the block was omitted entirely when
the block was used as the title-page illustration in three consecutive printings
of Fisher’s Sermon agayn M. Luther, published c. 1521, in 1522, and c. 1527.44
In these editions, metal type was inset into the block with the title of the book,
the name and titles of its author, and citation of its commissioner, Thomas
Wolsey, ‘by ye assingnement of ye most reuerend fader in god ye lord Thomas
Cardinal of yorke & Legate ex late re from our holy father the pope’. In the
woodcut, Fisher gestures from his pulpit, which is a simple panelled structure
standing on four legs. Like Alcock’s, Fisher’s facial features are carefully deline-
ated. He is given a lined, serious face with heavy-lidded eyes, high cheekbones,
and a strong square jaw. The same features are shown in another contemporary
portrait of Fisher, a chalk drawing at Windsor Castle made by Hans Holbein
when the bishop was about fifty-seven years old, a careful identification of the
40
Cited from John Fisher’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter
ODNB) <http://www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 23 May 2013].
41
STC 10891, Hodnett, item 895, p. 259. This and the next picture are reproduced in
Driver, Image in Print, pp. 88–89.
42
STC 10894.5, Hodnett, item 895, p. 259.
43
Hodnett, p. 26.
44
STC 10894, 10894.5, 10895.
author with his sermon.45 The woodcut is also interesting because, as various
commentators have pointed out, there is a very close fit between the main part
of the block and the moveable sections, which implies that these were made in
England. This surmise, along with the realistic delineation of Fisher’s features,
argues that the artist may have seen Fisher preaching in his pulpit and recorded
the historical moment for Fisher’s subsequent readers.
Along with these early experiments with portraiture in print comes carica-
ture, introduced into England through continental models. Richard Pynson’s
1509 Shyp of Folys draws indirectly, through French intermediaries, on
Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Basel edition of the Narrenschiff.46 In the latter volume a
fool in a hood with ass’s ears adorned with bells is shown preaching from a pul-
pit to a rowdy group of men (one holds a drawn sword, the other waves a staff )
and women; behind the pulpit, another fool similarly garbed sleeps. This illus-
tration is used to introduce Brant’s chapter ‘Concealing Truth’ (which argues,
in fact, that the truth can never be hidden).47 For the same chapter, Pynson
includes a woodcut copy that shows a fool hidden behind a pulpit from which
‘a second fool preaches to two women and three men, one holding a drawn
sword’, a simplified rendering of the original.48
Pynson’s edition is an adaptation of Brant’s text in prose and verse by
Alexander Barclay (c. 1484–1552), who is described as a ‘preste’ on the title
page and was chaplain to the College of ‘saynt mary Otery’, the collegiate
church of Ottery St Mary in Devon.49 The English version is not so much a
translation as a ‘recasting’ of Brant’s narrative that localizes the text by satiriz-
ing the Ottery clerks’ ‘unwillingness to learn, the neighbouring parish clergy
for ignorance and worldliness, and a group of named men of Ottery (who
appear to have been ordinary laity) for being frauds and thieves’.50 De Worde’s
subsequent edition, The Shyppe of fooles, published in 1509, includes a different
illustration to introduce ‘Of conscyon of sapience’ (of valuing truth), drawn
45
Holbein’s drawing is reproduced in Rex, Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII, item 15;
in Reynolds, Saint John Fisher; and in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, ed. by Bradshaw
and Duffy. There is an early copy in the British Museum and another in oil on paper in the
National Portrait Gallery, London.
46
STC 3545.
47
Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans. by Zeydel, p. 337.
48
Hodnett, item 1919, p. 386.
49
Cited from Alexander Barclay’s entry in the ODNB.
50
Cited from Alexander Barclay’s entry in the ODNB.
Figure 20. ‘The Preacher as a Fool’. Sebastian Brant, Shyp of Folys. London, Wynkyn de Worde, 1517.
STC 3547a. Photograph by Sara Driver. By permission of John Wolfson.
from Brant’s text. The woodcut shows a tonsured priest outdoors reading to
two men; all three have fools’ bells. In this example, however, there is no pulpit.
In De Worde’s later edition of 1517 (see Figure 20), this scene is illustrated by
a copy of Pynson’s preaching woodcut.51 The emphasis on the pollution of the
pulpit by fools in Pynson’s illustration is clearly drawn from continental models
and, as seen in earlier examples, pulpit satire flourished in France and elsewhere
51
Hodnett, item 1151, p. 295. STC 3547, STC 3547a. I examined the 1517 edition in the
collections of John Wolfson.
Figure 21.
‘Mohammed Preaching’. A Lytell
Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe Called
Alcaron. London, Wynkyn de
Worde, c. 1519. STC 15084.
By permission of the British Library.
in Europe. The picture accompanying the same text in De Worde’s earlier edi-
tion is freer, perhaps more English in its source, and does not directly attack
the pulpit’s power, though in his later edition, De Worde copies the woodcut
employed by Pynson.
Another sort of representation of priests preaching from pulpits occurs in
A Lytell Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe Called Alcaron, printed about 1519 by De
Worde.52 On the title page of this brief volume (see Figure 21), the Prophet
Mohammed is shown wearing a fez and holding a drawn sword as he preaches
52
STC 15084. I examined the British Library copy (British Library C.25.k.13) for this
research.
from the pulpit to a group of veiled women and laymen.53 This remarkable trea-
tise purports to describe Muslim beliefs as drawn from the Qur’an and is some-
what accurate in its descriptions, though it uses sources other than the Qur’an
for some of its (occasionally garbled) information. Mohammed is described on
the title page and repeatedly in the text as a ‘fals nygromancer’. The anonymous
author says, ‘I somwhat wryte of ye turkes laws | whiche lawe in many poyntes
accordeth with our lawe & is ye lawe of Machomet’ (sig. A2r).
Mohammed’s law is described as being very strict, comparable to a drawn
sword (which appears, in fact, in the title illustration, held by Mohammed him-
self ), and Muslims are bidden to flee or shun their enemies while Christians
are instructed to forgive and pray for them: ‘we shall loue them that loue not vs
and praye for oure enemys’ (sig. A2r). But the text also points to some similari-
ties between Christianity and Islam — that Muslims believe (like Christians)
that the good go to heaven while the bad are consigned to hell:
In the whiche boke this fals nygromancer Machamet wrote amonge other thynges
as many one hathe redde and sene here before that they the whiche ben god shall
go vnto paradise and they the whiche ben euyll to helle / and that byleueth all the
sarasyns (sig. A2r).
According to the author, the Qur’an describes paradise as ‘a place of delyte and
Joye / where a man shall fynde all maner of delytes and fruytes / & all maner
of fruytes at all tymes / and the ryuer renneth mylke/wyne/hony/and fresshe
water’ (sig. A2v), ideas that do occur in Qur’an itself (compare, for example,
‘The Paradise promised to the righteous is as if rivers flow through it; its fruit is
everlasting and also its shade’).54
The author of this tract further states that Muslims believe Jesus was a great
prophet born to the Virgin Mary. The Qur’an likewise describes Jesus as a great
apostle and as born to the Virgin Mary:
Mary said: Lord, how shall I have a son, when no man has touched me? He
answered: Such is the power of Allah, He creates what he pleases. When He decrees
a thing, He says to it: Be; and it is. He will teach him the Book and the Wisdom and
the Torah and the Gospel and will make him a Messenger to the children of Israel.55
While the title woodcut is unique, and very probably made specifically for this
volume, there is another woodcut on the title-page verso that originally illus-
53
Hodnett, item 444, p. 176, fig. 62.
54
The Qur’an: Arabic Text with a New Translation, trans. by Khan, 13. 35, p. 235.
55
The Qur’an: Arabic Text with a New Translation, trans. by Khan, 3. 48, p. 53.
trated De Worde’s Art to Live Well editions of 1505 and 1506, introducing ‘the
treatyse of ye comynge of Antecryst’ (fol. Civ).56 This picture shows two seated
and standing groups of listeners before two facing pulpits. In the pulpit at the
left are two bearded men, identified in the Art to Live Well editions as Enoch
and Elijah preaching the true word.57 In the facing pulpit stands the Antichrist
with the Devil. In the context of the Alcaron, the bearded figures may again
represent true prophecy as against the false prophecies of Mohammed, or per-
haps they represent true prophecy as against the false prophecy once more
of Antichrist, whose coming the Alcaron describes. The text proclaims that
Muslims believe Jesus will ‘come agayne in the ende of the worlde & Juge and
shall dystroye Antecryst’ (sig. A5v).
The author further addresses the apparently serious problem of Christians
turning to Islam. He says ‘somtyme that crysten men become sarasyns eyther
thrughe pouerte or through wyckednes’, and they learn to say the following
(garbled) prayer: ‘La oles ella Machamet roses all. That is to say | there is no
god but one and Machamet is his messenger’ (sig. A5v), which is the central and
holiest prayer of Islam, comparable to the Lord’s Prayer in Christianity. The
Alcaron also describes the fasting and other religious practices of Muslims and
includes this perhaps telling remark: ‘And the sarasyns byleueth so moche in
our faith that they ben lyghtely conuerted whan men dothe preche vnto them
the fayth of our lorde Jhesu cryst’ (sig. A5 v). Conversion may be the point of
this text, which, ending with ‘Amen’, sounds very much like a sermon.
In this little volume the woodcut of the good sermonizers facing off against
Antichrist and the Devil is polemical and perhaps satirical, used here to illus-
trate the activities of Antichrist on earth but also to condemn them, images
that would gain further polemical power in the hands of reformers just a few
years later. The title illustration of Mohammed preaching from a pulpit might
very well, like the illustrations of John Alcock and John Fisher, be intended
56
STC 792, 793.
57
Hodnett, item 518, p. 190. Hodnett identifies the bearded figures as ‘Moses and
Aaron?’(which is clearly incorrect) and those in the facing pulpit as Antichrist and a devil. In
the Art to Live Well editions, the illustration introduces the section of text ‘Here begynneth
the treatyse of ye comynge of Antecryst’ (fol. C1v or sig. Hh6v); a subsequent woodcut of two
bearded men in a pulpit preaching to seated women and a group of standing men (fol. Cxxviv or
sig. Ii6v) illustrates a text which says that in the final days God will send ‘two grete & excellent
prophetes / yt is to vnderstonde Enoch & Hely yt ben in paradyse terrestre / & the whiche shall
resyste agaynste the sayd Antecryste & his complyces in prechynge ryght fervently the fayth of
our sauyour’. In a subsequent woodcut Enoch and Elias are shown beheaded as the Antichrist
preaches (Hodnett, item 760, p. 236).
to be read straight, as a portrait of the prophet in the act of preaching. The

Alcaron, published about a decade before the Siege of Vienna by Suleiman the
Magnificent in 1529, is strangely prescient, anticipating the incursions into
Europe of the Ottoman Empire. In 1529, the same year as the Siege of Vienna,
Martin Luther also published On War against the Turk, which, like the Alcaron,
is both critical and commendatory of aspects of Islam (Luther’s tract, however,
describes the pope as Antichrist, which the Alcaron emphatically does not).
After the English Reformation, Christ again appears preaching in Bible illustra-
tions, for example, in a Tyndale Bible printed by Richard Jugge about 1553, and
preachers are shown in pulpits in Protestant works such as John Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs, in which the pulpit becomes increasingly politicized.58
Images of Christ preaching span the transition from manuscript to print,
as one might expect, and illustrations of historical preachers at work in their
pulpits are also evident in both media. Pictures of preaching might be one form
of self-promotion (clearly evident in the case of John Alcock, for example) or
a visual device for a printer to identify an author with his book.59 Pictures,
especially title-page pictures, also served to sell books. The Troilus frontispiece
depicting Chaucer in a pulpit instructing a noble company opens a manuscript
with unfinished illustrations; the picture itself surely served to promote or sell
the book.60 The pictures of John Fisher on the title pages of his sermons have
this function as does the title page of the Alcaron. While preaching is satirized
early on in French manuscripts and later in German imprints, this is not found
in English examples in manuscript or print unless modelled directly on con-
tinental sources, as shown by the woodcut in Pynson’s Shyp of Folys. And, to
judge from early English illustrations, the preacher’s pulpit was not always a
fixed attribute in images made between the fourteenth and early sixteenth cen-
turies. Preachers are shown standing, gesturing, reading aloud, and preaching
both in and out of pulpits. The pulpit is further appropriated to more literary
uses, which suggests a blurring of distinction between preaching and perfor-
mance in the period before Protestantism.
58
STC 2869, STC 11222. See King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture.
59
Smith, ‘An Image of a Preacher in Late Fifteenth-Century England’, p. 315, comments
on Alcock’s canny self-promotion: ‘The conspicuous placement of his images in public places,
including religious institutions he had reformed, suggests that they were to operate as a source
of influence and control’.
60
Salter, ‘The Troilus Frontispiece’, pp. 15, 23.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
—— , MS Additional 74236
—— , MS Cotton Nero A.x
—— , MS Royal 8.G.iii
—— , MS Royal 20.C.vii
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104
—— , MS Laud misc. 165 (III, 739)
Early Printed Texts

Alcock, John, Gallicantus Johannis Alcok (London: Richard Pynson, 1498), STC 277
—— , Mons perfectionis (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1496, 1497; London, 1501),
STC 278, 279, 281
—— , Mons perfectionis (London: Richard Pynson, 1497–98), STC 280
—— , Sermo Johannis Alcok [Sermon on Luke VIII] (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde,
?1497, c. 1497), STC 284–85
Bonaventura, Legenda maior S. Francisci (London: Richard Pynson, c. 1513), STC 3270
Brant, Sebastian, Shyp of Folys (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1517), STC 3547a
—— , Shyp of Folys of the Worlde (London: Richard Pynson, 1509), STC 3545
—— , The Shyppe of fooles (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509), STC 3547
The Crafte to Lyue Well and to Dye Well (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1505, 1506),
STC 792–93
Fisher, John, A mornynge remembrau[n]ce (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509), STC
10891
—— , Sermon agayn M. Luther (London: Wynkyn de Worde, ?1521, ?1522, ?1527),
STC 10894, 10894.5, 10895
—— , Sermon for kynge Henry the vij (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509), STC 10900
The Floure of the Commaundements of God (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1510), STC
23876
Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea [the Golden Legend] (Westminster: William Caxton,
after 20 Nov. 1483), STC 24873
Love, Nicholas, [Speculum vitae Christi] The Mirror of the Blessed life of Jesus Christ
(Westminster: William Caxton, 1484; 1490; Wynkyn de Worde, 1494; London:
Richard Pynson, 1494; 1506; and several other editions), STC 3259–3263
A Lytell Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe Called Alcaron (London: Wynkyn de Worde, ?1519),
STC 15084
Primary Sources
The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and
Ceremonies of the Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979)
Brant, Sebastian, The Ship of Fools, trans. by Edwin H. Zeydel, Records of Civilization,
Sources and Studies, 36 (New York: Dover, 1944)
Langland, William, Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. by
Derek Pearsall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)
—— , Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104, intro. by
Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992)
The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982)
The Qur’an: Arabic Text with a New Translation, trans. by Muhammad Zafrulla Khan
(New York: Olive Branch, 1997)
Secondary Studies
Alexander, Jonathan, ‘The Pulpit with the Four Doctors at St James’s, Castle Acre, Nor
folk’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Sym
posium, ed. by Nicholas Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 4 (Stamford: Paul,
1994), pp. 198–206
Backhouse, Janet, The Sherborne Missal (London: British Library, 1999)
Bradshaw, Brendan, and Eamon Duffy, eds, Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The
Career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Camille, Michael, ‘Reading the Printed Image: Illuminations and Woodcuts of the
Pèlerinage de la vie humaine in the Fifteenth Century’, in Printing the Written Word:
The Social History of Books, circa 1450–1520, ed. by Sandra L. Hindman (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 259–91
Christianson, C. Paul, A Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans, 1300–1500
(New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1990)
Coleman, Joyce, ‘Where Chaucer Got his Pulpit: Audience and Intervisuality in the
Troilus and Criseyde Frontispiece’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010), 103–28
Cox, Charles, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English Churches (London: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1915)
David, Alfred, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976)
Dennison, Lynda, and others, An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time
of Chaucer to Henry VIII, c. 1380–c. 1509: The Bodleian Library, Oxford, Fascicle ii
(London: Miller, 2001)
Donaldson, Talbot, ‘Piers Plowman: The Religious Allegory of the C Text’, in Interpre
tations of Piers Plowman, ed. by Edward Vasta (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1968), pp. 130–89
Driver, Martha, Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources
(London: British Library, 2004)
Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
Galway, Margaret, ‘The Troilus Frontispiece’, Modern Language Review, 44 (1949), 161–77
Hobson, G. D., Blind-Stamped Panels in the English Book-Trade, c. 1485–1555 (London:
Bibliographical Society, 1944)
Hodnett, Edward, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535, Illustrated Monographs, 22, rev. repr.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1973)
Johnston, Stanley Howard, Jr, ‘A Study of the Career and Literary Publications of Richard
Pynson’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 1977)
King, John N., Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge:
Kraus, Dorothy, and Henry Kraus, The Hidden World of Misericords (New York: Braziller,
1975)
Owst, G. R., Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the
Pearsall, Derek, Old English and Middle English Poetry, Routledge History of English
Poetry, 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977)
—— , ‘The “Troilus” Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience’, Yearbook of English Studies, 7
(1977), 68–74
Plummer, Pauline, ‘Restoration of a Fifteenth-Century English Pulpit’, Studies in Conser
vation, 10 (1965), 168–75
Rex, Richard, Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham
Palace (London: Queen’s Gallery, 1978)
Reynolds, E. E., Saint John Fisher, 2nd edn (Wheathampstead: Clarke, 1972)
Salter, Elizabeth, ‘The Troilus Frontispiece’, in Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer: A
Facsimile of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61, intro. by M. B. Parkes, and E.
Salter (Cambridge: Brewer, 1978), pp. 15–23
Scott, Kathleen L., Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, Survey of Manuscripts Illu
minated in the British Isles, 6, 2 vols (London: Miller, 1996)
Smith, Julie, ‘An Image of a Preacher in Late Fifteenth-Century England: The 1498
Woodcut Portrait of Bishop John Alcock’, Viator, 21 (1990), 301–22
Tuve, Rosemond, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1966)
Windeatt, Barry, ‘Troilus and Criseyde: Love in a Manner of Speaking’, in Writings on
Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. by Helen Cooney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), pp. 81–97
Some Middle English Sermon Verse and
its Transmission in Manuscript and Print
Julia Boffey
T
he role of verse in Middle English sermons is a topic that has received
some attention, but even at the most basic level it poses problems.1
What constitutes ‘verse’ in sermon contexts? Any definition, even
the elementary one of ‘words arranged according to a metrical and/or rhym-
ing pattern’, has to accommodate pieces of strikingly different length and form,
and to recognize that scribes were mostly unconcerned to register distinctions
between verse and prose in the manuscripts they copied. The problematic rela-
tionship between sermons in performance, spoken aloud to a listening audi-
ence, and written copies, which are likely to have responded in a variety of ways
to features of oral delivery, is made still more challenging by the possibility that
some works categorized as sermons may not in the first place have been con-
ceived for performance of any kind. Scholars and indexers, faced with the task
of defining ‘sermon verse’ for the purposes of capturing and recording it, take
on a difficult task.2
1
The following abbreviations are used in this discussion: NIMEV: Boffey and Edwards, A
New Index of Middle English Verse; STC: Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books
Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
2
Verse in Middle English sermons is now helpfully indexed in O’Mara and Paul, A
Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, iv, 2894–95. For some discussion of the dif-
ficulties of recording sermon verse in NIMEV, see Boffey, ‘The Indexing of Medieval Verse
Texts’.
Julia Boffey (j.boffey@qmul.ac.uk) is professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of

English at Queen Mary, University of London.
260 Julia Boffey
Those who have explored sermon verse in context have imputed to it a num-
ber of different functions. In some cases the verse items preserved in prose ser-
mons probably served in some way as mnemonics for both the preacher deliver-
ing the sermon and for the audience hearing it, encapsulating in a pithy way a
larger argument of some kind. The verse could offer handy summaries of sources
under discussion, whether from the scriptures or elsewhere, and might some-
times have recalled popular songs and snippets (occasionally proverbial) as a
way of offering instruction on behaviour to be shunned or especially cultivat-
ed.3 In certain other contexts verse items seem to have had a function as struc-
tural markers to round off or to introduce sections of a sermon as it unfolded.
Susan Powell’s study of Mirk’s Festial has identified in that work some rhyming
tags of a kind found in a number of sermons, and she has also investigated the
significance of the two longer lyrics interpolated in the Festial’s sermons for
the feast of the Assumption.4 As Powell points out, the transmission of these
two Marian lyrics was almost entirely confined to Festial manuscripts and was
subject to little textual variation.5 In sermons other than those of the Festial,
though, preachers sometimes incorporated verse from other contexts for their
own purposes and employed lyrics that circulated more widely and hence in a
greater variety of forms.
The textual variation that characterizes much sermon verse as it circulated
in manuscript form is perhaps unsurprising, but it nonetheless repays investi-
gation. The transmission of some items in unusually stable form, for example,
can clarify their functions and in some cases point to specific features of the
circulation enjoyed by their host sermons. And what happened to sermon verse
in the cases where it was also transmitted in print? In order to explore some of
these issues, this study will review a small sample of sermon material incorpo-
rating verse of some kind. The works in question, all from the very late four-
teenth century or the early years of the fifteenth century, have been chosen to
give a relatively broad view of the issues and include verse of various kinds in
varying proportions. They include, first, a cycle of fifty-six temporale sermons,
3
For discussion, see Wenzel, Verses in Sermons; Wenzel, Preachers, Poets and the Early
English Lyric; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England; Fletcher, ‘The
Lyric in the Sermon’; and Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching in Britain and Ireland,
pp. 273–305.
4
Powell, ‘“For ho is quene of cortaysye”’; Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 206–12 (pp. 210–11).
5
As Powell notes, one of the items does appear in a non-Festial context in London,
British Library, MS Harley 210, but with indications that it was ‘presumably copied […] from
the Festial’; see Powell, ‘“For ho is quene of cortaysye”’, p. 94.
Middle English Sermon Verse in Manuscript and Print 261
with additional sermons on the Annunciation, the Assumption, the Visitation,

and the Nativity, which survives in a single manuscript, Warminster, Longleat
House, MS 4; second, and probably by the same author, the rather different
sermon-like prose dialogue Dives and Pauper, which survives in a number of
manuscripts and a printed edition; and finally, the sermon on a text from Luke
16. 2, Redde racionem villicacionis tue, preached at Paul’s Cross in London,
sometime between 1387 and 1389, by Thomas Wimbledon, which was widely
transmitted in manuscript form in the fifteenth century and revived in succes-
sive printed editions from the mid-sixteenth until the mid-eighteenth century.6
While the first two works to be considered here include small clutches of verse
material, Wimbledon’s sermon, rather differently, includes only one stanza.
Considering the verse in the Longleat 4 sermons alongside that of Dives and
Pauper offers an unusual opportunity to review the practice of one author in
the context of two separate undertakings. In the collaborative article which first
drew the Longleat 4 sermons to scholarly notice, Anne Hudson and H. Leith
Spencer pointed out in the cycle six allusions to Dives and Pauper which
seem incontravertible evidence for common authorship. They also supported
arguments put forward in earlier studies of Dives and Pauper alone that the
author of this work — and hence also of the Longleat cycle — was probably a
Franciscan friar. Priscilla Heath Barnum’s work on Dives and Pauper persuaded
her that this author was not only a Franciscan but also very likely ‘employed as
a member of the household staff of an English magnate’. 7 Scholarly consensus
seems to be that the anonymous author was probably working on Dives and
Pauper from 1402 until sometime after 1405, possibly as late as 1410, and that
the sermon cycle, which came next, must postdate 1410 and the Constitutions
formulated under Archbishop Thomas Arundel from 1407 to 1410 to counter
Wycliffite and Lollard heresy.8 The sermon cycle survives only in Longleat 4, a
carefully produced parchment volume in which it precedes copies of Pore Caitif
and the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, and whose contents and general
6
The sermons of Longleat 4 are only partially edited: see Willmott, ‘An Edition of Selected
Sermons from Longleat 4’; I have relied on information in O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of
Middle English Prose Sermons, iv, 2484–2606, and on notes taken during preparatory work
for NIMEV. For the remaining works see Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed. by Knight, and Dives and
Pauper, ed. by Barnum.
7
Hudson and Spencer, ‘Old Author, New Work’; Barnum, Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum,
iii, p. xxv. John Bale’s attribution of Dives and Pauper to the Carmelite friar Henry Parker was
convincingly refuted by Richardson, ‘Dives et pauper’, and Richardson, ‘Dives and Pauper’.
8
Hudson and Spencer, ‘Old Author, New Work’, p. 222; Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum,
iii, pp. xviii–xx.
262 Julia Boffey
appearance suggest production for purposes of private study rather than public
preaching.9 Dives and Pauper, a dialogue again conceived for private reading,
but with a preacherly flavour deriving from the monitory role which Pauper
often plays, had in contrast a much wider transmission; this work survives in
eight virtually complete manuscripts, a further six fragments, and three early
printings made between 1493 and 1536.10
In keeping with the different nature of the works, the verse in each has
its own characteristic flavour. Five of the eight verse items identified in the
Longleat sermons are Latin (Esca cubile piger crux, sermon 1; Anna solet dici
tres peperisse Marias, in sermon 9; Confiteor tundo, in sermon 42; and Cur homo
torquetur and Iob probat, both in sermon 50).11 Three of these (Esca cubile piger
crux, Confiteor tundo, and Iob probat) consist of small strings of short lines, and
they function effectively to emphasize, and probably also to make easily memo-
rable, the sense of the Middle English that immediately precedes or follows
them (Confiteor tundo, for example, seems intended to underline and authorize
an Augustinian precept about forgiveness for venial sins). Cur homo torquetur,
even though rather longer, has the same function of emphasis: its eleven lines
are monorhymed, for extra effect; and Anna solet dici tres peperisse Marias, a
summary of the genealogy of Christ which extends to six long lines, encapsu-
lates and once again makes more easily memorable the sense of the surrounding
Middle English. All of these short Latin pieces except Esca cubile piger crux
apparently survive in other contexts, and it seems reasonable to assume that
they were relatively widely known and used by the sermon-author for purposes
of summary and emphasis.12 In no instance in Longleat 4 do they particularly
advance or develop the meaning of the surrounding Middle English prose into
which they are inserted, and they are present presumably to confer authority
and summarize significant information or points of doctrine at key moments.
Of the three English verse items in the Longleat 4 sermons, one does some-
thing of the same work in recapitulating the message of the surrounding prose,
which warns that a sinful person, once shamed, will seek God in order to be
9
Hudson and Spencer, ‘Old Author, New Work’, p. 226.
10
For a complete list, see Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, iii, pp. liv–lxxvi. The prints,
by Richard Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and Thomas Berthelet respectively, are STC numbers
19212–14 (see further below).
11
For transcriptions and an indication of context, see O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of
Middle English Prose Sermons, iv, 2484–2606.
12
O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, cite Walther, Initia
carminum, nos 1060, 3148, 3927, 9864.
healed like the leper healed by Christ in Matthew 8. 1–13: ‘Fyl here faces wiþ
opyn shame | and þanne schul þey sekin þin holy name’.13 Another has an obvi-
ously structural function in that it concludes the first sermon in the cycle.
Beginning with four long lines all starting with the imprecation ‘Blissid be he’, it
then rounds the sermon off with a two-line prayer. The remaining item of Middle
English verse, more substantial than these snippets, is, as Adrian Willmott
notes, a ten-line translation of lines from Job 14. 1–2, beginning ‘Man that is of
woman born’.14 It is the only one of the three items of Middle English verse in
the cycle to have correspondences outside Longleat 4, namely with translations
of the same passage from the Book of Job which appear in the Fasciculus morum
and in the Latin sermons of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Barlow 24.15 That the
only traceable connections of the Middle English verse in the Longleat sermons
should be with Latin sermons and with a preacher’s collection seems entirely
appropriate. Like the preponderance of Latin among the verse items, it bespeaks
the generally learned tenor of the cycle as a whole. The function of the verse here
has little to do with what Alan J. Fletcher characterizes as the ‘uphill task’ and
‘battle for attention’ which sometimes faced the live preacher.16
It is hardly surprising to find that Dives and Pauper, a work much longer
than the Longleat 4 sermon cycle, contains rather more in the way of verse: at
least ten, perhaps as many as fifteen items, variously in Latin and English (some-
times in parallel versions in both languages). Isolating and describing these is
complicated by the fact that they are all copied as prose in the manuscripts and
furthermore by the impossibility of making hard and fast distinctions between
formal verse items and rhetorically heightened passages of rhythmic prose. The
Latin and English verse items identified in Francis J. Sheeran’s study of Dives
and Pauper are approximately matched by the sections of text set out as verse
in Barnum’s edition, but there are some discrepancies, and Barnum’s notes
acknowledge the difficulties of separating out verse and prose with any preci-
sion.17 Of the Latin sections that Barnum sets out as verse, several probably
13
From sermon 10: see O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons,
iv, 2503–04.
14
NIMEV 2076.55; see Willmott, ‘Another Middle English Verse Rendering of Job 14: 1–2’.
15
NIMEV 2058; see Wenzel, Verses in Sermons, p. 149, and Fasciculus Morum, p. 96;
Fletcher, ‘“I Sing of a Maiden”’, and Powell, ‘Connections between the Fasciculus Morum and
Bodleian MS Barlow 24’.
16
Fletcher, ‘The Lyric in the Sermon’, p. 191.
17
Sheeran, ‘Ten Verse Fragments’; see also Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, i, 88–89
(with notes at iii, 26–27) and iii, p. xxxii.
264 Julia Boffey
derive from a bank of pieces which were part of any self-respecting preacher’s
stock-in-trade: one of these is a versified rendition of a biblical proverb from
Proverbs 19. 4 (Tempore felici | Multi numerantur amici);18 two more (Diues
diuicias non congregat absque labor; Condicio, sexus, etas, discrecio, fama) are
also found in the Fasciculus morum.19 Like the Latin verses in the Longleat 4
sermons, all serve as mnemonics or sententiae.
The English verse items have slightly more varied affiliations. Although it
can be argued that much of what Dives has to say is couched in preaching mode,
Dives and Pauper as a whole defines itself more broadly as a ‘tretys’, designed
to offer comprehensive vernacular instruction on the relationship of the com-
mandments to the virtuous earthly life, and its strategies and affiliations are
thus perhaps slightly different from those informing the Longleat 4 sermons.
Nonetheless, it is possible to draw some parallels. Just as the first sermon of the
Longleat 4 cycle ends with verse, for example, so Dives and Pauper is brought
to a close in some of the manuscripts with three rhyming lines (‘To whiche
blysse brynge vs he | þat for ȝou & for me | Deyyd on tre’),20 a device com-
mon in Middle English prose texts such as Nicholas Love’s translation of the
Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi, and compared by Priscilla Barnum
with Jacob’s Well (a series of ninety-five sermons on vice and virtue) and the
sermons in London, British Library, MS Royal 18 B.xxiii.21
A tissue of Latin sources and correspondences, similar to that which relates
to the verse in Longleat 4, can be teased out of the verse in Book xv of Dives
and Pauper, Commandment VI: a section which deals with remedies for
the temptation of lechery, the best of which is ‘deuocion & mende of Cristis
18
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 283 (Commandment IX, chap. 12; Barnum’s note
gives details of further occurrences). Sheeran, ‘Ten Verse Fragments’, p. 258, suggests that the
Dives and Pauper author may have used ‘an unidentified collection of poems especially gathered
for the use of clergymen’.
19
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 158 (Commandment VII, chap. 9), Fasciculus
Morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzel, p. 314, and Walther, Initia carminum, no. 6059; Dives and
Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 222 (Commandment VIII, chap. 6), Fasciculus Morum, ed. and trans.
by Wenzel, pp. 478, and Walther, Initia carminum, no. 719. One further group of Latin lines,
beginning Si ducas viduam uel corruperit alter and set out by Barnum as verse, are in Dives and
Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 113 (Commandment VI, chap. 19); no analogues are cited.
20
NIMEV 3783.22. Some of the manuscripts end imperfectly and so lack the conclusion
(see the textual notes in Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 326 and the manuscript descrip-
tions in iii, pp. liv–lxxv). Where they are present the lines are written as prose.
21
See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 239; Dives and
Pauper, ed. by Barnum, iii, 324; and more generally, NIMEV, Subject Index, under ‘colophons’.
passion’.22 The chapter begins with the widely circulating tale of the bloody
shirt, an allegory of Christ as knight, elaborated first with a couplet in both
Latin and Middle English (‘Cerne cicatrices ueteris uestigia pugne […] | Beheld
myn wondys & haue [þis] in þi þout’), and then with a Middle English quatrain
(beginning ‘Whyl Y haue his blood in mende’).23 The Latin of the first couplet,
identified as originally from Ovid’s Amores, appears once again in the Fasciculus
morum, possibly a work well known to the Dives and Pauper author.24 Middle
English variants of both the couplet and the quatrain appear in the Latin Gesta
Romanorum in the context of the same tale of the bloody shirt, and the Dives
and Pauper author hints that this may have been his source when he points
out that his version of the tale is adduced from ‘gestis’. 25 As he proceeds to
expound the allegorical significance of the tale, he moves onto the third and
final verse item in this section: three six-line stanzas (beginning ‘Whan Y
þinke of Cristes blod’) translated from Latin lines also provided here (begin-
ning ‘Reminiscens sacrati sanguinis’), and attributed to ‘an holy man’.26 Barnum
notes the appearance of the Latin in London, British Library, MS Arundel 507
and elsewhere, and also similarities to a Middle English ‘ABC Poem on the
Passion of Christ’.27 The verse in Commandment VI, Chapter 15 thus seem to
have had some currency in Latin and Middle English outside Dives and Pauper,
circulating in longer works like the Gesta Romanorum or the Fasciculus morum,
and also probably in anthologies of various kinds. Such contexts also proba-
bly furnished the four short lines of verse (beginning ‘With þis betyl ben þey
betyn’) in Commandment IV, Chapter 4, here providing the punch lines to a
story about unfilial children who get their comeuppance by being disinherited;
another version of it appears in the sermons of London, British Library, MS
Royal 18.B.xxiii.28
Chapter 14 of the section dealing with the sin of lechery in Commandment
VI includes verse with a different range of associations. One remedy against
lechery, the author points out, is to think about death and the last things. An
22
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 99.
23
NIMEV 497.55, 4074.22.
24
Wenzel, Verses in Sermons, pp. 160–62, and Fasciculus Morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzel, p. 204.
25
NIMEV 498, 3568.5/4074.5; The English Versions of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, ed. by
Herrtage, pp. 23–26.
26
NIMEV 3967.55; Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 102.
27
NIMEV 1523; Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, iii, 213.
28
See Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, i, 313, and the note at iii, 142.
266 Julia Boffey
example to bolster the soundness of this advice is drawn from the story of
Rosamund Clifford, Henry II’s ‘Fair Rosamund’, who died while the king was
away from her company and was buried at Godstow. When her tomb was later
opened at the grieving king’s request, the assembled company was repelled by
the sight of her ravaged corpse, with ‘an horryble froude [toad] upon hyr brest
atwoxsyn hyr tetys, & a foul neddere [snake]’, and the king accordingly ordered
an inscription for the tomb: ‘Hic iacet in tumba rosa mundi non rosa munda. |
Non redolet sed olet quod redolere solet. Þat is þus mychil to seye in Englysch:
Her lyth in graue rose of þe world, | But nout clene rose; she smellith nout
swote | But stynkyth wol foule, þat whylum smellyd so swote’.29 The story as
a whole was perhaps best known from Ranulph Higden’s fourteenth-century
Polychronicon, in which context it circulated widely, and it is worth noting
that the Dives and Pauper author follows Higden’s verse version of the Latin
epitaph with a Middle English prose translation very close to that supplied in
John Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Latin. Although Barnum sets out both
the Latin and English in verse lines, the Dives and Pauper author is properly
discriminating in referring only to the Latin as ‘þese two vers’ (‘vers’ presumably
meaning couplets).30
The remaining verse item in Dives and Pauper, rather like these lines on Fair
Rosamund, had a wider circulation in large part because of its incorporation
into another widely transmitted analogue. Chapter 15 of Commandment VIII,
on bearing false witness, introduces a discussion about God’s judgement and the
endless sorrow of the damned: ‘Than they þat schul ben dampnyd schul mon
seyn a sawe of sorwe ȝat neuere schal han ende: defecit gaudium cordis nostri […]
Þe ioy of our herte is don and pasyd awey
To sorwe and care is turnyd our play,
Þe gerlond of our hefd is fallyn to grounde;
Þat euere dede we synne, welaway þe stounde.31
Both Latin and English stanzas are versions of Lamentations 5. 15–16 (a

source cited in Dives and Pauper at the end of the verse stanza), and the Middle
English lines survive in variant forms, both with and without the Latin, in an
assortment of preachers’ manuscripts: John of Grimestone’s preaching note-
29
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 97.
30
Walther, Initia carminum, no. 7973. See Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi
Cestrensis, ed. by Lumby, viii, 54. Sheeran, ‘Ten Verse Fragments’, p. 263, quotes a further occur-
rence of the anecdote from Robert Holcot’s commentary on Wisdom.
31
NIMEV 3397.55. Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 245.
book (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18. 7. 21);

the Latin sermon collection which is now Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS
F.126; London, British Library, MS Royal 7.C.i (from Ramsey Abbey; includ-
ing much preaching material); and London, British Library, MS Harley 7322
(two versions).32 In a slightly different form they also appear in Oxford, Merton
College, MS 120, added in a later hand to a thirteenth-century copy of Peter
Comestor’s Historia scholastica.33 The context in which they are most frequently
recorded, however, is in the conclusion of Thomas Wimbledon’s sermon Redde
racionem villicacionis tue, an exposition of the parable of the vineyard from
Luke 16. 2, first delivered at Paul’s Cross in London in one of the years between
1387 and 1389:
Whan þese dampned men be in þis woo þey schulleþ
synge þis rewful song þat is written in þe Book of Mornynge:
Þe ioye of oure herte is ago;
Oure wele is turned into woo;
Þe coroune of oure heued is falle vs fro;
Alas for synne þat we haue doo.34
Surviving in both Latin and Middle English versions, Wimbledon’s sermon is

extant in over twenty manuscripts, a small number of which are partial or in
some way reworked: its wide transmission was probably related to what it has
to say about the responsibilities of priests and lords, and its not always implicit
critique of exploitation and extortion.35 Most of these manuscripts are antholo-
32
NIMEV 221 (the reference under this number to Cambridge, Cambridge University
Library, MS Ii.3. 8, fol. 43v, duplicates the entry under 3397 and should be deleted). On
these manuscripts, see respectively Wilson, A Descriptive Index of the English Lyrics in John of
Grimestone’s Preaching Book, items 39 and 92; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later
Medieval England, pp. 146–58 and Wenzel, Verses in Sermons, pp. 82–86; The British Library
Online Manuscripts Catalogue <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/> [accessed 13
April 2013]. The Harley 7322 versions are conveniently reprinted in Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed.
by Knight, p. 135.
33
NIMEV 3398; see Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in
Merton College, Oxford, pp. 99–100.
34
Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed. by Knight, p. 127; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later
Medieval England, pp. 171–74. On the date of the sermon’s delivery, see Fletcher, Preaching and
Politics, p. 208 n. 35.
35
NIMEV 3397. The most up-to-date list of manuscripts is that in O’Mara and Paul,
A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, i, 55–61. The edition by Knight, Wimbledon’s
Sermon, is based on the text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 357, as is that of Owen,
‘Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon’; that of Sundén, A Famous Middle English Sermon, on the text
268 Julia Boffey
gies or composites of some kind in which Wimbledon’s sermon features as one

of a number of contents. In some cases the other contents are predominantly
sermons or preaching-related, but in others Wimbledon’s sermon rubs shoul-
ders with an array of texts which includes the widely circulating prose narrative
The Three Kings of Cologne, extracts from the South English Legendary, the mys-
tical writings of Richard Rolle, and The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost.
It is unlikely that the author of Dives and Pauper simply lifted the verse from
a copy of Wimbledon’s sermon: his version differs in several minor particu-
lars from that transmitted in copies of Wimbledon, and in fact resembles more
closely the first of the two variant forms in London, British Library, MS Harley
7322, that on fol. 153v. Given that the author was at work on Dives and Pauper
some time after 1402, however, in what must have been the early period of the
copying and circulation of Wimbledon’s sermon, it seems quite likely that he
might at least have seen Wimbledon’s version of this eminently useful versified
Latin biblical paraphrase. That its sentiments had potential in a variety of con-
texts is further indicated by its incorporation in The Charter of the Abbey of the
Holy Ghost, in a sequence of references to Lamentations that lead to a discus-
sion of ‘Hou god ordened a waye to sauen man’:
A, þou sely couent, who shal ben þi helpe? Cecidit corona capitis nostri, ue nobis
quia peccauimus, I ne can nouȝt ellis seyn, he seiþ, but, þe fairest flour of al oure
garlond is fallen away; alas, alas & weloway, þat euere we dede synne.36
The scribe of London, British Library, MS Harley 1704 may have used a garbled
memory of this quotation, improbably mixed up with a line from Chaucer’s
‘Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale’,37 as some kind of shorthand reference to
an amalgamated version of the Charter and Abbey of the Holy Ghost. About to
start his copy on fol. 31r of the manuscript, he inserted the heading ‘Alas that
euer loue was synne’, but then crossed it out in order to insert some shorter
verse texts before beginning the Charter and Abbey conflation on fol. 32v.38
in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 57. A new edition of the sermon is being prepared by
Veronica O’Mara.
36
Rolle, Yorkshire Writers, ed. by Horstmann, i, 337–62 (p. 348). A list of manuscripts
of the Charter is in Boffey, ‘Conflations of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost and The Charter of The
Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, see p. 247 n. 9.
37
‘Allas, allas! That evere love was synne!’, iii, 614 in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson,
p. 113.
38
See Manly and Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, i, 240.
Discussion thus far has outlined some of the slipperiness characteristic of

short Middle English verse texts incorporated in longer prose contexts and has
gestured towards the complex networks of sources and correspondences which
play around them. Verse in sermons is an especially thorny problem when, as
is so often the case, it translates part of the scriptures or of some other author-
ity, or simply well-known Latin mnemonics or sententiae. The capacity of
such verse to change shape in transmission (sometimes to the extent of being
unrhymed and mismetred), and to pop up in and out of different contexts,
poses a number of challenges. The versified conclusion to Dives and Pauper,
for example, is not consistently versified in all the manuscripts; and in the copy
of Wimbledon’s sermon in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 155, a second scribe
has inserted an extra verse conclusion after the usual quatrain and signing off.39
These are just two instances of the variation characteristic of verse in sermons.
Editorially, and sometimes for readers as well, variation of this kind can be per-
plexing: a perceptive later reader spotted that portions of Dives and Pauper in
Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 270 were somewhat unusual
and wrote ‘verse’ in the margin next to ‘Whyl y haue his blood in mende’.40
In the case of both Dives and Pauper and Wimbledon’s sermon, it is however
possible to compare the state of the verse in the manuscripts with its forms in
successive early printed editions. To what extent was the verse in these works
susceptible to the potential of print to fix and make stable?
Dives and Pauper went relatively early into print, in a 1493 edition by
Richard Pynson about whose production an unusual amount is known (STC
19212). The setting copy has survived, in the form of Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Eng. th. d. 36, as also have documents relating to cases at law brought both
by and against Pynson in relation to one John Russhe, esquire, of London, who
put up half the money for the printing and received half the print run of six
hundred copies.41 Following the precedent of his setting copy, Pynson (or the
editor and/or compositors working for him) made no attempt to distinguish
the verse from its surrounding prose in terms of layout: in every case it simply
runs on as prose from its introductory prose lines. Even the three-line rhymed
39
See Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, iii, 324; O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of
Middle English Prose Sermons, i, 195: ‘To the whiche ioye and blis God bring you and me þat
boght vs with his precious passion opon the holy rode tre’.
40
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 100, textual notes.
41
Morgan, ‘Pynson’s Manuscript of Dives and Pauper’; Plomer, ‘Two Lawsuits of Richard
Pynson’.
270 Julia Boffey
conclusion which is found in some of the manuscript copies is in Pynson’s ver-

sion abbreviated and unrhymed: ‘To whiche blisse he // bring vs // that for vs
dyed on the //rode tree. Amen.’ (sig. J7 va). A reader of this edition could be
forgiven for not noticing the existence of verse in Dives and Pauper.
The same is true of Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of 1496 (STC 19213) based
on Pynson’s text although slightly modernized in parts and enhanced with
some woodcuts. But by the time of Thomas Berthelet’s 1536 edition (STC
19214) someone had evidently decided on a raft of changes to the appearance
of the text and among these had done some tinkering with the verse sections
(the text of the edition otherwise remains the same as Pynson/De Worde).42
Berthelet’s edition is for a start a smaller-format book, in octavo rather than the
folio size of both the Pynson and De Worde editions. It has marginal apparatus,
in the form of glosses indicating biblical and other sources, and it employs a
variety of typefaces to distinguish the main text from the glosses and within
the main text to separate Latin from English. Some portions of both the Latin
and English verse in the text are carefully set out in verse lines, sometimes with
added paraphs and indentation to clarify matters of rhyme and metre. 43 This
is so in relation to the verse in Commandment IV (‘with this betyll’; Berthelet,
fol. 137r), and to the three devotional lyrics in Chapter 15 of Commandment
VI (‘Beholde my woundes’, fols 220 v and 221r; ‘whan I thynke on Christis
bloode’, fol. 221v), where in the last case the Latin source is printed as a mar-
ginal gloss, in roman type. The epitaph on Fair Rosamund in Commandment
VI, Chapter 14, is also treated with discrimination: the Latin, which the text
describes specifically as ‘two verses’ is printed in separate verse lines, in roman
type, but the English prose translation is left as prose. Unaccountably, given
this otherwise very careful layout, the verse in Commandment VIII, Chapter
15 (‘The ioy of our hart is done & past away’, fol. 297r) is left in prose lines;
perhaps this is to be explained by a change of compositor or by a growing sense,
as the setting of the type proceeded, that space was at a premium. The colophon
(fol. 343r) is also left unrhymed, although here set into a neatly shaped fishtail.
Berthelet’s decision to print Dives and Pauper in 1536, forty years after De
Worde’s edition, may seem a curious one. That the printed editio princeps was
42
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, iii, p. lxxvi, confirming that both De Worde and
Berthelet’s editions follow the text established by Pynson, notes of Berthelet’s that ‘The basis of
his text seemed [sic] to have been the Wynkyn de Worde printing, but Berthelet abbreviated the
Table and freely modernized spellings and wordings’. Sheeran, ‘Ten Verse Fragments’, does not
consider Berthelet’s edition.
43
The Latin lines beginning ‘si ducas inductam’ (fol. 227v), are, for example, set out as verse.
the work of his predecessor as King’s Printer, Richard Pynson, may be part of
the explanation; and another factor may have been his concern not to handle
apparently heretical books (he had appeared before the vicar-general in 1526
for printing works without first seeking license): a work first printed in the
1490s may have seemed a safe option.44 At the same time, though, its promo-
tion of the ideal of holy poverty, its intermittent criticism of the clergy, and its
apparent support for the availability of ‘Godis lawe […] in her moder tunge’.45
Whatever the reasons behind his printing it, Berthelet’s edition rather interest-
ingly preserved for the 1530s some snippets of Middle English verse in a form
which made at least some of them more prominent as verse than they had been
in previous printed editions and in the manuscript copies.
The case of the verse that Dives and Pauper shares with Wimbledon’s ser-
mon, the translation of Lamentations 5. 15–16 (‘Þe ioy of our herte is don and
pasyd awey’) offers a curious coda to this discussion. While Wimbledon’s ser-
mon clearly had a comparatively extended fifteenth-century manuscript circu-
lation, it was not taken up by any of the first generation of English printers. As
H. Leith Spencer has pointed out, the Middle English sermons most enthu-
siastically transferred into printed editions were those of the Golden Legend
and the Quattuor sermones, along with Mirk’s Festial;46 these were joined in
the very late fifteenth and early sixteenth century by individual sermons from
preachers such as John Alcock and John Fisher.47 But once Wimbledon’s ser-
mon made its very late appearance in print, in an edition of ?1540 attributed
to John Mayler (STC 25823.3), it seems to have had an unstoppable success,
reprinted on its own and in other contexts (such as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs)
until at least 1745.48 The reasons for this have been productively explored by
Alexandra Walsham, who signals the sermon’s useful susceptibility to reinven-
tion, its appeal to those concerned to ‘recover and revive Wycliffite writings’
who were to make it ‘nothing less than a Tudor and Stuart bestseller’.49 These
44
Clair, ‘Thomas Berthelet, Royal Printer’.
45
See Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, ii, 64, and iii, pp. xv–xxxi; and on the wider con-
text, Hudson, ‘“No Newe Thing”’.
46
See Spencer, ‘The Sermons’ Later History’.
47
See, for example, STC 282–285.5, 10891, 10892–95, 10900–01.
48
Its appearance in successive editions can be consulted via ‘The Acts and Monuments’
Online at <http://www.johnfoxe.org/> [accessed 13 April 2013]. However, as shown in
O’Mara, ‘Thinking Afresh about Thomas Wimbledon’s Paul’s Cross Sermon of c. 1387’, p. 167,
not all of Foxe’s editions have a copy of Wimbledon’s sermon.
49
Walsham, ‘Inventing the Lollard Past’, especially pp. 629–30.
272 Julia Boffey
enthusiasts were evidently unconcerned with the distinctive modulation from

prose to verse which brought the sermon to an end in its earlier existence. In
Mayler’s and subsequent editions the quatrain was unravelled into prose, and
in Richard Kele’s tiny sexodecimo edition of c. 1550, for example, it reads as
follows: ‘The ioy of our hertes is gone // Oure myrth is turnyd to woo / and
sorrow. The crownes of oure / head is fall from vs. Alas for / the synne that we
haue doone’ (STC 25824).
The disappearance of the quatrain from sixteenth-century and later printed
editions of Wimbledon’s sermon no doubt serves as a reminder that Berthelet’s
careful signalling of the verse in his 1536 edition of Dives and Pauper was not
in any way a standard response to the presence of verse in prose contexts of this
kind. While the evidence reviewed in this discussion confirms that the prose
of Middle English sermons readily accommodated passages of heightened for-
mality, with metrical and rhyming patterns both deliberately constructed and
imported from elsewhere, it also makes clear that such passages did not call for
any special signalling from scribes, and that printers in turn were only intermit-
tently interested in them. They seem to have remained malleable elements of
the larger rhetorical constructs of which they were a part, embedded in tissues
of quotation and allusion where features of rhyme and metre were occasional,
emphatic flourishes.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3. 8
Dublin, Trinity College, MS 155
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18. 7. 21
Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 270
London, British Library, MS Arundel 507
—— , MS Royal 7.C.i
—— , MS Royal 18.B.xxiii
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Barlow 24
—— , MS Eng. th. d. 36
—— , MS Hatton 57
Oxford, Merton College, MS 120
Warminster, Longleat House, MS 4
Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.126
Early Printed Texts

Diues [et] pauper (London: Richard Pynson, 1493; Wynkyn de Worde, 1496; Thomas
Berthelet, 1536), STC 19212–19214
Wimbledon, [Thomas], A sermon no lesse fruteful then famous […] (London: John Mayler,
?1540; with at least twenty further editions between c. 1548 and 1635), STC 25823.3
Primary Sources
Dives and Pauper, ed. by Priscilla Heath Barnum, EETS, o.s., 275, 280, 323, 3 vols
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–2004)
The English Versions of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, ed. by Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS, e.s., 33
(London: Trübner, 1879)
A Famous Middle English Sermon […] Preached at St. Paul’s Cross, London, on Quinqua
gesima Sunday, 1388, ed. by K. F. Sundén (Göteborg: Elanders, 1925)
Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. by Siegfried
Wenzel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989)
Love, Nicholas, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, ed. by
Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005)
274 Julia Boffey
Mirk, John, John Mirk’s ‘Festial’: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II., ed. by
Susan Powell, EETS, o.s., 334–35, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–11)
Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, Together with the English Translations
of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Joseph
Rawson Lumby, Rolls Series, 41, 9 vols (London: Longman, 1876)
Rolle, Richard, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole an English Father of the Church
and his Followers, ed. by Carl Horstmann, 2 vols (London: Sonnenschein, 1895–96)
Willmott, Adrian, ‘An Edition of Selected Sermons from Longleat 4’ (unpublished doc-
toral dissertation, University of Bristol, 1995)
Wimbledon, Thomas, ‘Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon: Redde Racionem villicacionis tue’,
ed. by Nancy H. Owen, Mediaeval Studies, 28 (1966), 176–97
—— , Wimbledon’s Sermon, Redde rationem villicacionis tue: A Middle English Sermon of
the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Ione Kemp Knight, Duquesne Studies, Philological ser.,
9 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967)
Secondary Studies
Boffey, J., ‘Conflations of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost and The Charter of The Abbey of the
Holy Ghost in Manuscript and Print’, in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector:
Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, ed. by Takami Matsuda, Richard Linenthal,
and John Scahill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 245–54
—— , ‘The Indexing of Medieval Verse Texts: Questions Arising from the Revision of The
Index of Middle English Verse’, in Current Research in Dutch and Belgian Universities
and Polytechnics on Old English, Middle English and Historical Linguistics, ed. by Thea
Summerfield (Utrecht: University of Utrecht, 1998), pp. 43–64
Library, 2005)
Clair, C., ‘Thomas Berthelet, Royal Printer’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1966), 177–81
Fletcher, Alan J., ‘“I Sing of a Maiden”: A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Reminiscence’, Notes
and Queries, n.s., 25 (1978), 107–08
—— , Late Medieval Popular Preaching in Britain and Ireland: Texts, Studies, and
Interpretations, Sermo, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009)
—— , ‘The Lyric in the Sermon’, in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. by Thomas
G. Duncan (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 189–209
—— , Preaching and Politics in Late Medieval England (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998)
Hudson, Anne, ‘“No Newe Thing”: The Printing of Medieval Texts in the Early Refor
mation Period’, in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis, ed. by Douglas
Gray and Eric Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 153–74 (repr. in
Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London: Hambledon, 1985), pp. 227–48)
Hudson, Anne, and H. Leith Spencer, ‘Old Author, New Work: The Sermons of MS
Longleat 4’, Medium Ævum, 53 (1984), 220–38
Manly, John M., and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales Studied on the Basis of
All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940)
Morgan, Margery M., ‘Pynson’s Manuscript of Dives and Pauper’, The Library, 5th ser., 8
(1953), 217–28
O’Mara, Veronica, ‘Thinking Afresh about Thomas Wimbledon’s Paul’s Cross Sermon
of c. 1387’, Leeds Studies in English: Essays in Honour of Oliver Pickering, ed. by Janet
Burton, William Marx, and Veronica O’Mara, n.s., 41 (2010), 155–71
Plomer, Henry R., ‘Two Lawsuits of Richard Pynson’, The Library, n.s., 10 (1909), 114–33
Powell, Susan, ‘Connections between the Fasciculus Morum and Bodleian MS Barlow 24’,
Notes and Queries, n.s., 29 (1982), 10–14
—— , ‘“For ho is quene of cortaysye”: The Assumption of the Virgin in Pearl and the
Festial’, in In strange countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife. Essays in
Memory of J. J. Anderson, ed. by David Matthews (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2011), pp. 76–95
Richardson, H. G., ‘Dives and Pauper’, The Library, 4th series, 15 (1934), 31–37
—— , ‘Dives et pauper’, Notes and Queries, 70 (1911), 321–23
Sheeran, Francis J., ‘Ten Verse Fragments in Dives and Pauper’, Neuphilologische Mittei
lungen, 76 (1975), 257–70
Spencer, H. Leith, ‘The Sermons’ Later History’, in H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in
the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 321–34
Thomson, R. M., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Merton College,
Oxford (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009)
Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Inventing the Lollard Past: The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in
Early Modern England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58 (2007), 628–55
Walther, Hans, Initia carminum ac versum medii aevi posterioris latinorum: alphabetisches
Verzeichnis der Versanfänge mittellateinischer Dichtungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1959); 1. 1, Ergänzungen und Berichtigungen zur 1. Auflage von 1959
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969)
—— , Preachers, Poets and the Early English Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986)
—— , Verses in Sermons: ‘Fasciculus Morum’ and its Middle English Poems (Cambridge,
MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1978)
Willmott, Adrian, ‘Another Middle English Verse Rendering of Job 14: 1–2’, Notes and
Queries, n.s., 41 (1994), 148
Wilson, Edward, A Descriptive Index of the English Lyrics in John of Grimestone’s Preaching
Book, Medium Ævum Monographs, n.s., 2 (Oxford: Blackwell for the Study of Medi
aeval Languages and Literature, 1973)
Texts
Preaching in the
South English Legendary:
A Study and Edition of the
Text for All Souls’ Day
Oliver Pickering
I
t is a long time since scholars took the view that the popular late thirteenth-
century South English Legendary (SEL) collection comprised Middle
English verse sermons.1 Its saints’ lives, expositions of feasts and fasts, and
associated scriptural and apocryphal narratives seem instead to have been writ-
ten to provide instruction and entertainment for other listening or reading
purposes, although the nature of the target audience remains unclear. Doctrine
and exhortation nevertheless form part of the legendary’s mix of contents. In
1996 I considered the question in ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching
or Preaching?’, arguing that it was the interventions by the so-called outspo-
ken South English Legendary poet (still before 1300) that resulted in its most
noticeable preaching characteristics: short, often humorous appeals to the (real
or supposed) audience, decidedly personal comments on the behaviour or fate
of good and bad characters, and lively anecdotes of contemporary medieval life.
1
Over sixty manuscripts (major manuscripts, fragments, and extracts) are listed and
described in Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary. The main editions
are The Early South-English Legendary, ed. by Horstmann, and The South English Legendary, ed.
by D’Evelyn and Mill. For the view that the saints’ lives were intended to be preached (to the
laity), see, for example, The Southern Passion, ed. by Brown, pp. xciii–cx.
Oliver Pickering (o.s.pickering@leeds.ac.uk) is an honorary fellow in the School of English at

the Universiy of Leeds.
278 Oliver Pickering
Such features, I concluded, gave the collection elements of preaching style with-
out ever turning the poems into sermons.2
The outspoken poet was also the chief reviser of the first version of the leg-
endary in both its sanctorale and temporale portions, active in adapting existing
lines of verse and in contributing much new material.3 One of the still unre-
solved questions about his input concerns the extent to which he contributed
narrative in the SEL’s ‘plain’ style — generally closed septenary couplets with-
out any extravagance of language — but the evidence from those few saints’
lives that exist in both an earlier and a revised form suggests that he was able
and willing to write in this way. 4 More characteristic, however, particularly
when he is expounding a point (or, in the scriptural narratives, inserting freshly
translated biblical material), is a fluidity of style that results in lengthy complex
sentences unrestricted by couplet boundaries. A good example is the fiercely
argued passage in the scriptural narrative known as the Southern Passion occa-
sioned by Mary Magdalene’s unwavering faithfulness after Christ’s death, in
which the outspoken poet mounts a defence of women by demonstrating that
men are far more lecherous.5 The same passage illustrates how his contributions
were apparently sometimes found too extreme or idiosyncratic (or too difficult)
by those transmitting the text of the SEL, as the majority of the lines in ques-
tion are preserved in no more than a single manuscript.6
All these aspects of the outspoken poet’s style are exemplified by All Souls’
Day, a standard component of the SEL that survives in sixteen manuscripts.7
2
Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or Preaching?’. For the poet’s com-
ments on bad characters, see also Pickering, ‘Black Humour in the South English Legendary’.
3
For the overall textual development of the legendary, including its numerous revisions,
see Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary. The outspoken poet’s work
is often equivalent to what he calls the ‘A’ redaction. For the poet in question, see generally
Pickering, ‘The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet’.
4
See below, and n. 23, for the example of the life of St Bridget of Ireland. Detailed analy-
sis of the SEL legends’ vocabulary, rhyme-words, and phraseology, not yet undertaken, may help
to determine this matter more precisely.
5
Pickering, ‘The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet’, pp. 26–27, and see Pickering,
‘The “Defence of Women” from the Southern Passion’.
6
For brief discussion, see Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or
Preaching?’, pp. 13–14. Another example concerns his version of the text of Lent, for which see
Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary, Confession, and Cambridge University Library MS
Dd.1.1’, p. 382.
7
Fifteen of the manuscripts are listed under NIMEV 201 (Boffey and Edwards, A New
Index of Middle English Verse), and one under NIMEV 2680; this is London, Lambeth Palace
Preaching in the South English Legendary 279
It has twice been printed, from Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 108, in 1887,
and from British Library, MS Harley 2277, in 1956, but never with any exposi-
tion of what is a difficult text.8 The nature of the different manuscript versions
is given some consideration in the third section below, but it can be said here
that the edition of All Souls that concludes this essay is again based on MS
Laud misc. 108 (late thirteenth century), generally considered the oldest extant
SEL manuscript. There follow now first a detailed synopsis of the structure and
content of the poem, and secondly, a discussion of the content, including some
appraisal of the writer’s verse style. All reference is to the present edition. The
essay does not investigate the matter of the text’s specific sources, but it is very
clearly indebted to the Legenda aurea.9
Synopsis of the Poem

The subject of All Souls’ Day is Purgatory, as it relates to the salvation of the
individual Christian soul. The poem discusses some aspects of the nature of
Purgatory, but has more to say about the efficacy of prayers and other good
works performed on behalf of the departed.10 Broken down in some detail,
the content of the poem is as follows. The distinction between doctrine on the
one hand and story/exemplum, authorial comment, and so forth, on the other
(marked below with boldface) is necessarily somewhat artificial but helps to
bring out the mixed nature of the text.
Library, MS 223, which begins quite differently (see further below).

8
The Early South-English Legendary, ed. by Horstmann, pp. 420–31, and The South
English Legendary, ed. by D’Evelyn and Mill, ii, 463–76.
9
Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, p. 200, notes the possible
contribution of the Legenda aurea and adds: ‘It is certain that as in other homiletic texts several
sources have flowed together, some probably vernacular, possibly even oral.’ Matsuda, Death and
Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, considers that ‘the notion of purgatory in the South
English Legendary [i.e. in All Souls] is well-developed and basically concurs with the exposition
in the Legenda aurea. […] The poet’s knowledge of the literature on Purgatory does not appear
to extend beyond what the Legenda aurea provides’ (pp. 80, 82). Thompson, Everyday Saints
and the Art of Narrative, believes that ‘there is every reason to assume that the Legenda was the
SEL’s primary source’ (p. 125). For an account of the treatment of Purgatory in the Legenda
aurea, see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. by Goldhammer, pp. 321–24, and Matsuda,
Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, pp. 19–21, 56–58.
10
Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, p. 82, notes that the
orientation of the SEL’s All Souls ‘is more didactic than doctrinal’.
1–2 The importance of celebrating All Souls’ Day.

3–30 Story of an angel showing a man in Rome a vision of Purgatory. Those
for whom good works are done after their death by those on Earth
are well treated, while others suffer. The angel tells the man to ask the
pope to establish the feast of All Souls’ Day, so that prayers may be
said for all those in Purgatory.
31–48 Our lord established Purgatory as a place for those (a) who have unfin-
ished penance, (b) who have not been shriven for venial sins, and (c)
whose penance is insufficient because the priest has been too lenient.
Therefore (authorial comment) do not put your trust in an unwor-
thy priest.
49–56 Authorial comment on Janekyn, Robinet, and other named individu-
als, who go to Gilbert the priest because they know they will receive
a light penance. He and they will all go to the devil, unless God is
merciful.
57–82 If there is no time before death to complete one’s penance, God may
forgive the sin without the need for Purgatory if the person is truly
repentant and well shriven. But if the penance is given at the point of
death, with no time to perform it, a close friend may be able to help,
on four conditions: (a) there must be great love between them; (b)
there must be no time for the dying person to finish the penance; (c)
the priest must approve; (d) the penance to be done by the friend
must be more than the dying person would have done. Therefore
(authorial comment) if a friend is at the point of death, see whether
you can help in this way.
83–92 Purgatory is not in the same place for everyone, but in five differ-
ent places: (a) in the firmament, where great burning is, including
the sun; (b) in the upper air, where evil spirits fly and torment the
departed; (c) on earth amongst us here; (d) in water; (e) deep under
the earth, beside Hell, for example St Patrick’s Purgatory.
93–100 There are four reasons for this: (a) so that some souls endure less pain
than others; (b) so that some may be brought more quickly to Heaven
through good deeds; (c) so that people on Earth may become aware
of those in Purgatory through visions; (d) so that those whose delight
was to sin in one place should pay for their sin in the same place, as in
the following example.
101–22 Exemplum 1. A priest, when he goes to bathe, is often helped by an

unknown person. The priest one day offers him the Eucharist, but
the man refuses it, saying he is not yet blessed. On enquiry, the man
explains that he is a soul in Purgatory, in this place because this is
where he used to delight in sinning when alive. If the priest will say
Masses for him, he will know the other is safe if he no longer appears.
The priest does this, and so it happens: the soul in Purgatory disap-
pears before a week is out and goes to Heaven.
123–26 Authorial comment on Dame Aldith, whose only love is for her
worldly wealth at home, which is where she shall therefore spend her
Purgatory.
127–30 Many have their Purgatory on Earth for such reasons. Others have it
in water, as in the following example.
131–72 Exemplum 2. St Theobald’s gout is relieved by a block of ice that
does not melt. On enquiry, a soul imprisoned in the ice reveals that
this is his Purgatory, and that he can be released if the bishop will
say Masses for him. The bishop does so, but the devil tries to prevent
their completion by causing first fighting, then a siege, and then a fire
in the town. The bishop goes to help on the first two occasions, but
on the third he decides to complete the Mass: the fire does no dam-
age, and the soul is released from the ice.
173–78 Three things particularly help a soul in Purgatory: prayers, alms-deeds,
and Masses. That prayers do good is shown by the following example.
179–89 Exemplum 3. A clerk is accustomed, when passing a church, to say
prayers for all Christian souls. On one occasion when he is set upon
by robbers, the bodies in the churchyard rise up with weapons because
he has prayed for them, and drive the robbers away, after which they
return to their graves.
190–94 Authorial comment. I am sure the robbers did not run home quietly,
and I bet none of you could have frightened them so much. It would
have been a wonderful battle if it had gone on a long time. Even a
champion, if present, would have thought better of it and run home.
195–96 That alms-deeds do good is shown by the following example.
197–216 Exemplum 4. After the death of a man called Stephen, a friend does
much alms-giving on his behalf. The friend sees a vision of a high slip-
pery bridge, with deep water beneath and a beautiful meadow nearby.
Some people crossing the bridge fall into the water while others get
safely across into the meadow. When Stephen crosses, black men (his
sins) try to drag him into the water, while others dressed in white (the
alms-deeds) pull him upwards — the latter are victorious, because of
what the friend did.
217–18 That Masses do good is shown by the following example.
219–58 Exemplum 5. A man survives the fall of a rock that kills the others
who were digging for treasure beneath it, but he is hidden in a trench
beneath the rock so that he is thought dead. His wife has Masses said
for him, and brings offerings of bread, wine, and a candle, but the
Devil, becoming angry, tells her on the way to church, for three days,
that Mass is over. When she gets up at dawn and he does it again, she
carries on to the church and finds she has been deceived. Later on,
when further digging takes place, the man is found alive, and explains
that he was kept alive by the food and drink his wife sent to him,
except for three days when he almost died of hunger.
259–68 But good deeds do not help everyone, as those who die are of many
kinds. Thus there is no need for such deeds in the case of those who
are wholly good, though such actions are not wasted, as they help
both the doers and all Christian souls in Purgatory.
269–84 Three types of people are wholly good when they die: (a) children
who have been baptized; (b) Christian martyrs; (c) those who expiate
all their sins before death. All these go straight to Heaven, faster than
lightning, as there is no sin to be burnt away.
285–302 Biblical example of how Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist was
the first occasion on which Heaven opened for mankind. Heaven is
now perpetually open as the result of baptism, including for baptized
children who have not yet sinned.
303–06 Authorial comment. It is therefore senseless to grieve for children
when they die. Not even mothers should do so.
307–18 Biblical example of the martyrdom of St Stephen, who saw Heaven
open above him. Heaven is consequently open for all Christian mar-
tyrs, whose death and blood wash away their sins.
319–26 Biblical example of St John the Evangelist, who says in the Apoca-
lypse that he saw Heaven’s door open for him. Heaven is therefore
open for all those who die clean of their sins.
327–38 Good deeds on earth do not help those already in Heaven, just as they
cannot help those in Hell. But such deeds still help both the doers
and all those in Purgatory, unless the doer is in a state of deadly sin.
339–44 Masses, however, are so holy that they do not lose their efficacy even
if said by sinful priests. But such priests shall pay for it dearly.
345–50 Authorial comment. Therefore Gilbert, who lives a sinful life and
pretends not to be a priest when without his priestly robes, shall go to
Hell.
351–54 Anyone who wants a dead man to receive a good deed should act
immediately, because the dead remember for a long time, as is shown
by the following.
355–74 Exemplum 6. A knight in Charlemagne’s army, fearing he will be
killed in battle, asks another to sell his horse if this happens and put
the proceeds towards the good of his soul. When he does indeed die,
the other knight keeps the horse for himself, meaning to sell it later.
The first knight comes to him as a spirit, declaring that his friend has
betrayed him and will therefore be damned to Hell, as he has been
forced to spend an additional seven nights in Purgatory.
375–80 Authorial comment. False executors who delay distributing a dead
person’s goods should beware of this tale, as they will go to Hell.
381–84 Prayer to Christ for mercy and forgiveness, to allow Christians to
enter Heaven.
Content and Style

Although All Souls cannot be considered a sermon, the mixture of doctrinal
explanation, story, and comment gives the piece strong preaching character-
istics, as does the frequent enumeration of points being made. The authorial
comments are a particularly distinctive feature. In practice the extant versions
of Middle English prose sermons do not usually include such comments, these
being limited in reality (one would suppose) to oral, extempore performance.11
11
An exception is the collection of sermons preserved in London, British Library, MS
Royal 18.B.xxiii, where the manuscript occasionally preserves remarks by the preacher appar-
ently specific to a particular preaching occasion. See Middle English Sermons, ed. by Ross, p. 6,
ll. 36–39 and p. 58, ll. 34–37.
I have conjectured elsewhere that their occurrence in SEL texts is a literary

device, utilized by the outspoken poet to suggest a listening audience not in
fact present.12
In terms of doctrine and story the content of All Souls is not, on the whole,
unusual. The location and function of Purgatory, the nature of those who do
and do not have to endure it, and the importance of intercession for the suf-
fering souls by means of good deeds done on Earth — all these were aspects of
Purgatory of great interest to the later English Middle Ages, especially in the
context of All Souls’ Day (2 November), and the SEL poet does not depart
from accepted teaching.13 But little stress is laid on the torments of Purgatory,
and the information about its five different locations (ll. 83–92), along with
the four reasons put forward for these locations (ll. 93–98), is compressed
almost to the point of obscurity.14 Later on, the section on children who go
straight to Heaven when they die (ll. 285–302, a passage to be discussed below)
is noticeably repetitive. More successful, but unexpected, is the opening story
of the founding of All Souls’ Day. Here the author ignores the link normally
made with Odilo, abbot of Cluny, narrated at the start of All Souls in the
Legenda aurea,15 and instead takes material from the version found at the end
of the Legenda aurea’s previous text, for All Saints’ Day (1 November).16 In this
account the ‘custos ecclesiae sancti Petri’ in Rome (reduced in All Souls to an
unspecified ‘man of Rome’) experiences an angelic vision relating to both All
Saints and All Souls, at the end of which he is urged to establish a feast for the
latter to match that for All Saints. Those Middle English sermons that relate
12
Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or Preaching?’, pp. 11–12.
13
Cf. the section ‘The Discussion of Purgatory in Middle English Didactic and Homiletic
Treatises’, in Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, pp. 78–93, and
Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, specifically the chapters ‘The Scholastic Systematization’ and
‘Social Victory: Purgatory and the Cure of Souls’ (pp. 237–88, 289–333). See also McGuire,
‘Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, and Medieval Change’.
14
Cf. Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, p. 81, who calls the
passage a ‘peculiarity’. It may be noted that the Legenda aurea, though it gives five reasons for
the different locations (not four, as in All Souls), does not say that there are five locations.
15
Cf. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 124–27, 321–22, and, more recently, Moore,
‘Demons and the Battle for Souls at Cluny’.
16
As noted in Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative, p. 125. For the text of
‘De festivitate omnium sanctorum’ and ‘De commemoratione omnium fidelium defunctorum’
in the Legenda aurea, see Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. by Maggioni, ii, 1234–46,
1248–64 (versos only).
the same vision retain its association with All Saints’ Day and do not transfer it
forwards to All Souls.17
It is of course possible that some of the vagaries in the SEL text derive from
its immediate source, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the poet is more
interested in elaborating the illustrative exempla and in inserting his own com-
ments. Again, the exempla themselves are well known, all of them deriving from
the Legenda aurea and some going back as far as the Dialogi of Gregory the
Great.18 But they are vividly told, to the extent that Anne B. Thompson, in her
book on the SEL, gives them a section of their own entitled ‘The Triumph of
Narrative in All Souls’.19 She writes very helpfully about the way in which the SEL
author selects from the Legenda aurea those exempla with the most potential for
narrative expansion and most likely to be of interest to his audience, and she pays
particular attention to exemplum 5, the story of the buried miner. Thompson
justifiably considers the writer’s personal comments to be another aspect of his
predilection for narrative, in that they show him taking sympathetic interest in
the detail of people’s individual lives. Discussing the passage centring on the leni-
ent priest Gilbert (ll. 49–56), she writes tellingly of how the poet ‘conjure[s] up
this little local world out of nothing’. And in relation to lines 79–80, the possi-
bility of helping a friend on the point of death, she comments: ‘Nothing could be
further from the [Legenda aurea] than what we see here, a poet in whose hands
everything becomes a story, and whose responsibility towards the audience so
vividly imagined directs him to instil hope as well as fear.’20
17
For example, the sermon for All Saints’ Day in the Speculum sacerdotale, ed. by Weatherly,
pp. 218–24, and a sermon for the same day in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS
Gg.6.16, fols 26r–28r, summarized in O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose
Sermons, i, 24–25 (for similar accounts, see iii, 1819–21 and 1957–58). It may be noted here
that John Mirk includes neither version of the establishment of the feast in his sermon for All
Souls, and omits mention of it also from that for All Saints, despite citing the Legenda aurea.
See Mirk, Festial, ed. by Powell, ii, 239–41 (All Saints) and 241–44 (All Souls). For the SEL
poet’s treatment of All Saints’ Day, see below.
18
In terms of Middle English prose sermons, nos 2, 3, and 6 (St Theobald and the block
of ice, the bodies in the churchyard, and the knight in battle) are all found in the All Souls’ Day
sermon in the Festial, and nos 2 and 6 also in the corresponding sermon in the Speculum sacer-
dotale (ed. by Weatherley, pp. 224–32). Exemplum 1 (the bathing priest) occurs in a sermon in
London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 379, fols 21v–22v, derived from the Legenda aurea, for
which see O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ii, 1368–70.
19
Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative, pp. 124–29 (see also ‘The Story of
the Buried Miner’, pp. 129–35).
20
Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative, pp. 127, 128. Citing Görlach, The
My own earlier discussion of the poet’s personal comments in All Souls drew
attention first to how the verse in these passages (compared to that in the rest
of the poem) appears to operate on a different level, being characterized by
forcefulness of language and a colloquial, conversational style; and secondly to
the writer’s ability to switch from story to address in mid-couplet, as happens
strikingly at 189–90 during exemplum 3:
Þus weren is beden iȝolde þat he bad erore and ofte
— Ich am siker þe þeoues ne ȝeoden nouȝht aweywardes ful softe,
For Ich wot wel þat non of us ne hadde heom so sore agast. (ll. 189–91)
I noted, too, that although the style used for the exempla and other non-per-
sonal parts of All Souls is generally plain in terms of vocabulary, the explanatory
writing overflows couplet boundaries throughout the legend. I concluded that
even though the possibility that the poet revised a pre-existing composition
had to be considered, it was likely on balance that he wrote the whole text.21
Specific examples of the poet’s fluid, confident writing style in non-personal
parts of All Souls include, within passages of doctrine, the continuous, complex
sentences deployed in lines 31–36, 59–62, and 63–66. Each of the latter two
examples has two lines of subordinate clause before the main clause begins, and
it may be noted that a new idea (in this case a list of four things) is introduced
in line 66, the second line of a couplet. But the same kind of fluidity also occurs
frequently within the narrative tales. For example, lines 19–26, the angel’s
words to the man of Rome, form a single complex sentence; lines 147–52 (in
exemplum 2) see a switch of thought and syntax half-way through a line, so
that the devil’s anger is highlighted with unexpected urgency; in lines 201–04
(exemplum 4) the description of the ‘fair mede’ is run on seamlessly from the
end of one couplet to the beginning of the next, delaying the following clause;
and in lines 219–25 (exemplum 5) the story of the buried miner advances from
the initial scene-setting to his entombment in one long, expert sentence, set-
ting off effectively the single line then given to his wife’s reaction:
Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, p. 200, Thompson surmises that the Gilbert
passage ‘could have been influenced by oral tradition’. Görlach is referring to Beatrice Brown’s
comment on p. c of The Southern Passion, ed. by Brown, that the same ‘rustic names’ (Malekin,
Ianekin, Robin) occur, with others, as misbehaving characters in the thirteenth-century verse
‘Lutel Soth Sermun’ printed from British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix and Jesus College,
Oxford, MS 29 in An Old English Miscellany, ed. by Morris, pp. 186–91.
21
Pickering, ‘The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet’, pp. 27–28.
Men weren ȝwilene in a contreye þare a gret ston roche stod,

And men wenden þat þareonder were gret tresor and guod,
So þat huy doluen þareaftur, ake to wroþerhele ate laste,
For opon hem ful þe roche adoun and heom alle ouercaste
And aslouȝ heom alle, bote anne man, þat ase it were bi cas
In a manere dich fel and lay, and þe roche aboue him was,
So þat he ne miȝhte of þe stude — ase iputted he lay þere;
His wyf nuste nouȝht of is lyf, ake wende þat he ded were. (ll. 219–26)
So pervasive is this style in works attributable to the so-called outspoken poet

(including in sections of the major temporale narrative for which he was respon-
sible, the Southern Passion) that it may be equally as reliable a defining marker
of his way of writing as ‘outspokenness’.
The contrast with the verse style in some other parts of the SEL has been
exemplified recently by the publication for the first time of the short life of
St Etheldreda. As its editor points out, with one exception ‘every sentential unit
is completed in one or two lines’, and the overall style of the poem’s fifty lines can
best be characterized as terse.22 The matter is complicated by the presence, even
here (ll. 15–16, 45–46), of two lighthearted (but difficult) comments about
wives and husbands that would normally be attributable to the outspoken poet,
suggesting that in this case he inserted couplets into a pre-existing composition.
More usually — when the outspoken poet’s stylistic markers are lacking — the
difficulty of distinguishing between contributions by different hands can be
considerable, especially in passages of narrative written in the SEL’s ‘plain’ style.
This is highlighted by the existence of both an original and a revised version
of the life of St Bridget of Ireland, a circumstance that according to Manfred
Görlach constitutes the best evidence in the SEL corpus for the ‘A’ redaction
with which the outspoken poet can be associated. Here, despite the extensive
introduction of new narrative material by the reviser, and adaptation of other
passages, it is the presence of a few of his characteristic comments and one com-
plex six-line sentence that conclusively betrays the outspoken poet’s hand.23
Disjunctions of style elsewhere in the SEL may lead us to suspect that revi-
sion has taken place even though comparative textual evidence is lacking. A case
in point is the expository temporale poem for Lent, which scholars accept as
composite: 168 lines firmly attributable to the outspoken poet have been added
to an original forty-line poem (not separately extant) written in a ‘dry, technical
22
Major, ‘Saint Etheldreda in the South English Legendary’.
23
For Bridget, see Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary,
pp. 141–43, and Pickering, ‘The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet’, pp. 36–37.
style’ also found, for example, in the short expository poems for Annunciation
and Easter.24 This style is characterized by pedantic explanation of the nature
and significance of the movable feasts and of how their dates are calculated,
with special interest in parallels (often in terms of date) between significant
Old and New Testament events. There is something of this in All Saints, the
poem that immediately precedes All Souls in the SEL, and which is similar to
the expository temporale poems in concisely enumerating reasons for the feast’s
establishment and in explaining the date of its celebration (now 1 November,
but shifted from an original date of 11 May, when food was scarcer). However,
the lines on the date are first surprisingly repetitive (33–40) and then syntacti-
cally compressed (41–44), ending with an unexpected couplet about the reason
for choosing November that is put into the mouth of Pope Gregory (45–46):
‘Me þincheȝ ȝuyt’, quath þe guode man, ‘þe feste feble were
Bote men hadden ȝware-with þe wombe joye [to] arere.’25
The uncommon term ‘wombe joye’ is glossed ‘gluttony’ by the Middle English
Dictionary,26 but it is provocative in context even if it here bears the milder
meaning of ‘stomach pleasure’. All Saints then finishes by fluently recounting
the angelic vision relating to the feast’s establishment mentioned above in con-
nection with the beginning of All Souls. There is some fluidity in the handling
of couplets (especially in ll. 55–60), and the description of the successive com-
panies of prophets and patriarchs, apostles, martyrs, and confessors recalls parts
of the ‘Banna Sanctorum’ poem that acts as introduction to the SEL in the ‘A’
version of the legendary, and which can possibly be attributed to the outspoken
poet.27 Overall, although the evidence is hard to evaluate, there are grounds for
suspecting that All Saints as we have it is the work of more than one writer.
24
Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, pp. 156–57 (quotation
from p. 156); Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary, Confession, and Cambridge University
Library MS Dd.1.1’, p. 382. Easter, in turn, is incorporated into the outspoken poet’s long narra-
tive poem, the Southern Passion. For these short poems generally, see Pickering, ‘The Expository
Temporale Poems of the South English Legendary’.
25
That is, ‘it seems to me the feast would be unsuccessful unless there was the wherewithal
to give pleasure to men’s stomachs’. The quotation is slightly emended from The Early South-
English Legendary, ed. by Horstmann, p. 419 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 108,
fol. 174v). The extent of textual variation in ll. 33–46 shows how much difficulty scribes had
with the passage; see also The South English Legendary, ed. by D’Evelyn and. Mill, ii, 461–62.
26
s.v. womb(e (n.), 1b (c).
27
The South English Legendary, ed. by D’Evelyn and. Mill, i, 1–3.
The section of All Souls that appears most stylistically disjunctive is that
concerning children who go straight to Heaven when they die (ll. 285–302).
Lines 269–84 explain that three categories of people go directly to Heaven
after death, and describe how, having no sin to be burnt away, they fly through
Purgatory as quick as lightning and find Heaven’s door standing open. Line
285 is then a general introduction to the three ‘examples’ that are about to fol-
low (‘And þat it beo soth of alle þreo, ensaumple ȝe mouwen iseo’), but the
next line, ‘Þat aȝein children ibaptizede Heouene iopened beo’ (l. 286) is left
hanging; the expected sense, ‘that Heaven stands open for baptized children [is
shown by what happened at Christ’s baptism]’, is uncompleted (cf. ll. 307–08,
where a whole sentence introduces the example for the next category). The
trick of beginning a sentence in mid-couplet is characteristic of our poet, as has
been seen, but what follows in lines 287–88 is a syntactically unrelated clause
reminiscent of the earlier, ‘dry technical’ style mentioned above, concerned to
specify Christ’s age at baptism:
For ore louerd was nyne and twenti ȝer and twelf daywes old
Are he ibaptized were, ase þe bok us hath itold.
Indeed this couplet (which in All Souls adds nothing to the argument) appears
in almost identical form among the lines on the Baptism of Christ found in MS
Laud misc. 108’s unique short text on the feasts of Circumcision and Epiphany,
considered to date from an early version of the SEL:
He was nyne and twenty ȝer and þrettene dawes old
Are he ibaptiȝed were, ase þe bok us hath itold.
And the same couplet occurs in the SEL-related temporale narrative known
as the Abridged Life of Christ, which is likely also to pre-date the work of the
outspoken poet.28
The impression of incorporation of pre-existing material, imperfectly fused
with the new,29 is heightened by the occurrence, a few lines later, of a rhetorical
28
For MS Laud’s unique short text, see Pickering, ‘The Expository Temporale Poems of the
South English Legendary’, pp. 8–10, where the corresponding couplet in the Abridged Life of
Christ is given (p. 10). The quotation from MS Laud is slightly emended from The Early South-
English Legendary, ed. by Horstmann, p. 178. For the Abridged Life, which remains largely
unprinted, see Pickering, ‘The Temporale Narratives of the South English Legendary’, and The
South English Ministry and Passion, ed. by Pickering, pp. 36–37.
29
For evidence that the outspoken poet’s refashioning of his source texts is not always per-
fectly managed, see Pickering, ‘The Southern Passion and the Ministry and Passion’.
‘What betokened?’ style of interpretative questioning (repeated at ll. 325–26),

not normally associated with the SEL saints’ lives but found in some of the
older temporale narratives:
Ȝwat bitocknede þulke openingue þat þo was and er nouȝht,
Bote þat þoruȝ cristindom man was to Heouene ibrouȝht? (ll. 293–94)
Compare, for example, the following from the Nativity of Mary and Christ:
What myhte bytokne þat ilke frut in þulke tyme of þe ȝere,
Bote þat þe swete frut ybore was vs to saue and lere?30
Lines 295–302 are then surprisingly repetitious, failing to add to what has
already been said. It may also be noted that this whole section on those who
go straight to Heaven (ll. 269–326) — which is different from the rest of the
poem in using exempla drawn from the Bible — stands apart in conveying doc-
trinal information rather than practical guidance for its readers or hearers.31 It
is an aspect of the poet’s preaching, but is not about how to deal with death and
(for medieval people) the certainty of Purgatory.
However, the passage in question (extending to l. 338) is again based on the
Legenda aurea, which uses the same three biblical examples, and so the most one
can say is that the author of All Souls, when composing it, seems to have incorpo-
rated lines found in earlier SEL materials, not entirely successfully. The four lines
of personal comment on the death of children (ll. 303–06) are a self-contained
intrusion of a different kind, not readily forgotten: the image of the mother
slumped against the wall and the poet’s harsh but presumably sincere response:
Gret folie it is to weope, ase men beoz iwonet to done,
For ȝongue children þat deiȝez so, þat in Heouene buth so sone.
‘Awei, mi child’, seith þe damme, and suouȝnez aȝein þe wowe
— Bi Crist, heo auȝte þonki God þat nam hit ase his owe!
30
The South English Nativity of Mary and Christ, ed. by Pickering, p. 82, ll. 433–34. Cf.
‘Qwat betokenyth water & blood þat out of oure lordis side come? | Þe blood betokenyth him-
self, þe water, cristendome’, in The South English Ministry and Passion, ed. by Pickering, p. 181,
ll. 2575–76, adapted by the outspoken poet for use as ll. 1641–42 of The Southern Passion, ed.
by Brown, p. 60. It may be noted also that All Souls ll. 311–12 are virtually identical to ll. 27–28
of the SEL’s life of St Stephen: ‘Lo he sede ich ise[o] . þoru Iesu Cristes sonde | Heuene iopened
and Iesus . inis fader riȝt honde’ (The South English Legendary, ed. by D’Evelyn and Mill, ii, 591).
31
The difference is possibly confirmed by the appearance, from line 265, of -uth spellings
to represent the third person plural indicative instead of the usual -eoth, especially noticeable in
buth ‘are’ (ll. 265, 269, 273, 304, 307). But spellings in -eoth, which return more definitely from
line 328, do not disappear completely during the passage in question.
Greatly expanded from the Legenda aurea is the subsequent passage about the
enduring efficacy of the Mass even if said by a sinful priest (ll. 339–44), which
leads seamlessly into a further outspoken attack (ll. 345–50) on the Gilbert-
figure who had earlier been accused of giving over-lenient penance. By now we
are near the end of the poem: exemplum 6 (ll. 355–74) is a fluent rendering of
the well-known story of Charlemagne’s two knights (note especially the fluid
style of lines 361–66), which leads into a final denunciation of false executors
(ll. 375–80). In preaching terms All Souls ends strongly.
Variant Texts
The edition below presents a 384-line text of All Souls, reflecting the stand-
ard finished version of the poem. The copy-text is Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Laud misc. 108 (L), which accidentally omits four lines (39–42), supplied
here from London, British Library, MS Harley 2277 (H) as transcribed in the
standard EETS edition of the SEL by Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill.32
Eight manuscripts, including L and H, preserve this full form of the poem,
save for very small differences in the number of lines.33 But the scribes of eight
other manuscripts (or the originators of the versions that they transmit) react
to the length and/or content of All Souls in a number of different ways, in con-
sequence modifying the effectiveness of its preaching style.
In four cases the scribes show an evident desire to reduce the ‘outspoken-
ness’ of the poem by reducing the number of passages of personal comment
— a phenomenon shown by the scribal removal of similar material elsewhere
in SEL manuscripts.34 This affects Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys
2344 (P); London, British Library, MS Stowe 949 (S); Cambridge, Cambridge
University Library, MS Additional 3039 (U); and Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Rawlinson Poetry 225 (Br). Thus P omits all of lines 49–56, the criticism
32
But Harley in turn omits one line; see The South English Legendary, ed. by D’Evelyn
and Mill, ii, 471, where the textual notes to lines 233–36 give the correct reading, five lines in
length, from another manuscript.
33
I rely here, and in the following two paragraphs, on the results of Manfred Görlach’s
collation of fifteen of the manuscripts, summarized in The Textual Tradition of the South English
Legendary, pp. 199–200. The sigla are also his. One of the eight full versions (London, British
Library, MS Egerton 2891) in fact omits ll. 1–50, owing to the loss of leaves.
34
See Pickering, ‘The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet’, pp. 33–35, and the refer-
ences given at n. 6 above.
of those who seek out Gilbert, the lenient priest (U leaves out ll. 51–52); PSBr
omit lines 123–26, the four lines on Dame Aldith that follow exemplum 1 (U
is missing all of ll. 63–146, for physical reasons); P omits lines 191–94, the
bulk of the pretend disparaging of the audience after exemplum 3, the battle in
the churchyard (SBr omit ll. 193–94); SU omit lines 305–06, the comment on
the distraught mother who has lost her child; and all four manuscripts leave out
lines 345–50, the second passage on Sir Gilbert, with U extending this omis-
sion backwards to line 341 and SBr to line 343.
Much more extensive abridgement of the poem is found in the textual tra-
dition represented in All Souls by Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 43
(A) and London, British Library, MS Egerton 2810 (M), which leave out over
140 lines, distributed throughout the text. There must clearly have been rea-
sons why particular lines were selected for omission, but the sometimes con-
troversial nature of the poem’s contents may not have ranked quite so highly,
although lines 121–28, which include the Dame Aldith passage, comprise
one of the passages not copied. Other major omissions by AM are all but six
lines of lines 47–82, including in effect the first Sir Gilbert passage and the
four ways in which a friend may be able to help a dying man; and the major-
ity of the long section on the three kinds of people who go straight to Heaven
when they die, with their accompanying biblical exempla (preserving no more
than twelve lines out of ll. 269–326). AM’s text of All Souls is an example of
Görlach’s redaction ‘M’, which he characterizes as ‘a thorough condensation of
the complete collection […] a deliberate attempt to cut down on the repetitions
and all “superfluous” descriptive detail’.35 In this light it is not so surprising that
the redactor chose the rather laborious lines 269–326 as a passage that could
benefit from being cut.36
Finally, there are two examples of extreme textual change. One occurs in
Tokyo, Professor Takamiya Collection, MS Takamiya 54, where All Souls
(fols 153v–154v) is reduced to sixty lines as a result of one of the unsystematic
drastic cuts that Manfred Görlach identified as one of the principal features of
this manuscript. Lines 31–349 are omitted, that is, everything after the open-
ing vision of Purgatory and before exemplum 6. According to Görlach’s tabula-
35
Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, p. 56.
36
On the other hand, the bulk of lines 269–338 (but reduced to fifty-two lines) are
for some reason attached to the end of Lent in the version of the SEL preserved in Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a.1 (Vernon), a manuscript from which All Souls as a sepa-
rate legend has been lost, for physical reasons. See Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South
English Legendary, pp. 271 n. 98 and 291 n. 316.
tion, no other SEL legend suffers such a proportionate reduction in length.37

No more than a token text is retained.
The other case is London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 223 (G), which
replaces lines 1–256 with eighty-four different lines. It also substitutes seventy-
five new lines for the final eight lines of the immediately preceding All Saints, a
conjunction that could in theory suggest that a textual ancestor of G was physi-
cally defective at this point, prompting fresh composition. Görlach, however,
points out that G’s changes appear designed to bring the two legends into closer
alignment with the Legenda aurea, in that the new material at the end of All
Saints contains the equivalent of All Souls lines 1–30, the vision of Purgatory
vouchsafed to the ‘man of Rome’38 — it was noted above that in the Legenda
aurea this story forms part of the text for All Saints’ Day and is more normally
associated with that feast. But the author of the new passage provides far more
detail than in the Legenda aurea, perhaps using a source that also furnished the
material for his altered beginning to All Souls.39 Here, instead of the opening
vision and all the teaching about the reasons for the existence of Purgatory, the
help that can be given to a dying man, the different locations of Purgatory, and
the efficacy of prayers, alms-deeds, and Masses in helping those who dwell there
(with the associated exempla 1–5), the author substitutes a different, lengthy
exemplum which, though summarized in the Legenda aurea, was not selected by
the original poet: the story of a dying monk who had wrongly hidden three gold
coins from his brethren and was consequently buried for thirty days in a dunghill
until released from this punishment by a Mass.40 The reviser then retains what
must — from a preaching angle — be considered the less arresting part of All
Souls (l. 257 to the end), and if his intention was to tone down the poem it is not
surprising that he also follows SU and AM in omitting the personal lines 305–06
on the grieving mother, and PSUBr in omitting lines 345–50 on Sir Gilbert.
37
For MS Takamiya 54, see Pickering and Görlach, ‘A Newly-Discovered Manuscript of
the South English Legendary’, pp. 120–21.
38
Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, p. 291 n. 313, and see
also n. 315.
39
It may be noted that the account of the vision closely matches that found in the All Saints
sermon in the Middle English prose Speculum Sacerdotale, which may have used the same source.
40
He also inserts a new couplet after line 258, i.e. two lines after he has returned to the
standard text of All Souls, referring back to the story he has just told, which is thus tied in to the
original poem: ‘For þurȝ þe masse þat þe monkes songen for her broþer | Þe souner he was broȝt
to blisse & so ben mony oþer’ (G, fol. 203r). The exemplum in question goes back to Gregory
the Great’s Dialogi.
The Present Edition

The text below is that of Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud misc. 108, fols 175r–179v.41
Manuscript spelling has been preserved (including the use of the letter i for
consonantal purposes), as have the archaic Middle English letter-forms þ and
ȝ. But word division, capitalization, punctuation, and paragraphing are edito-
rial, and abbreviations (where they exist) have been silently expanded.42 An
orthographical peculiarity of the manuscript, preserved in the edition, is that
the verbal ending apparently representing the sound /th/ (e.g. in the 3rd person
singular and plural indicative) is often rendered as z. The four lines omitted
in L (39–42) and here supplied from H (as given in D’Evelyn and Mill’s edi-
tion) have been brought into line with MS Laud’s orthography. No attempt has
been made to restore what might have been the author’s original readings or
metre, except that L’s text has been emended (on some thirty occasions) where
the scribe appears to have omitted or miswritten words or produced defective
sense. These emendations (some of which are already made in Horstmann’s
text) are signalled by […] in the case of additions or substitutions, and † in the
case of omissions. The textual notes that follow the edited text give L’s read-
ing in these cases. Although other manuscripts of All Souls have not been col-
lated for this edition, it has been natural to consult the text of H as printed by
D’Evelyn and Mill, and readings from this manuscript are also given in all cases
of emendation.
Because the language of the poem is difficult, even for those used to reading
Middle English, and because bringing out the progress of its argument is an
essential editorial task, the text has been provided with frequent glosses posi-
tioned at the foot of each page.
41
A comparison with Horstmann’s edition of the poem, from the same manuscript (The
Early South-English Legendary), pp. 420–31, showed his transcription to be very accurate. For
comprehensive information about MS Laud, see The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, ed. by Bell and Couch.
42
Word division, including decisions about hyphenation, follows the practice of the
Oxford English Dictionary. Paraph signs with trailing descenders occur in the manuscript at
the beginning of lines 9, 27, 53, 71, 79, 85, 91, 99, 107, 131, 161, 169, 177, 197, 215, 219, 231,
241, 269, 307, 333, 349, 355, and 367. The only transcriptional difficulty concerns the close
similarity, at times, between the letter-forms for e and o, particularly in the case of what has been
rendered as e in ‘Þe’ (l. 150) and ‘tresor’ (l. 220).
All Souls’ Day

Alle Soulene Day on Vrþe riȝht is to holde heiȝe, [fol. 175r]
For alle we schullen habben neode þarto, for alle we schullen deiȝe.
A fair siȝht þareof also [an] aungel þo gan bringue 1
[To a] manne of Rome ase he ladde him ase he lay in metingue. 2
5 Him þouȝte he saiȝh manie men liggen in beddes of golde,

And manie sitte at heyȝe borde and habbe al þat huy wolde, 3
And manie gon nakede and bidde þat sum man heom scholde biweue, 4
And manie ofhongrede and beden also þat men sum guod heom ȝeue. 5
Þe aungel him seide ȝwat it was al þat he saiȝh þere,

10 And þat it was Purgatorie and þe men soulene were.
Þulke þat weren at so noble bord and in þe riche beddes also, 6
Þat weren men for ȝwam þare was muche guod on Vrþe ido, 7
Þat bilefden freond bihynde heom þat Massene leten singue 8
And duden guod for Godes loue, heore soulene out of pine to bringue.
15 Þulke þat weren acale and ofhongred, þat no guod ne miȝhten finde, 9
Þat weren þulke þat nadden on Vrþe none freond hem bihinde
Ne for hem late Masses singue ne almes-dede for hem do, [fol. 175v]
Þarefore ase helplese men in misayse huy ȝeoden so. 10
‘Loke’, quath þe aungel, ‘þat þu telle þe Pope herof sone,

20 Þat men holden Alle Soulene Day, for it is wel to done,
And also wide ase Holie Churche þat he make is heste 11
Þene amorewe aftur Alle Halewene Day to holde þulke feste, 12
Þat ech man with guode wille ase ferforth ase he may
1 3 siȝht] vision; þo] once.

2 4 in metingue] in a dream.
3 6 huy] they.
4 7 bidde] pray; biweue] clothe.
5 8 ofhongrede] starving.
6 11 Þulke] Those.
7 12 Þat] They.
8 13 bilefden] left; Massene leten singue] caused Masses to be sung.
9 15 acale] cold.
10 18 ȝeoden] dwelt.
11 21 heste] decree.
12 22 Þene amorewe] The morning.
For alle þe soulene in Purgatorie bidde þat ilke day,

25 So þat þe pouere þat nath no freond þat for him bi name ouȝht do 13
Þo[ruȝ] biddingue of ech Cristine man iholpe huy mowen beo so.’ 14
Þe guode man aros up anon þo he isaiȝ al þis,

And þonkede god of þe siȝhte, and so he wel auȝhte iwis.
Þe pope he tolde, þat þo was, al þat he saiȝh þere,
30 So þat men holdeth þulke feste herre þane heo er were. 15
Ore louerd bifond furst Purgatorie men þuder in to wende 16
Þat [h]or penaunce here on Vrþe ne brouȝhten non to ende, 17
And þat men for simple sunnes of ȝwan ischriue hy [n]ere 18
In þulke torment huy bilefden forto hy ibette were, 19
35 And men also þat weren ischriue and heore schrift afengue also 20
Of a fol preost and nouȝht inouȝ to þe sunne þat was ido. 21
Þulke schullen [g]o to Purgatorie forto huy habben to ende ibrouȝht

Penaunce acordinde to heore sunne and aftur þe preostes nouȝht, 22
[For ȝif þe preost enioignez penaunce þat ne beo nouȝht ful inouȝ
40 In Purgatorie it worþ iȝulde and elles it were wouȝ, 23
For penaunce is in þreo manere: lasse oþer more

Oþer euene aftur a mannes sunne, and nouȝht aftur þe preostes lore.] 24
Ȝif heo is more þane þe sunne and a man it do iwis 25
Al it schal in Heouene tuyrne to echingue of his blis. 26
45 Ȝif heo is euene to his sunne, þe sunne heo wole aquenche, 27
13 25 ouȝht] anything.
14 26 iholpe] helped.
15 30 herre þane heo er were] more highly than before.
16 31 bifond] established.
17 32 hor] their.
18 33 ȝwan] of which.
19 34 bilefden forto hy ibette were] should remain until they were atoned for.
20 35 afengue] received.
21 36 fol] sinful; inouȝ] sufficient.
22 38 aftur þe preostes nouȝht] not (penance ordained) by the priest.
23 40 worþ iȝulde] will be paid; wouȝ] unjust.
24 42 euene aftur] equal to; nouȝht aftur þe preostes lore] does not depend on what the priest says.
25 43 heo] it; it] i.e. the penance.
26 44 tuyrne to echingue] go towards increasing.
27 45 aquenche] cancel.
Ake nouȝht ȝif heo to luytel is, þarefore ech man him biþenche 28
And to a fol preost ne triste nouȝht þat to luyte penaunce him set, 29
For soþe here oȝur ellesȝware ech sunne worth ibet.

Ȝwat, hou is hit þanne of Ianekin and of Robinet þe wilde, 30
50 Of Annot and of Malekin, þat wollez habbe þene preost so milde? 31
And huy seggez, ‘Þilke preost is to hard, God schilde us fram is lothþ; 32
Go we to Sire Gilbert þe preost, he nis neuere wrothþ.

He wollez schriue us nessche inouȝ and ore sunnes al forȝyue’ 33
— Bi God, ȝwane huy habbez al ido, hom huy gothþ vnschriue, 34
55 For heore penaunce schal beo so luyte þat Sire Gilbert and huy also
Schullen gon a deuele wey bote God nime ȝeme heom to. 35
In Purgatorie nis no confort bote of one þingue:

Of þe hope of ioye afturward þat ore louerd heom wole bringue.
Ȝwane men in heore deth-beddes beoth and heore penaunce heom is iset,
60 And huy ne mouwen nouȝht on eorþe beo forto heo beo ful bet, 36
So repentaunt huy mouwen beo þat ore louerd it wole forȝyue 37
Withouten any Purgatorie ȝwan huy beoth wel ischriue. 38
Ake ȝif his penaunce him is iȝyue ȝwane he mot heonne wende, 39
[And of þat he is ischriue] he ne may it bringue to ende, 40
65 On of his nexte freond miȝhte for him it swiþe wel do, 41
Ake four þingus he moste habbe þat scholde take on so: [fol. 176r]
42
28 46 biþenche] consider.
29 47 to luyte] too little.
30 49 Ȝwat] Well; of ] with.
31 50 milde] lenient.
32 51 lothþ] harshness.
33 53 nessche] gently.
34 54 hom] home.
35 56 a deuele wey bote] to the devil unless; nime ȝeme heom to] takes heed of them.
36 60 And are unable to continue on earth for the time needed to make full amends.
37 61 So repentaunt huy mouwen beo] It is possible for them to be so repentant.
38 62 ȝwan] if.
39 63 ȝwane he mot heonne wende] when he is about to die.
40 64 of þat he is ischriue] (the penance) for which he has been shriven.
41 65 nexte] close.
42 66 take on so] act in this way.
Furst þare moste gret loue beo bitwene ȝwam so it were, 43
For withoute loue and deol of heorte swuch þing nouȝht nere; 44
Ake ȝif huy weren also of one blode þe betere it were iwis, 45
70 Ake studefast heorte of guod loue þe maistrie þarof is. 46
Þat oþur þing is þat he schal þoruȝh deþe heonne wiende, 47
And þat he ne may habbe no space here his penaunce bringue to ende. 48
Þe þridde þing is þat it beo þoruȝh þe preostes rede, 49
For no man ne may þarewithoute [fu]lendi swuch dede. 50
75 Þe feorþe þing is þat men him take penaunce more þareto 51
Þane him þat þe sunne dude ȝif he miȝhte penaunce do, 52
For hoso wole for oþeres sunne swuch penaunce here lede, 53
More penaunce man mot heom sette þane him þat dude þe dede.
Þarefore ȝwane anie of ouwer freond hath ibrouȝht is lif to fine, 54
80 Iseoth here hou ȝe mouwen bringue him out of his pine. 55
To biete is sunne in þis manere sikerliche ȝe mouwen eou beode 56
— For Godus loue þenchez þaron ȝwane ouwer freond habbez neode. 57
In ȝwuch stude is nouþe Purgatorie manie wolden fayn iwite; 58
Hit [nis] nouȝht [in] a stude to alle men, ake in fif studes, it is iwrite. 59
85 On is in þe firmament þare gret brenningue is
43 67 ȝwam so] whomsoever.

44 68 deol] compassion; nouȝht nere] could not be.
45 69 of one blode] related by blood.
46 70 þe maistrie þarof is] is the main thing.
47 71 oþur] second.
48 72 space] time.
49 73 rede] agreement.
50 74 fulendi] accomplish.
51 75 him take] prescribe (the friend).
52 76 miȝhte] had been able.
53 77 lede] undertake.
54 79 ouwer] your; fine] end.
55 80 Iseoth] See.
56 81 biete] atone for; sikerliche] assuredly; eou beode] offer yourself.
57 82 þenchez] think.
58 83 nouþe] now; fayn iwite] gladly know.
59 84 a stude to] in the same place for.
Of fuyr þat hath þare is stude and of þe sonne iwis. 60
Þat oþur is in þe eyr abouen us here þare luþere gostes fleoth,

Þat tormentiez heom nyȝht and day and neuere in reste ne beoth. 61
Þe þridde is an Vrþe among us here, þe feorþe in watere is,

90 Þe fifte is onder vrþe deope biside Helle iwis.
Seint Patrik on Vrþe ȝwilene ane stude þarof founde, 62
Ase God wolde, biside þe hul of Seint Brendan in [Ir]londe.

For four þingus Purgatorie in þeos fif studen is: 63
For sum man scholde lasse torment þane oþur habbe iwis,
95 And þat men miȝhten þorouȝh god dede þe sonore to ioye heom bringue, 64
And þat men weren þoruȝh hem iwar bi a vision oþur metingue, 65
And for men þat delitiez muche [to] sunne in one place, 66
Þare he schal þe sunne biete forto ore louerd him ȝiue grace.
One tale and one faire ensaunple þareof we findez iwrite,
100 Þat ore louerd schewez us swuch þing, for we scholden þe soþe iwite.
A preost was ȝwilene in one stude þat dude him baþie ilome 67
In one stude priueliche þare none men ne come.

So þat þare cam ofte a man, ase hit were bi cas, 68
And seruede him and wu[sch] him wel, ake he nuste ȝwat he was. 69
105 A day he made hali bred and þe manne hit bitok 70
Ase for is mede for is swunch, ake he it anon forsok. 71
‘Sire’, he seide, ‘I ne may hit nouȝht, for it ihalewed is,

And for I nam nouȝht holi ȝuyt I ne may it nauȝt iwis.’ 72
60 86 sonne] sun.
61 88 heom] i.e. sinners.
62 91 ȝwilene] once; stude] example.
63 93 þingus] reasons.
64 95 sonore] sooner; heom] i.e. sinners.
65 96 weren þoruȝh hem iwar] might take warning from them.
66 97 one] the same.
67 101 þat dude him baþie ilome] who often bathed.
68 103 cas] chance.
69 104 wusch] washed; ȝwat] who.
70 105 made hali bred] made consecrated bread; þe manne hit bitok] offered it to the man.
71 106 mede] compensation; swunch] labour; forsok] refused.
72 108 holi ȝuyt] yet blessed; ne may] may not (eat).
‘A Godes name’, quath þe preost, ‘Ich hote and halsnie þe 73
110 Þat þou me segge ȝwat þou art þat þus ofte comest to me.’
‘Ich was ȝwylene of þis stude, louerd’, þis oþur seide; [fol. 176v]
‘In þis place Ich delitede muche to don a misdede,
And al mi deli†t of þulke sunne so was in þis place;
I ne bette nouȝht þe sunne aliue, for Ich nadde nouȝht þe grace. 74
115 And aftur mi deth þerefore mi Purgatorie here is,

To biete mi sunne in þulke place þarease Ich dude amis,
And ȝif þou woldest for me Massene singue Ich miȝhte habbe milce and ore, 75
And þou miȝht iwyte þat Ich am sauf ȝwane þou ne finst me non more.’ 76
Þe preost song for him Massene fiue and oþur guodnesse dude also;
120 Sone he miste þat selie gost ȝuyt are þe seue nyȝht weren ido, 77
For he wende to þe ioye of Heouene þat he deore abouȝhte; 78
Þus mani man hath his Purgatorie þare he is sunne wrouȝhte. 79
So may parauentur Dame Aldith, þat nath non oþur blis 80
Bote at hom in hire hal†e clene þerease hire moker is, 81
125 Þat, þei heo bidde hire beden at churche, hire þouȝht is at hom more; 82
Parauenture heo schal it bete þare and abugge hire loue ful sore! 83
Men habbuz [on Vrþe] heore Purgatorie manie for swuche þingue,
And manie to warni some men † helpe heom þarof to bringue.
Mani man his Purgatorie in wature hath also;
130 Þarof Ichulle one ensaumple segge of þat ȝwilene was ido. 84
Seint Tebaud þe bischop hadde in his fot ane hote goute 85
73 109 hote] order; halsnie] adjure.

74 114 aliue] while alive; grace] fortune.
75 117 milce] mercy; ore] grace.
76 118 finst me] find me (here).
77 120 selie] pitiable; ȝuyt are] even before.
78 121 deore] for a high price.
79 122 wrouȝhte] performed.
80 123 parauentur] perchance.
81 124 Bote] Except; hale clene] fine little hiding place; moker] worldly wealth.
82 125 Þat þei] So that, although.
83 126 it] i.e. her sin; abugge] pay for; loue] covetousness.
84 130 Ichulle] I shall; þat] something that; was ido] happened.
85 131 hote goute] burning gout.
Þat poudagre icleopeod is — he hadde þereoffe gret doute. 86
Ase his fischares wenden afischez in heruest al aboute, 87
In heor net huy nomen ane clompe of ys, huy weren þarewith wel proute, 88
135 For þat ys þat was so cold, ileid to heore louerdes fote,
[Hi]t wolde aswagi þe hote goute and bringue him sum bote. 89
Þis bischop Tebaut was wel glad — þat ys huy leiden ofte
To is fot, and eche time it made him liþe and softe. 90
Þat ys was euere hol and sound, it ne malt for none hete; 91
140 Seint Tebaud þouȝhte þareof wonder, for noþing he nolde it lete. 92
A luyte cri him þouȝhte a day in þat ys he heorde þere;

He coniourede hit a Godes name to segge him ȝwat it were.
‘Ich am’, quath þis oþur, ‘a seli gost, and in þis ys Ich am her
In mi Purgatorie forte Ich beo of mine sunnes scker, 93
145 Ake ȝif þou woldest for Godes loue þritti Masses singue
For me, Ich wot þat þu miȝhtest of þis pine me bringue.’ 94
Þe bischop grauntede him wel sone and bigan anon amorewe 95
Þe Massene for þis selie gost to bringuen it out of soruwe,

And ech day song so aftur oþur — þe deuel hadde þerto gret onde 96
150 Þe ȝuyt þat [þe] gost scholde of pine come; his wrench he gan fonde, 97
For ase þe bischop þene tenþe day bigan is Masse to singue,

Al þe toun þe feond† hadde ibrouȝt on a fiȝhtyngue. 98
Þe guode man bilefde is Masse anon and orn among heom faste, 99
86 132 poudagre] podagra (=gouty arthritis); icleopeod] called; doute] anxiety.

87 133 fischares] fishermen; heruest] autumn.
88 134 clompe of ys] block of ice; proute] pleased.
89 136 aswagi] assuage; bote] relief.
90 138 liþe] supple.
91 139 ne malt] did not melt.
92 140 it lete] cease (the treatment).
93 144 scker] absolved.
94 146 wot] am certain.
95 147 him] i.e. his wish.
96 149 onde] anger.
97 150 Þe ȝuyt] However; of … come] be brought out of; his wrench he gan fonde] he devised a trick.
98 152 ibrouȝt on a fiȝhtyngue] set fighting.
99 153 orn] ran.
And harmles þoruȝh godes grace apa[i]sede heom at þe laste. 100
155 Ase he bigan amorewe is Masse a gret cri þare cam al aboute
Þat þe toun biseged was with gret ferd al withoute, [fol. 177r]
101
And men ornen into al þe toun ase witlese for doute; 102
Þe bischop lefde is Masse anon and orn toward þe route. 103
He made pays aȝein þat fierd þat huy noþing ne reueden, 104
160 Ake natheles so þeo tuey dawes his Masse he bileuede. 105
Ase he bigan is Masse þene þridde day men heten out al aboute, 106
For is court and muche of þe toun afuyre was withoute.

‘Þei it al furberne’, quath þe bischop, ‘and Ich misulf also, 107
I nelle today fram þis weued are þis Masse beo ido.’ 108
165 So þat he song is Masse forth, and muche folk was bisi withoute
To lauien watur and quienche þat fuyr þat orn so wide aboute. 109
Þo þe Masse was ido þat fuyr aqueynte anon; 110
Þare nas apeired nouȝht an hous, ake hole stoden ech on. 111
Þulke þreo dawes þe deouel hadde al þulke wo ido 112
170 His Masse for to lette and pini þe soule so. 113
Þe bischop fond þat ys at hom imolten al to nouȝhte; 114
Þo wuste he þat þoru is Masse to ioye þe soule he brouȝhte.

Manie þingus one soule helpez þat in Purgatorie is,
Ake þreo þingues heom helpez mest bifore alle oþere iwis: 115
100 154 apaisede] pacified.

101 156 ferd] host of people.
102 157 doute] fear.
103 158 route] disturbance.
104 159 pays aȝein] peace with; reueden] plundered.
105 160 þeo tuey dawes] on these two days; bileuede] abandoned.
106 161 heten] cried.
107 163 furberne] burn down.
108 164 nelle] shall not (go); weued] altar.
109 166 lauien] pour on.
110 167 aqueynte] went out.
111 168 apeired] damaged.
112 169 ido] caused.
113 170 lette] hinder; pini] torment.
114 171 imolten] melted.
115 174 mest] most.
175 Beden of men and almes-dede, singuingue of Masses also;

Þeos þreo þingues beoth best iwis and mest guod huy wollez do.
Þat biddingue of beden beoth guode þe soþe ȝe mouwen iwite
Bi a tale of a clerk þat we findez iwrite.
A clerk hadd[e] ȝwilene ane wone bi churche heȝye ȝwane he come 116
180 To segge for alle Cristine soulene þe ‘De profundis’ ilome.

In a churcheȝerd ones he cam late, þeoues him comen aboute 117
And asaileden him to robbi, he nuste ȝwat do for doute.

Þe bodies þat weren iburede þare his beden ȝolden anon; 118
Huy comen with wepnen him for to helpe and sturten forth ech on, 119
185 Euerech with swuch manere wepne ase huy uyseden here aliue, 120
Plouȝman with his aker-staf, archer mid bouwe and knyue. 121
Aboute þis þeoues huy comen ech one and guonne heom sone todriue, 122
And to heore puttes wenden sethþe aȝein — þis clerk hamward wel bliue. 123
Þus weren is beden iȝolde þat he bad erore and ofte 124
190 — Ich am siker þe þeoues ne ȝeoden nouȝht aweywardes ful softe, 125
For Ich wot wel þat non of us ne hadde heom so sore agast. 126
A wonder bataille it was on, hadde it longue ilast. 127
Ich wene þei ani chaumpiun þare hadde ibeo 128
Sone he wolde habbe inome is red hamward for to fleo! 129
195 Almes-dede deth þe soule also swiþe gret guod withalle,

Þat ȝe mouwen bi a cas iseo þat ane knyȝhte dude bifalle.
116 179 wone] custom; churche heȝye] churchyard.

117 181 þeoues] thieves.
118 183 ȝolden] repaid.
119 184 sturten] rushed.
120 185 Euerech] Each; swuch manere] such kind of; aliue] when alive.
121 186 aker-staf ] plough-staff.
122 187 todriue] drive away.
123 188 puttes] graves; sethþe] afterwards; hamward] (went) home.
124 189 erore] earlier.
125 190 ful softe] comfortably.
126 191 agast] terrified.
127 192 wonder] wondrous; was on] would have been.
128 193 wene þei] believe that even if.
129 194 inome is red] made up his mind.
A guod man ȝwyle þat heiȝte Steuene to is endingue drouȝ; 130
A knyȝht, his freond, for is deth made gret deol inouȝ,

And dude for him gret almes-dede boþe niȝht and day;
200 Þarof he isaiȝ a fair bitokningue ase he aslepe lay:
Him þouȝhte he saiȝ a sluper brugge swyþe fayr and heiȝ; 131
[fol. 177v]
A deop watur and swart bineoþe, a fair mede þare was neiȝ 132
With swote smul and faire floures, and ope þe brugge he [saiȝ] gon
With grete misayse mani men þat fullen into þat watur anon,
205 And manie he saiȝ þareoppe gon al sauf withoute drede,
And manie with ioye and blisse inouȝ pleyinde in þe mede.
Ope þe brugge him þouȝhte he saiȝ gon in wrechhede
Steuene, for ȝwam þat he dude þe grete almes-dede.
Blake men þare weren bineoþe þat adoneward him drowe,
210 And oþere þare weren in ȝwite cloþes þat opward him heolden inowe. 133
Bitwene heom laste þe noyse longue; aȝein oþur ech drouȝ faste; 134
Ake euere hadden þe ȝwite men þe maistrie at þe laste.

Þat weren þe almes-dedes þat for him weren ido, 135
Þat þe knyȝht for is soule dude, þat drowen him opward so.
215 Þe blake þat him adoneward drowen, þat weren is luþere dedes
Þat wolden him to pine drawe, ȝif huy miȝhten for almes-dede. 136
Massene also doth gret guod boþe þe quike and dede, 137
Þat ȝe mouwen iheore bi þis tale and bi oþure þat Ich er sede.
Men weren ȝwilene in a contreye þare a gret ston roche stod, 138
220 And men wenden þat þareonder were gret tresor and guod, 139
So þat huy doluen þareaftur, ake to wroþerhele ate laste,

140
For opon hem ful þe roche adoun and heom alle ouercaste
130 197 to is endingue drouȝ] died.

131 201 sluper brugge] slippery bridge.
132 202 swart] dark; mede] meadow.
133 210 ȝwite] white.
134 211 drouȝ] tugged.
135 213 Þat] Those.
136 216 for] in spite of.
137 217 boþe] to both.
138 219 roche] rock.
139 220 wenden] believed.
140 221 to wroþerhele] disastrously.
And aslouȝ heom alle, bote anne man, þat ase it were bi cas
In a manere dich fel and lay, and þe roche aboue him was,
225 So þat he ne miȝhte of þe stude — ase iputted he lay þere; 141
His wyf nuste nouȝht of is lyf, ake wende þat he ded were. 142
To churche heo wende euerech day ane Masse to leten singue; 143
A lof and wyn and a candel of wex to þe weued heo wolde bringue,
And al for hire louerdes soule — heo ne bilefde nouȝht a day; 144
230 Þe deuel hadde þarto gret onde þo he þat isaiȝ.

Ase þis wyf ȝeode a day toward churche þe deuel cam hire to
And seide þat heo ȝeode for nauȝht, for þe Masse was ido. 145
Þat guode wyf ȝeode hom aȝein and wende þat he soth sede;
Amorewe he made hire also gon hom mid þulke sulue dede. 146
235 And þane þridde day also guod, ake þat wyf þane feorþe day
Sone aros and to churche ȝeode þo heo þane day isaiȝh. 147
Ȝuyt cam þe schrewe and seide þat þe Masse was ido;

Þis wyf iliefde him er fule wel, ake þo nolde heo nouȝht so, 148
Ake wende to churche and fond þe soþe of þat þe schrewe hire mette, 149
240 Þat is was to bitrayen hire and guodnesse to lette.

Sone hit bifeol þareafturward þat men of þe toune
Wenden to bete op þulke roche þat so lay þare adoune 150
And wenden to finde sum tresor — huy doluen and beoten faste;
Þe selie man bineoþe was ofdrad þat huy more opon him caste. 151
245 ‘Deluez’, he seide, ‘warliche, þat ȝe ne slen me nouȝht!’ 152
Þo weren þis men sore adradde and stoden in gret þouȝht, [fol. 178r]
Ake naþeles huy doluen biside so þat huy to him come;
141 225 of ] (move) from; iputted] buried.

142 226 of is lyf ] that he was alive.
143 227 ane Masse to leten singue] to have a Mass sung.
144 229 bilefde] missed.
145 232 ido] finished.
146 234 mid þulke sulue dede] by the same trick.
147 236 Sone] Early; þane day isaiȝh] saw that it was day.
148 238 iliefde him er] had believed him earlier; þo] now; so] i.e. accept it.
149 239 of þat þe schrewe hire mette] about what the wretch had put into her mind.
150 242 bete op] break up.
151 244 ofdrad] terrified.
152 245 warliche] carefully.
Huy founden him ligge hol and sound and with ioye hine up nome.
Huy axeden him hou he hadde ileoued, þat hongur him ne aslouȝ; 153
250 ‘Certes’, he seide, ‘Ich habbe ihaued mete and drinke inouȝ,
For a lof and a picher wyn mi wyf me sende ech day 154
And a brennind candle þat me liȝhte þe ȝwile Ich here lay,

Bote þreo dawes þis oþur wike noþing heo me ne sende; 155
Ich was neiȝh for hongur ded, ake heo gan sone amende
255 And sende me ase heo dude er and fedde me wel withalle;
Of alle wyues worþe hire best, and best hire mote bifalle!’ 156
Bi þis miracle man may iseo and bi manie oþure also

Þat Massene and almes-dede gret guod þe soule wollez do.
Þis guodnesses nellez nouȝht helpe alle iliche iwis, 157
260 For of men þat heonne wiendez mani manere þare is: 158
Oþur riȝht guode oþur riȝht vuele, oþur † bitweone two; 159
God dede helpez some ful luyte þat man wole for heom do.
Ȝif þat huy riȝht guode beoz, huy ne habbuth none neode mid alle 160
To none erþeliche guodnesse þat heom miȝhte þare bifalle, 161
265 For in þe ioye of Heouene huy buth, ase huy weren bifore; 162
Ake naþeles þat men for heom doth ne worth nouȝht forlore, 163
For it schal himsulf helpe muche þat þulke guodnesse deth, 164
And alle Cristine soulene also þat in Purgatorie beoth.

Þreo manere men þare buth riȝht guode þat to Heouene wiendez anon 165
270 Ȝwane huy out of þis worlde farez: ȝung child is þat on
153 249 ileoued] stayed alive.

154 251 picher wyn] pitcher of wine.
155 253 Bote] Except that on; þis oþur wike] i.e. recently.
156 256 worþe hire] she is; best hire mote bifalle] may the best befall her.
157 259 guodnesses] good deeds; iliche] equally.
158 260 þat heonne wiendez] who die.
159 261 riȝht] wholly; vuele] evil.
160 263 mid alle] at all.
161 264 erþeliche guodnesse] good deed on Earth.
162 265 buth] are.
163 266 þat] that which; ne worth nouȝht forlore] is not wasted.
164 267 himsulf ] i.e. the person; þulke guodnesse deth] does the good deed.
165 269 wiendez anon] go at once.
Þat deide aftur is cristinedom are hit dude to quede, 166
And martyrs þat for Godes loue in strong torment weren dede.
Þe þridde manere so but[h] clene men þat are þat huy heonnes wende 167
Alle heore sunnes betten here, ase ore louerd heom grace sende.
275 Þis þreo manere men ne mouwen nouȝht in Purgatorie bileue,
Ake smitez þoruout quiclokur þane þe leyte doth an eue. 168
Huy ne mouwen nouȝht bileue þare, for er heo wenden heonne

Clene huy weren of alle sunne and ne habbut noþin[g] to brenne, 169
For ase wode and col fedez þat fuyr þat here is, 170
280 Also sunne fet þat fuyr in Purgatorie iwis, 171
And ȝwan þe sunne is ibrend awey þe soule to Heuene geth,

Ake wel sone þoruȝ he flieth þat in clannesse þolede deth. 172
Also doth [þulke] þreo manere men of ȝwan Ich eou er seide,
For Heouene openez aȝenes heom so sone as heo beoth dede. 173
285 And þat it beo soth of alle þreo, ensaumple ȝe mouwen iseo;
Þat aȝein children ibaptizede Heouene iopened beo, 174
For ore louerd was nyne and twenti ȝer and twelf daywes old
Are he ibaptized were, ase þe bok us hath itold.
[Are] þat tyme non eorþelich man ne miȝhte enes iwite 175
290 Þat Heouene openede ouȝwere aboue, þat we findez iwrite, 176
Bote þo he was ibaptized of þe holie man Seint Iohan, [fol. 178v]

Aboue his heued with gret liȝht Heouene openede anon.
Ȝwat bitocknede þulke openingue þat þo was and er nouȝht,
Bote þat þoruȝ cristindom man was to Heouene ibrouȝht?
166 271 cristinedom] baptism; are] before; to quede] any wrong.

167 273 clene] sinless.
168 276 smitez þoruout quiclokur] speed through more quickly;
þe leyte doth an eue] lightning does in the evening.
169 278 brenne] burn off.
170 279 here] i.e. on Earth.
171 280 fet] feeds.
172 282 þolede] suffered.
173 284 aȝenes] for.
174 286 aȝein children ibaptizede] for baptised children.
175 289 enes] ever.
176 290 ouȝwere] in any place.
295 — And þat Heouene dore was faste imad forto cristindom were, 177
And þat aȝein þe furste cristindom Heouene openede þere, 178
And þat Heouene dore iopened is to Cristine men also

And to ȝongue children forto huy habben þoruȝ sunne it furdo? 179
For huy schullen, ȝwane huy heonnes wiendez, Heouene dore opene finde,
300 For huy ne berez with heom no sunne þat drawe heom bihinde. 180
Also quicliche ase liȝhttingue þoru Purgatorie huy doz gon,

And Heouene dore findez opene, and wiendez in anon.
Gret folie it is to weope, ase men beoz iwonet to done, 181
For ȝongue children þat deiȝez so, þat in Heouene buth so sone.
305 ‘Awei, mi child’, seith þe damme, and suouȝnez aȝein þe wowe 182
— Bi Crist, heo auȝte þonki God þat nam hit ase his owe! 183
Aȝein þe martyrs þat guode buth Heouene iopened is,

Þat man may bi þe martyrdom iseo of Seint Steuene iwis,
For þo men him to deþe þreowen he biheold to Heouene an heiȝh, 184
310 An[d] Heouene openede anon, ase he þare iseiȝh.

‘Lo’, he seide, ‘nouþe Ich iseo þoruȝ Ihesu Cristes sonde 185
Heouene opene and Godes sone in is fader riȝth hond stonde.’

And þe furste martyr he was þat euere on Vrþe cam
Aftur Godes passion to holde vp Cristindom.
315 Heouene openede aȝen him, ase he þene deth nam, 186
To bitokni þat he wolde also aȝen ech þat þolede guod martyrdom. 187
And þei he were sumdel in sunne, heore deth þat huy nome 188
And heore blod heom wolde wasche are huy to Purgatorie come.
177 295 faste imad] shut fast.

178 296 aȝein] on the occasion of.
179 298 it furdo] forfeited (the opportunity).
180 300 drawe heom bihinde] might pull them back.
181 303 iwonet] accustomed.
182 305 Awei] Alas; damme] mother; suouȝnez] swoons; wowe] wall.
183 306 owe] own.
184 309 þreowen] pelted.
185 311 sonde] grace.
186 315 ase he þene deth nam] when he died.
187 316 he] it.
188 317 sumdel] somewhat.
Þulke also of clene liue, þat in clennesse here lif endiez,

320 Heouene openez aȝein heom ȝwane huy heonne wiendez.
Þat man may iseo bi ensaumple of Seint Iohan þe Wangelist: 189
Clannore þane he was no man nas withoute Iesu Crist. 190
He seith in þe Apocalips, þat a wel guod bok is,

Þat he iseiȝh Heouene dore aȝen him opene iwis.
325 Ȝwat bitoknede þat bote þis: huy scholden iseo also,
Aȝein heom alle þat clene weren, Heouene dore vndo?
Erþelich guodnesse helpez luyte swyche men iwisse, 191
For huy nabbuth þareto non neode ȝwane huy beoth in Heuene blisse.
Ake þanne it helpez himsulf muche þat deth þulke god dede, 192
330 And alle þat beoth in Purgatorie, ase Ich erore sede.
Hoso is also in Helle pine, it hellpez him luytel also
Any guodnesse þan man may on Vrþe for him do,
For Seint Austyn seith, ȝif he wuste þat is fader in Helle were,
Non more he nolde for him bidde þane for ane deuel þere.
335 Ake euere it helpez him þat it dothþ and Cristine soulene also,
For no guodnesse ne worth furlore þat man may on Vrþe do. [fol. 179r]
Ake beden oþer † almes-dedes luyte helpuz of fremde oþur of kunne, 193
Bote he withoute wrathþe beo and withoute dedlich sunne. 194
Ake a Masse nis no þe worse for ȝwam þat heo is ido, 195
340 Þei it beo of a sunfol preost — of non oþur þing it nis so, 196
For þat dede is so heiȝh þat heo ne may apeyri nouȝht 197
Of no wrechche preost þat it dez, þei he beo in sunne ibrouȝht.

Ake þei þe Masse ne beo þe worse, þe preost, bi mi swere, 198
189 321 Þat man may iseo] One may see this.
190 322 Clannore þane he was no man nas withoute] No one was purer than he was except.
191 327 Erþelich guodnesse] Good deeds (done for them) on earth.
192 329 himsulf ] the person.
193 337 of fremde oþur of kunne] whether done by stranger or kinsman.
194 338 wrathþe] (the sin of ) wrath.
195 339 for ȝwam þat heo is ido] on account of the person who performs it.
196 340 Þei] Even though; of non oþur þing it nis so] this is not the case with anything else.
197 341 heiȝh] special; apeyri] be devalued.
198 343 bi mi swere] I swear.
Þat hire singuth in dedlich sunne acorie it schal ful deore, 199
345 For ȝwane Sire Gileberd imassed hath, his lif he wole so diȝhte 200
At þe tauerne to beon a-day and bi is quene bi nyȝhte. 201
He seith, ȝwane men cleopiez him preost, ‘Sittez stille, mine guode ifere, 202
Þe preost hanguez at churche and Ich am nouþe here.’

His cope oþur is surplis þe preost he seith it isse, 203
350 Ake his cope schal bileue at hom ȝwane he schal to Helle, iwisse! 204
Hoso wole [þat a] ded [man of ] his guodnesse afongue, 205
Do it bitime, for þe dede þareaftur þinkez longue, 206
And þat it beo soth man may is[e]o bi a wonder cas

Þat ȝwylene bi a knyȝht bifeol þat with þe heiȝe Kyng Charles was.
355 Þe Kyng Charles his ost a day to strongue batayle gan lede; 207
His o knyȝht þat with him wende of þe deþe gan him drede. 208
A cosyn he hadde in þe route; to him he þouȝhte he miȝhte 209
Best truste of alle men, and so he auȝhte with riȝhte.

‘Cosyn’, he seide, ‘ȝif Ich am here to deþe ibrouȝht,
360 Sul mi stede and do for mi soule — ne bilef þou it nouȝht! 210
Þis kniȝht truste wel to is word þat grauntede don is bone, 211
And into þe batayle wende forth, ase riȝht was for to done,
And fauȝht þe ȝwyle he miȝhte, and aslawe was at þen ende; 212
His cosin nam his stede sone and hamward he gan wiende,
199 344 acorie it] pay a penalty.

200 345 imassed] finished the Mass; wole so diȝhte] leads in such a fashion.
201 346 quene] mistress.
202 347 cleopiez him] address him as; ifere] friend.
203 349 He makes out that his cope or surplice is the priest.
204 350 schal to] shall (go) to.
205 351 of his guodnesse afongue] receive the benefits of his good deeds.
206 352 bitime] in good time; dede] dead person; þinkez longue] long remembers (the intention).
207 355 ost] army.
208 356 His o knyȝht] One of his knights.
209 357 route] company.
210 360 Sul mi stede] Sell my horse; do] provide; ne bilef þou it nouȝht!] do not put it off !
211 361 is word þat grauntede don is bone] to the word of the man who agreed to carry out his request.
212 363 þe ȝwyle he miȝhte] as long as he could.
365 And to is owene bihofþe faste ire heold, and þouȝhte for to done 213
Also muche guod for þe knyȝhtes soule ȝwane he miȝhte eftsone. 214
Þe knyȝht cam to him eftsone gostliche in priuete: 215
‘Cosyn’, he seide, ‘late þou dudest þat þou biheiȝhtest me! 216
Þou madest me beon in Purgatorie seue nyȝht mid iwisse, 217
370 And nouþe Ich am in Heouene and þarof þou schalt misse,
For þou schalt in þis ilke day to þe pine of Helle wende
For þe treson þat þou me dudest, and beon þare withouten ende.’
Þis gost wende forth anon and þe false man wel sone
Deide and wende a deuele wey, ase he ofseruede to done. 218
375 Here mouwen þis false esecutores beon iwarre bi þis tale, 219
Þat muche habbez of dedes godes and deleth þareof ful smale, 220
Ake þenchez ȝwane huy riche beoth to ȝelden it wel iwis. 221
Þe soule longueth þareaftur [so]r[e], þat in Purgatorie is; 222
Heo abidez longue heore richesse — þe guode is euere bihinde. 223
380 Huy schullen gon a deouele wey and þare heore miede finde. 224
Nou Iesus þat us deore bouȝhte, þei we don ofte amis, [fol. 179v]
225
On alle Cristine soulene haue merci and bring us to Heuene blis,

And led us to oure riȝhte heritage, for þou bouȝhtest us þarto; 226
Ne leos nouȝht þat þou deore bouȝhtest, þei we sumdel misdo. 227
213 365 bihofþe] benefit; þouȝhte] planned.

214 366 eftsone] later.
215 367 gostliche] as a spirit.
216 368 late þou dudest þat þou biheiȝhtest me] you are taking a long time to do what you promised.
217 369 mid iwisse] fully.
218 374 ofseruede] deserved.
219 375 esecutores] executors; beon iwarre bi] take heed of.
220 376 dedes] a dead person’s; deleth þareof ful smale] distribute only a small amount.
221 377 ȝelden] pay.
222 378 longueth þareaftur] yearns for (the benefit of its wealth).
223 379 Heo abidez longue] It waits a long time for;
þe guode is euere bihinde] good deeds are always delayed.
224 380 Huy] i.e. the wrongdoers; miede] reward.
225 381 bouȝhte] redeemed.
226 383 led] lead; riȝhte heritage] allotted place.
227 384 Ne leos nouȝht þat] Do not condemn (to Hell) those whom.
Textual Notes
3 an] þe L (‘an’ H).

4 To a] Þene L, i.e. ‘To the’(‘A’ H).
26 Þoruȝ] Þo L (‘Þurf ’ H).
32 hor] for L (‘here’ H).
33 nere] were L (‘nere’ H).
37 go] so L (‘go’ H).
39–42 omitted L.
64 And of þat he is ischriue] of þat he is ischriue and L (‘Þerof þat he is ischryue’ H).
74 fulendi] wel endi L (‘fulenden’ H).
84 nis nouȝht in] nouȝht L (‘nis noȝt in’ H).
92 Irlonde] his londe L (‘Irland’ H).
97 to] in L (‘to’ H).
104 wusch] wuchs L (omitted H, ‘wesch’ amongst D’Evelyn and Mill’s variant readings).
113 delit] delist L (‘delit’ H).
124 hale clene] halle clene L (‘alclyne’ H). Charlotte D’Evelyn, in The South English Legendary,
III: Introduction and Glossary, p. 41, tentatively glosses alclyne as ‘treasure chest’ on the
basis of its similarity to the Spanish alcancia, but it is likely that L’s ‘halle’ disguises Middle
English Dictionary (MED), hale, n.1, 1a, ‘a remote corner, nook, cranny, hiding place’, here
with a postpositional adjective. D’Evelyn’s text and glossary record certain other variants,
namely ‘al clene’, ‘ale clene’, and ‘aleclyne’.
127 on Vrþe] here L (‘an vrþe’ H).
128 helpe] to helpe L (‘help’ H).
136 Hit] Þat L.
150 þe] omitted L (‘þe’ H).
152 feond] feondes L (‘deuel’ H).
154 apaisede] apassede L (‘passede’ H, ‘paisede’ amongst D’Evelyn and Mill’s variant readings).
179 hadde] hadd L (‘hadde’ H).
203 saiȝ] gan L (‘seȝ’ H).
216 For ‘for’ = ‘in spite of ’, see MED, for, prep., 9b.
239 mette. H has different phrasing, ‘fond þat soþe, þat he þat heo mette / Þe deuel was …’, but
the more precise point, as in L’s apparently harder reading, is that the woman found out
the truth of what the devil had been telling her (i.e. that it was untrue that the Mass had
finished), rather than that she found out who he was. However, retaining L’s reading neces-
sitates mette having an unrecorded extended sense of either MED, meten, v. 3, ‘dream’ (‘put
into her mind’?) or meten, v. 4, ‘meet’ (‘encountered her with’?).
261 bitweone] riȝht bitweone L (‘bituene’ H).
273 buth] but L (‘beoþ’ H).
278 noþing] noþint L (‘noþing’ H).

283 þulke] omitted L (‘þulke’ H).
289 Are] Of al L (‘Er’ H).
294 þoruȝ] At first omitted; ‘þoru’ is lightly inserted above, but ‘þoruȝ’ is written more boldly
in the margin (in the scribal hand).
310 And] An L (‘&’ H).
337 oþer] oþer oþure L (‘oþer’ H).
351 þat a ded man of ] ȝwane he is ded to L (‘þat a ded man of ’ H).
353 iseo] iso L (‘iseo’ H).
378 þareaftur sore] þareafturward L (‘þerafter sore’ H).
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 3039
—— , MS Gg.6.16
Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2344
London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix
—— , MS Egerton 2810
—— , MS Egerton 2891
—— , MS Lansdowne 379
—— , MS Royal 18.B. xxiii
—— , MS Stowe 949
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 43
—— , MS Eng. poet. a.1
—— , MS Rawlinson Poetry 225
Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29
Tokyo, Professor Takamiya Collection, MS Takamiya 54
Primary Sources
‘The “Defence of Women” from the Southern Passion: A New Edition’, ed. by O. S.
Pickering, in The South English Legendary: A Critical Assessment, ed. by Klaus P.
Jankofsky (Tübingen: Francke, 1992), pp. 154–76
The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints, ed. by Carl Horstmann, EETS, o.s.,
87 (London: Trübner, 1887)
SISMEL — Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007)
Middle English Sermons: Edited from British Museum MS Royal 18.B.xxiii, ed. by
Woodburn O. Ross, EETS, o.s., 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940)
2009–11)
An Old English Miscellany, ed. by Richard Morris, EETS, o.s., 49 (London: Trübner, 1872)
‘Saint Etheldreda in the South English Legendary’, ed. by Tristan Major, Anglia, 128
(2010), 83–101
The South English Legendary, ed. by Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, EETS, o.s., 235,
236, 244, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1956–59)
The South English Ministry and Passion, ed. by O. S. Pickering, Middle English Texts, 16
TPreaching in the South English Legendary 315
The South English Nativity of Mary and Christ, ed. by O. S. Pickering, Middle English
Texts, 1 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975)
The Southern Passion, ed. by Beatrice Daw Brown, EETS, o.s., 169 (London: Oxford
Speculum sacerdotale, ed. by Edward H. Weatherly, EETS, o.s., 200 (London: Oxford
Secondary Studies
Bell, Kimberly K., and Julie Nelson Couch, eds, The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, Medieval
and Renaissance Authors and Texts, 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2011)
Library, 2005)
Görlach, Manfred, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, Leeds Texts and
Monographs, 6 (Leeds: School of English, University of Leeds, 1974)
Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Aldershot:
Scolar, 1990)
Matsuda, Takami, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1997)
McGuire, Brian Patrick, ‘Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, and Medieval Change’,
Viator, 20 (1989), 61–84
Moore, Michael E. Hoenicke, ‘Demons and the Battle for Souls at Cluny’, Studies in
Religion, 32 (2003), 485–97
Pickering, O. S., ‘Black Humour in the South English Legendary’, in Rethinking the South
English Legendaries, ed. by Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 427–42
—— , ‘The Expository Temporale Poems of the South English Legendary’, Leeds Studies in
English, n.s., 10 (1978), 1–17
—— , ‘The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet’, in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and
their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. by A. J. Minnis (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1994), pp. 21–37 (repr., in slightly revised form, as part of O. S. Pickering,
‘Outspoken Style in the South English Legendary and Robert of Gloucester’, in
Rethinking the South English Legendaries, ed. by Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-
Browne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 106–45)
—— , ‘The South English Legendary, Confession, and Cambridge University Library MS
Dd.1.1’, in Of dyuersitie & chaunge of langage: Essays Presented to Manfred Görlach on
the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. by Katja Lenz and Ruth Möhlig (Heidelberg:
Winter, 2002), pp. 379–89
—— , ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or Preaching?’, Poetica, 45 (Spring 1996),
1–14
—— , ‘The Southern Passion and the Ministry and Passion: The Work of a Middle English
Reviser’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 15 (1984), 33–56
—— , ‘The Temporale Narratives of the South English Legendary’, Anglia, 91 (1973),
425–55
Pickering, O. S., and Manfred Görlach, ‘A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the South
English Legendary’, Anglia, 100 (1982), 109–23
Thompson, Anne B., Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English
Legendary (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
The Syon Pardon Sermon:
Contexts and Texts
Kari Anne Rand
U
ntil recently the text of the Syon Pardon sermon in London, British
Library, MS Harley 2321 was thought to be unique. It is a long text
(occupying fols 17–62 of that manuscript) in the form of a sermon for
the feast of St Peter ad Vincula (1 August, Lammas Day) which lists the details
of all pardons to be obtained at Syon, as well as offering an exhaustive discus-
sion of all aspects of indulgences. The text has never been published, but the
sermon has received a certain amount of attention in recent years.1 It deserves
more. Although the material it contains had such specific reference to Syon
that it might seem unlikely to travel well, it spread to other orders and monastic
houses. It was passed on in new forms and appears to have gained wide currency.
The Birgittine indulgences which had been granted to Vadstena were
extended to Syon by Pope Martin V in two stages, in 1419 and 1425. The feast
of St Peter ad Vincula would have been the day of the year when a Birgittine
house received the greatest number of pilgrims, and the sermon appears to be
aimed at a lay audience, but its length and construction make it unlikely that
it was ever preached in its entirety ad populum. There are substantial passages
in Latin, and the exhaustive catalogue of the pardons to be had at Syon is so
long and detailed that it is unlikely to have been read out. In the Revelationes
1
It was edited by Hughes in ‘The Syon “Pardon” Sermon’, and has more recently been dis-
cussed by Powell, ‘Syon, Caxton and the Festial’; Powell, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’; Swanson,
Indulgences in Late Medieval England, pp. 336–45.
Kari Anne Rand (k.a.rand@ilos.uio.no) is professor of Older English Language at Universitetet

i Oslo.
318 Kari Anne Rand
extravagantes of St Birgitta it is made clear that it is Christ’s wish that ‘qui pred-
icant veritatem meam, debent habere verba simplicia et pauca, in leccione sanc-
tarum scripturarum fundata, vt homines venientes de longe capere sufficiant et
non attediantur in prolixitate et declamacione verborum superfluorum’ (Those
who preach my truth should use simple and few words, based on reading the
holy scriptures, so that people who come from afar can grasp it and are not
wearied by a protracted declamation of superfluous words).2 The sermon text
offers what R. N. Swanson describes as orthodox views, and instructions on the
doctrine and practice of pardons.3 Its contents are outlined in A Repertorium of
Middle English Prose Sermons, and described in detail by Swanson.4 The author
first introduces the theme of the sermon, ‘Tibi dabo claues regni celorum’
(Matthew 16. 19)5. Then follow its four divisions, which all concern indul-
gences. The first discusses pardons in general and what pardon is. It notes a
distinction between pena and culpa with separate processes of removal, so that
a pardon a pena et culpa requires confession for the pardon to take effect. It also
notes that there is no way of escaping the earthly consequences of sin. It then
deals with the calculation of pardons and notes the possibility of obtaining ple-
nary remission through confession and contrition.
The second division concerns the pardon of Syon. There are four ways of
acquiring the pardon that Syon and the Birgittine order offer (fols 23v–24r):
the first is the pardon of St Peter ad Vincula in Rome ‘with wiche our Lord
Ihesu Criste haþe endowed this religion and Pope Martyn haþe graunted and
confermed hit in special endowed to this place [that is, Syon]’; the second is the
pardon granted by Christ to St Francis of Assisi for his church of Our Lady of
Portiuncula in Assisi ‘atte þe preyer of our lady’, and which was then granted
to ‘an hous of þis ordir in Gdancȝk and afterward extendit to all þe ordir and
in special to þis monasteri of Syon’; the third is the pardon of the Augustinian
order ‘thorowth alle þe worlde’, of which there is a special one only to be had
in two places in Rome, at Santa Maria del Popolo and St Triphonis. Finally,
there is the pardon ‘þat is grauntyd immediately to diuerse placis of þis ordyr
by popes and by cardinalis and by bischopis, wyche is also extendit and con-
2
Birgitta of Sweden, Reuelaciones extrauagantes, ed. by Hollman, p. 133. See also Andersson
and Borgehammar, ‘The Preaching of the Birgittine Friars at Vadstena Abbey’, pp. 211–12;
Borgehammar, ‘Preaching to Pilgrims’.
3
I follow Swanson’s example and use the terms ‘pardon’ and ‘indulgence’ interchangeably.
4
O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ii, 1323–27;
Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England, pp. 336–45.
5
‘I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven’.
The Syon Pardon Sermon 319
fermed to þis monastery’. Then follows a detailed list of the amount of pardon
available at Syon on feasts and other days throughout the year, starting with the
first Sunday in Advent (fols 24r–28v). Two extracts may serve to illustrate the
contents at this point:
[fol. 24v] […] On Estron day is foryefnes of þat .iij. parte of alle synnes and .iij. ml
.vij. C .iiijxx. and .viij. yerre | [fol. 25r] and als many lentes6 and .iij. howndred dayes.
And yche day within þe vtas of Estron is remission of þe .iij. parte of alle synnes,
and in ml .iiij.xx and xiij yere. And .iij. ml .iij.xx and .xiij. lentes and .vj. C dayes. On
þe Ascencion day and on Witsonday it is þe same pardon þat is on Cristmas day.
And within þe vtas of Ascension and .vj. dayes after Witsonday is þe same pardon
þat is within þe vtas of Cristmas. On Corpus Christi day and in þe Natiuite of
Saynt Iohn Baptiste, and in þe fest of Peter and Powle, and in eche of the .iij. festis
of Saynt Brigiste [sic], and on Alle Halow day and on þe day of þe Didicacion, is
remission of þe .iij. parte of alle synnes, a ml and .v. and .l. yeres and a ml an[d] to
lentes and .iij. C dayes. And yche day within þe vtas of þe festes is remission of þe
.iij. parte of alle synnes […]
[fol. 27v] […] Byside al þis indulgence toforsayde þer is .xii. dayes in þe yeere in þe
wiche is in þis monstary [sic] plener remission of alle synnes. Þat is to say at Lam-
mas .viij. dayes fro þe begynnynge of þe first euesong on Lamaseven, vnto þe last
day of the vtas, is euery day plener remission of alle synnes. And this pardon is of
Saynt Peters chirche Adunicula in Rome, and graunted to þis ordir by oure Lorde
Ihesu Criste. The .ix. day of plener remission is Midlent Sonday on þe wiche day
is here þe same pardon that our Lord graunted to Saynt Fraunceys in Assyse. The
tother .iij. dayes of plener remission are .iij. stacions of Rome, of wiche oon is þe
first Monday of Lent. The tother on Satyrday in þe same weke of Lent. The .iij. on
Monday in Whitson weke. And too of thes stacions, þat is þe first Monday of Lent
and the Monday in Pentecost weke, are take of Saynt Peters schirche Aduincula in
Rome. The .iij. stacion, þat is on Satyrday in first weke of Lent, is take of | [fol. 28r]
Saynt Austyns ordir þat is of þat chirche in Rome þat is called Saynt Triphonis […].
The second division then goes on to explain in some detail what is meant by a
station of Rome and a pardon of a station.
The third division deals with the seven conditions which must obtain if a
person is to have pardon: he must have (1) faith, (2) reverence, (3) devotion,
(4) contrition, (5) confession, (6) he must visit Syon, and (7) he must do some
charitable work. Each of these seven is briefly explained.
6
A ‘lenten’ of pardon releases as much sin as would forty days of penance. See Swanson,
Indulgences in Late Medieval England, pp. 344–45.
320 Kari Anne Rand
Finally, in the fourth division, the preacher lists fifteen hypothetical ques-
tions and provides the answers, once again in considerable detail. The questions
are: (1) By what means and authority may the pardon be granted? (2) How
can the pardon at Syon be plenary, since certain cases are reserved for the pope
(and so are beyond its authority)? (3) Why should there be remission of only
part of the penance due for sin? (4) When a person comes to Syon for pardon,
should penance be imposed on him? (5) If a person is told to do penance, may
he go to a place of pardon and leave the penance undone? (6) If a person has
received a plenary indulgence, would he be free of having to make amends to
his fellow Christians? (7) Will a person without true contrition gain any profit
from the pardon? (8) Can a person who is contrite but cannot find a confessor
receive the pardon? (9) May a person who is sick or prevented from visiting the
place send someone in his stead? (10) Can a person who has the pardon pass it
on to others, either living or dead? (11) May the pope give pardons to those in
purgatory? (12) Given that the pardon is offered to those who visit the monas-
tery or do a good deed, can the brothers and sisters of the monastery, who have
nothing to offer and cannot go out, obtain the pardon? (13) Since Syon offers a
third part remission every day, could full remission be obtainable in three days?
(14) What is a ‘lenten of pardon’? (15) Should someone who has obtained the
pardon be prayed for after death?
In conclusion the author enlarges on the benefits to be had from pardon,
which include faith, hope, and charity, and ends by saying that those who come
‘with parfite hert’ to the pardon of Rome (that is, that given at Syon) ‘schal
not oonly haue foryefnes of her synnes but also thei schalle haue endeles blis’
(fols 61v–62r).
A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons describes the manuscript,
dates it to the first half of the fifteenth century, and notes that the text may
be the ‘sermo de indulgenciis’ attributed to Simon Winter in the catalogue
of the library of the Syon brethren (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS
141, published in the series Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues).7
Winter was a brother at the Birgittine house of Syon Abbey and died in 1448.8
Powell appears to have a clear view of the authorship, referring to the text in
Harley 2321 as ‘Wynter’s sermon’.9 Michael A. Hughes, in his master’s thesis,
7
O’Mara and Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ii, 1322, 1327; Syon
Abbey, ed. by Gillespie.
8
Sharpe, Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540, p. 620.
9
Powell, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’, pp. 234, 252 n. 46.
Figure 22. ‘The Syon Pardon Sermon’, London, British Library, MS Harley 2321, fol. 34v.
Mid-fifteenth century. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.
322 Kari Anne Rand
says only that ‘the author […] is unknown, though presumably one of the broth-
ers of the community at Syon’.10 Like Hughes, R. N. Swanson offers no sugges-
tions, referring simply to ‘the Syon writer’.11 The position with regard to the
authorship is that the Syon Abbey volume of the Corpus of British Medieval
Library Catalogues contains two relevant items: among the entries in the regis-
trum in Corpus 141, the second item in K.43 (653b) is ‘Sermo de Indulgenciis
secundum Dominum Symonem Wynter’. In the volume Gillespie does not
identify this item with any particular book, and it seems unlikely that text b
is identical with the Harley text, since nothing indicates that the former is in
English. Gillespie clearly also concludes that the two are distinct; he notes that
‘a vernacular sermon on this topic is preserved in London, British Library, MS
Sloane 2123’ (sic for Harley 2321). He also notes ‘a further copy’ as the second
item in N.35 in the same catalogue (889b), there described as ‘Sermo egregius
in anglicis de Indulgenciis per dominum Symonem Wynter sacerdotem huius
monasterii professum. fo. 49’.12 Since this is explicitly said to be in English, it
is in this respect a better bet, but it appears to be considerably shorter than the
text in Harley 2321. Unlike K.43, the entry for N.35 contains folio references,
and as the English text listed there starts on fol. 49, and the next text follows
on fol. 60, it is not long enough. Even if the pages of N.35 were exceptionally
large, those eleven folios could not have encompassed the entire contents of the
ninety-one pages of text in Harley 2321. I think one must therefore conclude
that the two are different. That does not of course rule out the possibility that
the latter was an expanded version of the former, or that the former was an
abbreviated version of the latter. As will be seen from what follows, parts of the
contents of the Pardon sermon (hereafter PS) in Harley 2321 reappear else-
where in other, much abbreviated guises.
As far as dating the text is concerned, there is a helpful passage on fol. 34v
of the Harley manuscript, which says ‘our fadyr Ser Thomas Fisshborun, God
reste his soule, beyng at Rome, asked of þe pope’. Thomas Fishbourne was the
first confessor general at Syon and died in 1431,13 so this provides a terminus
post quem for the PS, but no exact terminus ante quem is available.
MS Harley 2321, which has all the appearances of a copy, is written on mem-
brane in one clear, somewhat variable mid-fifteenth-century hand (see Figure 22).
The scribe gives his initial on fol. 84v (‘Deo gracias quod G’). Since there is as
10
‘The Syon “Pardon” Sermon’, ed. by Hughes, p. xxiv.
11
Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England, pp. 336–45.
12
Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie, pp. 191–92, 279–80.
13
yet no modern catalogue of the Harley manuscripts, and since MS Harley 2321
is not among those Harley ones which have so far been included in the British
Library’s online catalogues, my account of what it contains is fairly detailed.
The volume has a number of late sixteenth-century additions in Latin and
English. Its medieval contents fall into three categories. One concerns the
Syon Pardon, its connection with Rome, the pardons to be had in Rome, and
pardons in general. This begins on fols 1 r–15v with a text on indulgences by
François de Meyronnes. That too takes Matthew 16 as its starting point14 and
serves as background to the PS, where it is specifically referred to.15 Fol. 16r–v
was originally blank, and as noted the PS is on fols 17 r–62r. It is followed on
fols 62v–63v by a text on the Assisi pardon,16 written by the author of the Syon
sermon, specifically to accompany it:
In the sermon afor writ is oftentyme made mencyon of the pardon of Assise þe
wiche is hadde in the monastery of Syon the .iiij. Sonday of Lenton. Therfor Y
trowe it be expedient to write her furthe hou the same pardon was graunted to S.
Frances, to the more clere vndirstondyng of the same pardon. (fol. 62v)
Fol. 64r–v was originally blank. On fols 99r–118v is a short ‘Mirabilia urbis
Romae’, with a list of the stations of Rome, and a detailed discussion of the
indulgences to be gained there.17 This is followed on fols 118v–119v by an
itinerary from England to Rome (‘Iter ab Anglia’), which starts at Calais and
goes via Bruges, Antwerp, Aachen, Speyer, Memmingen, Merano, Verona, and
Florence. On fol. 119v are eight lines of an incomplete itinerary for the return
journey (‘Regrediendo de Roma’). A second itinerary from England to Rome
on fols 119v–121v also goes through Germany but follows a route along the
Rhine valley. It contains distances as well as information about places along
the road and about fees and tributes to be paid. It is accompanied by two short
pieces on payments (‘De escambio & ubi melius fiat’) and on currency (‘Modo
de pecunia’) on fols 121v–122r and 122r–v. In sum, this first category of material
gives a thorough overview of pardon, and detailed practical advice on how to
go about acquiring it.
14
‘Quodcumque ligaueris super terram erit ligatum et in celis’.
15
As on fol. 20r: ‘If þis penanunce enioyned schalt de [sic] vnderstond oonly of penance
enioyned by þe prest, as Fraunces de Moronis demeth to say in a sermon þat þe [sic] mede of
indulgencys, than were muche pardon graunted in vayn’.
16
Begins: ‘Hou the pardon of Assyse was graunted to S. Fraunceys bothe by our lord Ihesu
Criste and by the Pope of Rome’.
17
Begins: ‘In Italia in principio Tuscie situata’.
324 Kari Anne Rand
The second type of material in the manuscript consists of texts in Latin on

fairly accessible subjects of general knowledge. Some are extant in few copies
and not particularly well known today. On fols 65r–84v is the Breviarium totius
veteris et novi testamenti of Menardus Eisnacensis, a summary and interpreta-
tive guide for each book of the Bible.18 A shorter, anonymous ‘Breviarium totius
veteris et novi testamenti’ follows on fols 84v–88v.19 On fols 89r–97v is the list
of popes from the Chronica pontificum et imperatorum of Martin of Troppau
(Martinus Polonus). It ends imperfectly with Constantine, 708 ad.20 However,
four pages from John de Foxton’s Liber cosmographiae, of which a larger section
occurs on fols 139r–145v, have been wrongly bound and inserted into that text as
fols 93r–94v.21 On fols 123r–129r, following the material on Rome noted above,
is a text on pastoral care, beginning with four lines from Chapter 1 of Gregory’s
Regulæ pastoralis liber but then diverging from it.22 On fols 129v–130r is a collec-
tion of proverbs from the scriptures,23 which is followed on fol. 131r–v by a text
on the burial places of the saints.24 On fols 131v–132r is a copy of De statura et
qualitate Christi,25 and on fol. 132r–v a ‘Descriptio beate Marie’.26 The two texts
which follow, a Mirabilia orientis on fols 132v–134v, and a Mirabilia anglie on
fols 134v–135r, are also known to occur together in other English manuscripts.27
18
Begins: ‘Venerabili viro Iacobo de Ysenaco Menardus solo nomine’. Stegmüller, Reper
torium biblicum medii aevi, iii, item 5657.
19
Begins: ‘In principio creauit Deus celum et terram & dixit fiat lux’. Stegmüller, Reper
torium biblicum medii aevi, vi, item 10161.
20
Begins: ‘Post passionem Christi anno sequenti beatus Petrus apostulus filius Iohannis
de prouincia Galilee’. The same text is also in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 427,
pp. 113–39.
21
Begins: ‘anno [blank] canonizatus est et corpus eius translatum apud Beuerlacum. Anno
domini [blank] obijt sanctus Beda’. Spaces for dates have been left blank in these pages.
22
Begins: ‘Nvlla ars doceri presumitur nisi intenta prius meditatione discitur. Ab imperitis
gregorio pastorale magisterium qua temeritate suscipitur […] regimen animarum’. The next line
begins: ‘Sunt non nulli qui vidari doctores’.
23
Begins: ‘Audiens sapiens sapientior erit primo. Timor domini principium scientiae
primo. Sapientiam atque doctrinam stulti despiciunt primo’.
24
Begins: ‘In primis sacrum corpus beate Marie in Valle Iosephat fuit sepultum’.
25
Begins: ‘Legitur in annalibus romanorum quod Dominus Ihesus Cristus dictus’.
26
Begins: ‘Notandum quod beata Anna mater gloriose virginis Marie habuit sororem’.
27
As is the case in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ll.1.18, fols 146r–148r,
and in Cambridge, St John’s College, MS F.18, fols 131r–133v. The texts begin ‘Reuera admira-
bile est nomen dei in vniuersa terra’ and ‘Ventus egreditur de cauernus in monte qui vocatur Peek’.
On fol. 135r–v is a short text on the four parts of Hibernia. 28 This is followed
on fols 135v–138v by a chronicle consisting of extracts from Brut-like material,
ending with the coronation of Richard II at Westminster in 1367.29 The main
section of the chronicle material from John de Foxton’s Liber cosmographiae
begins at fol. 139r and extends to the middle of fol. 142v.30 The text then con-
tinues as a chronicle and carries on to fol. 144r but is based on a different source
(or sources) from there on. As in the four misbound pages noted above, spaces
for dates have been left blank. On fols 145r–166v are gnomic verses,31 and on
fols 166v–168v verses on the virtues.32
The last section of the manuscript constitutes a third category of material,
much of which is shared with Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 496, and
it requires further investigation. It begins on fol. 169r and is a composite text
to which has been added a prologue, apparently by John Matthew, monk of
Glastonbury.33 The Prologue contains the opening lines of De professione mona-
chorum, a poem on monastic life which has been attributed to Roger of Caen.34
After the Prologue it starts afresh with its ninth line as the incipit and contin-
ues to fol. 172r.35 It is immediately followed by a text on a mathematical puz-
zle known as the Josephus problem, which, unlike many versions, also includes
the line of symbols which give the solution to the problem.36 At the foot of
fol. 172r is the poem Golias ad sacerdotes formerly attributed to Walter Map.37
To these items have been added an epilogue which ends with a colophon where
John Matthew gives his name and notes that he wrote the text at the request of
28
Begins: ‘Hibernia diuiditur in quatuor, in Ultoniam, Memoniam, Mediam et Armaciam’.
29
Begins: ‘Anno ab orbe condito ad vrbem Rome conditam’.
30
Begins: ‘Licet per apostolos et alios Christi discipulos in cunctis mundi’.
31
Beginning: ‘Adam primus homo dampnavit secula pomo’; no. 496 in Walther, Initia
carminum.
32
Beginning: ‘Rectifice lege nec metrises ordine verso’. Walther, Initia carminum, no. 16457.
33
Begins: ‘Respice processum metricum’. Walther, Initia carminum, no. 16664; Sharpe,
Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540, p. 282.
34
Incipit embedded in prologue: ‘Quid deceat monachum, vel qualis debeat esse’. See
35
The text begins ‘Non tonsura facit monachum’; Walther, Initia carminum, no. 12204.
36
Begins: ‘Paganos dudum prudencia cristicolarum’. The text is also in Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Bodley 496. See Eldredge, Rand Schmidt, and Smith, ‘Four Medieval Manuscripts
with Mathematical Games’.
37
Begins: ‘Viri venerabiles sacerdotes Dei’. Walther, Initia carminum, no. 20578; Sharpe,
Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540, p. 737.
326 Kari Anne Rand
Nicholas Frome, his abbot.38 The colophon is also shared with MS Bodley 496
and should not be taken as an indication that the Harley manuscript was written
at Glastonbury. This third section of the manuscript is the only part where any of
the material appears to have specific relevance for members of a monastic house.
Since Harley 2321 is in one hand, and since it gives the impression of being
a well-planned, unified production, it is tempting to speculate on the use for
which it was intended. It is relatively small (110 × 160 mm) and would fit into
a large pocket. There are no marks of ownership or clues to its provenance, but
the PS is clearly its core text, and it seems possible that the manuscript could
have been made for one or more brothers at Syon who were in contact with
pilgrims there and needed to have detailed knowledge of its indulgences, but
who may also have been concerned with the practical and doctrinal aspects of
pilgrimages to Rome.
Another Copy of the Pardon Sermon

Although the Pardon sermon ranges widely, the contents are nevertheless pecu-
liar to Syon — so much so that one might have expected it to have limited appeal
with other religious orders. This appears not to have been the case. Swanson refers
to the PS as unique, but in the course of my work on the volume of the Index of
38
‘Explicit iste liber dictus Speculum Monachorum
Regula quo morum splendescit et ordo bonorum
Intererant fini Mathei metra Iohannis
M C quater Domini ter & .x. .i. dico sub annis
Que dudum gratis precibus dompni Nicholai
Fecerat abbatis dans grates hinc Adonay
Salue plena precum de Glastonie manso turba decenti
Longa salus tecum quia seruus Omnipotenti
Hoc opus exegi vobis missum quoque habetis
Ordinis vt legi melius viuendo vacetis
Iam mare transiui Gades in litore fixi
Cepta finiui veniam peto si male dixi
Cessit opus mete doctor reuerende valete
Hinc precor vt de te dentur mihi vina metrete’
This version of the verses is corrupt and occasionally nonsensical, but John Matthew names him-
self and says that the preceding ‘Mirror of Monks’ was written at the request of Abbot Nicholas
[abbot 1420–56]. John sends greetings to the community of Glastonbury, and having crossed
the sea, arrived in Cadíz and completed the work, he wishes the esteemed doctor [Nicholas]
well and asks to be given wine from his barrel.
Figure 23. ‘The Syon Pardon Sermon’, Cambridge,

Corpus Christi College, MS 156, fol. 60v. Late fifteenth century.
Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Middle English Prose for the collection in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
I found an incomplete copy in MS Corpus 156.39 I have also been able to draw
some conclusions about the date and provenance of that manuscript.
MS Corpus 156 came from Archbishop Matthew Parker, who had been
master of Corpus Christi from 1544–53, and bequeathed his collection of
books and medieval manuscripts to the college. MS 156 contains on fol. 60v
(new foliation) a copy of the opening of the Pardon sermon, but this consists of
only eighteen lines of text (see Figure 23); I have collated it with Harley 2321
and include it among the texts below. Given the differences between the syntax
of the two openings (both in the Latin and the English), as well as between the
spelling systems, it is unlikely that the text in MS Corpus 156 was a direct copy
of MS Harley 2321.
The Corpus manuscript in its present form contains four separate sections.40
A fifth section, which physically was the first, and consisted of a printed book,
39
Rand, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xx, pp. 22–23.
40
Part 1: fols 1r–13v; Part 2: fols 14r–126v; Part 3: fols 127r– 225v; Part 4: fols 226r–246v.
328 Kari Anne Rand
was removed from the volume in 1980. That book contains pagination in red
crayon in Matthew Parker’s hand, whereas the remainder of the volume does
not, which may indicate that the five parts were bound together after Parker’s
death in 1575.41
It is of course perfectly possible that all or some of the handwritten parts
had had a life together prior to this. That is very likely true of the first two:
the PS is in what is now Part 2, which covers fols 14 r–126v. Its folios are dis-
tributed in seven quires, which are paper and membrane mixed; the inner and
outer bifolia are (or — in some cases — were) parchment, the rest are paper.42
Apart from the first gathering, which was originally a quire of sixteen, and the
last, which was a quire of six, the remaining five were all quires of twenty.43
The paper is from one paperstock only, with a clear diamond ring watermark.
Interestingly, Part 1 of the manuscript (fols 1r–13v), which consists of paper
only, and where other copyists have been at work, must nevertheless be closely
connected to Part 2, because the paper is from the same stock, with the iden-
tical watermark.44 The nearest Briquet marks are the group of ten which are
variations on the motif which is represented in the catalogue by Briquet no.
689 (Cologne 1457).45 The motif is also found in Piccard nos 32337–49. Those
range in date from 1458 (Cologne) to 1476 (Riga).46 The diamond ring water-
mark was in other words common in Germany, France, and the Netherlands
41
There is, however, a note in red crayon in a Parkerian hand in the margin of fol. 121v, in a
section of the manuscript written by the scribe of the Pardon sermon. As R. I. Page once noted:
‘I use the term “Parkerian” […] since it is not always clear whether work is done by Parker or by
his collaborators. “Parkerian” evades the problem’; Page, ‘Early Care and Conservation and the
Problems They Produce’, p. 170.
42
Section one of the manuscript (fols 1r–13v) is paper only, and section three (fols 127r –225r)
membrane only.
43 16
A (wants 1,9) + B20 (wants 7) + C20 (wants 18–20) + D20 + E20 + F20 + G6 (wants 4–6).
44
It contains one quire, originally of sixteen, which now consists of thirteen leaves, where
fols 3 (misbound), 4, and 7 are singletons.
45
Briquet, Les Filigranes, ed. by Stevenson, i, 48 (also at BO: Briquet Online <http://www.
ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/_scripts/php/BR.php> [accessed 13 April 2013). No images of the other
nine are included in the catalogue, but the places and years of production are given as ‘Cologne
1458, Suze 1461, Utrecht 1461–62, Catane 1462, Bretagne 1462, Raren (St-Gall) 1467, Verceil
1473–74, Nuremberg 1477’.
46
Gerhard Piccard, Die Wasserzeichenkartei im Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart <http://www.
piccard-online.de> [accessed 25 August 2011]. Places and years of production: Cologne 1458,
Rotenberg 1459, Düsseldorf 1460, Traburg 1460, Utrecht 1461, Utrecht 1462, Munich 1469,
Riga 1476.
in the 1460s and 1470s. The first two items in Part 1 (on fols 1r–4v) are papal
bulls from 1467. This gives a terminus post quem for this part of the manuscript
which fits with the watermarks.
Although no exact date can be given to the Corpus copy of the PS in Part 2,
a terminus post quem can be adduced here too. On fol. 116v is a reference to the
death of Johannes de Turrecremata, or Juan de Torquemada (‘Oratio autoris
Iohannis de Turre Cremata cardinalis sancti sixti qui obiit circa a.d. 1465’). His
dates were however 1388–1468, and the copy of the PS, which is in the same
hand as the Turrecremata text, is therefore likely to post-date 1468.
Three late fifteenth-century hands appear to be responsible for the origi-
nal text in the twelve quires which make up Part 2 of Corpus 156. 47 A large
number of pages have been left blank between texts in the first half here. The
PS was written by Scribe B, who was also responsible for copying : a text by
‘Parisiensis’ on indulgences (fols 28 r–30r);48 the De instructione confessoris
by St Antoninus Florentinus (or Antonino Pierozzi; fols 64r–102v) and his
Tractatus de restitutione (fols 103r–108v); the Meditationes (or Contemplationes)
of Johannes de Turrecremata (fols 109 r–117v); the ‘memorandum’ concern-
ing Robert Grosseteste’s representation to Pope Innocent IV at Lyons in 1245
(fols 117v–121v); Robert Grosseteste’s Epistola 128 to Pope Innocent IV and
related material (fols 121v –123r); and the Disputatio inter clericum et militem
attributed to William of Ockham. The first half of Part 2 as a whole has a strong
emphasis on the subject of pardons, however. The texts in the two other hands
include François de Meyronnes’s De indulgentiis (fols 14r–20v) as well as ser-
mons by Richard Fitz-Ralph, bishop of Armagh (fols 22r–24r), the Oxford
Dominican Richard Fishacre (fols 26r–28r), and the Paris theologian Henry of
Gent (fols 43r–51r) — all on indulgences.
It is also possible to establish the provenance of Corpus 156. On two of
the blank pages in Part 2 of the manuscript (fol. 63r–v), a later hand than those
of the three main scribes has added a text with the heading ‘Epistola incom-
47
Scribe A wrote fols 14r–28r, fols 35r–35v (change of hand mid-page on fol. 35v), and
fols 43r–45v (change of hand mid-page on fol. 45v); Scribe B wrote fols 28r–30r, fol. 60v (the
Pardon sermon), fols 64r–126v; Scribe C wrote fols 35v–41v, fols 45v–53r and fols 54r–60r.
48
I have not been able to identify this text. Richard Sharpe in the list of identifications
from the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, posted on his website, gives three
‘Parisiensis’: Peter the Chanter, William of Auvergne and Willelmus Peraldus <http://archive.
modhist.ox.ac.uk/sharpe/index.htm#update> [accessed 25 August 2011]. The writer is unlikely
to be any of these.
330 Kari Anne Rand
pleta Mansueti Medicanensis episcopi ad Constantem imperatorem’.49 Above

the heading is: ‘Script. fratris Iohannis Henffeld monachi’ in the same hand.
John Henfeld first occurs in the records of Christ Church Cathedral Priory,
Canterbury, when he was tonsured in 1488, and the final reference to him there
is from 1511.50 He has signed his name three times in Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, MS 137, which came from Christ Church, Canterbury (as did a
substantial number of Matthew Parker’s other manuscripts).51 Although the
script in the Mansuetus text is more current, and gives the impression that he
was younger when the three occurrences of his signature in MS 137 were writ-
ten, the hand appears to be the same. We may therefore conclude that the open-
ing of the Syon Pardon sermon in Corpus 156 was copied by a monk at Christ
Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury some time after 1468. He was one of
three scribes who began the production of a book where the first three quires
were devoted to texts on indulgences. However, while the remaining four
quires were filled, mainly with material on confession, the scribes appear to
have been waiting for more indulgence material. They left twenty-three empty
pages between texts in this section, and the copy of the Syon Pardon sermon
was never finished. On the evidence of the paperstock, it follows that Part I of
the manuscript also came from Christ Church.
Generally speaking, Corpus 156 probes deeper into the subject of indul-
gences than does Harley 2321, and it gives the impression of having been pro-
duced for a more learned audience or readership. Both Harley 2321 and Corpus
156 contain a copy of François de Meyronnes’s Latin sermon on indulgences,
but except for this (and the PS itself ) the manuscripts have little in common.52
Both the contents and the format of the relevant part of Corpus 156 indicate
that it was intended for the library at Christ Church, Canterbury.
49
M. R. James notes in the Corpus catalogue: ‘Mansuetus Abp of Milan (for Medicanensis
read Mediolanensis) wrote the Epistle to Constantine Pogonatus in 679. It is prefixed to the
Acts of the Sixth Council (A. D. 680)’. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the
Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, i, 353
50
Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories, pp. 195–96.
51
On fol. 1r and on the verso of the fifth endleaf.
52
The Meyronnes text was a relatively common one: there are two more copies in Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge (in MSS 107 and 151); one in Pembroke, Cambridge (MS 255);
one in Gonville and Caius College (MS 353/580); and three in Merton College, Oxford (MSS
47, 65, and 201).
Advertisements for the Syon Pardon

Since the appearance of G. J. Aungier’s The History and Antiquities of Syon
Monastery in 1840, it has been known that small selections of material which
occur in the PS must have circulated widely in the fifteenth-century.53 These
selections have been referrred to and treated as abridged or adapted versions of
the sermon.54 However, this is material which is even less preachable than the PS
itself. It has been recycled for a wider audience and a different use, and it would
in my view be more helpful to think of the selections as belonging to a differ-
ent and distinct category — as advertisements for the Syon Pardon.55 Some are
definitely derived from the PS, others are based on the lists of pardons to be
obtained at Syon, which also occur in the second division of the sermon. Those
lists may have had a separate existence before being incorporated into the ser-
mon when it was composed around 1470, or they may have been extracted from
it. We shall probably never know, and as it is difficult to make a meaningful dis-
tinction on this basis, I have not attempted to do so. In the final section of this
essay I have collected those advertisement texts for the Syon Pardon of which I
am aware and edited them, but there are very likely more still to come to light.
The rationale behind their existence is obvious. As R. N. Swanson notes,
permanent indulgences needed to be advertised. For pardons to attract dona-
tions, they had to be known. ‘Publicity, advertising, became crucial’.56 The mate-
rial below illustrates many of Swanson’s points well: publicity leaflets were very
likely scribbled off in large numbers and spread widely. Advertisements did not
have to be detailed; some appear to have been produced as handbills or small
posters. They were, however, ephemeral, and most of those included here have
survived because they were copied into collections which contained devotional
texts. That applies to five of the edited extracts below (from Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Ashmole 750; London, British Library, MS Harley 955; London,
British Library, MS Harley 4012; San Marino, California, Huntington Library,
MS HM 140; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 237). The exception is the
material from Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.54, which appears to con-
tain remnants of mass produced handbills.
53
Aungier, The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, pp. 421–26.
54
As in Powell, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’, p. 252 n. 46.
55
The term ‘advertisements’ was probably first used for libri indulgentiarum by Hulbert in
‘Some Medieval Advertisements of Rome’.
56
Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England, pp. 242, 161.
332 Kari Anne Rand
Aungier printed two of the texts in one of his appendixes. The first, and
shorter, occurs in both Ashmole 750, fols 140 r–141 r, and Harley 955,
fols 72r–74v.57 Ashmole 750 is a fifteenth-century Cistercian commonplace
book in several hands which has been labelled a clerical miscellany, and
which c. 1460 belonged to John Kyllyng, monk of Vale Royal, Cheshire.58 The
Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (hereafter LALME) locates one of
the hands in Hampshire and two in Suffolk, but it does not include the indul-
gence text, which yields too little for the language to be localized.59 MS Harley
955 is a devotional book in several hands with various antiphons, offices, col-
lects, prayers, and material on indulgences. It dates from the second half of the
fifteenth century, and is likely to have belonged to one of the religious at Syon.
Aungier appears not to have been aware of Harley 2321, and so makes no con-
nection with the PS, but the contents of the Ashmole 750/Harley 955 text
were clearly extracted from the second division of the PS, or from its source.
The longer of Aungier’s texts is from MS Harley 4012, fols 110r–113r. That
manuscript is in a single hand which has been dated by M. B. Parkes to c. 1460,
and has been assigned to Leicestershire by LALME. It was owned by, and
very likely made for, Anne Wingfield, née Harling (1426(?)–1498), who later
became Lady Scrope, and who had connections with Syon.60 I give the opening
and ending of the text in Appendix 2 below. That too originates in material
found in the second division of the PS.
The next two extracts relate to the seven things necessary to receive pardon in
the third division of the PS. Hughes drew attention in his thesis to a text in MS
HM 140, fol. 170r, which draws on this material.61 The manuscript in which it
occurs is perhaps the best known of those discussed here. It is in two parts, from
the third and the fourth quarter of the fifteenth century, and contains mainly
works by Lydgate but also a number of Chaucer’s shorter poems, an early version
of ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, and a copy of the anonymous verse ‘Libel of English Policy’.
There are also some devotional texts, and that on the pardon has been added on
57
Index of Printed Middle English Prose, ed. by Lewis, Blake, and Edwards, item 766.
58
Fletcher, ‘The Preaching of the Pardoner’, p. 27; Eldredge, The Index of Middle English
Prose, Handlist ix, pp. 25–26.
59
McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, i, 145;
iii, 155 (LP 5480), 491 (LP 8491); Michael Benskin, personal communication, 2011.
60
Wilson, ‘A Middle English Manuscript at Coughton Court, Warwickshire’; Dutton,
‘Piety, Politics and Persona’.
61
Hughes’s folio reference is incorrect.
the very last page. The reference to Syon has been removed, but the text clearly
originates in an advertisement for the Syon Pardon. To my knowledge it has not
been published in full before, and it is not publicly available in digital form. The
text was indexed by Ralph Hanna for the Index of Middle English Prose. It also
occurs in P. S. Jolliffe’s Checklist of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual
Guidance as E.5 (in the class for Confession & Penance). 62 Understandably,
since all references to Syon are missing, neither Hanna nor Jolliffe saw it in the
context of the (unpublished) Syon Pardon sermon. Both note the existence of
another copy of the text in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 237, fol. 242r.63
The fact that these two texts were then given a joint heading and listed as a
separate item number (‘Seven Things Necessary for Pardon’) in the Manual of
the Writings in Middle English, served to emphasize them as both identical, and
as a discrete unit.64 However, they differ considerably although they are clearly
derived from the same section of the PS.
The last word in the first line of the MS Corpus 237 text thas been read ‘syn’,
but it is ‘Syon’, as in the penultimate paragraph.65 The manuscript was owned by
John Dee (his ladder symbol is at the head of fol. 1r), and was probably given to
the college by Brian Twyne (d. 1644). It is from the second half of the fifteenth
century and is in several hands. Some shorter texts, including the advertise-
ment, have been added towards the end, but the bulk of the manuscript con-
tains devotional texts in verse and prose, all in English. Edmondus Carpenter,
whose owner’s note is on the front pastedown, appears to have been one of the
scribes (writing fols 1r–137r), and ‘Barker’, whose name is on fols 241v and 244v,
may have written fols 158r–241v.66
Unlike the texts so far noted, the twelve pages in Cambridge, Trinity College,
MS B.14.54, from which the last extracted items below are taken, appear to be
examples of actual handbills. The manuscript is a small volume of devotional
texts in English from the late fifteenth century, which was probably bequeathed
to the college by John Whitgift (1530/1(?)–1604), archbishop of Canterbury
62
Jolliffe, A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings, pp. 76–77; Hanna, The Index of
Middle English Prose, Handlist i, p. 16.
63
Jolliffe had seen the Corpus text, but not the Huntington one. Jolliffe’s folio reference
for the Huntington text is incorrect; Hanna’s for the Corpus text is incorrect.
64
‘Seven Things Necessary for Pardon’, in Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical
Instruction’, pp. 2303 and 2525.
65
Ogilvie-Thomson, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist viii, p. 30.
66
Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College
Oxford, pp. 121–22.
334 Kari Anne Rand
and former Master of Trinity. Nothing is known of its provenance prior to this.
It contains towards the end a dozen palimpsest leaves (between pp. 177–200).
The original text, which is faint but still in large parts legible under the super-
imposed writing, appears to have been removed by washing. It covered only one
side of the membrane, leaving the verso blank, and when one reconstructs the
text areas, it becomes apparent that the original page or pages must have been
relatively large.67 This, combined with the subject matter, makes it likely that
they have been intended as one or more handbills or smallish posters.
Because they have been cut into what amounts to strips (albeit page-sized
ones), there is a certain loss of text, but the twelve strips combine to make up
altogether five sections of text, which I have transcribed below, labelling them
A–E. When one combines lines from the strips which constitute pp. 184, 185,
180, and 189 (starting in that order), what emerges (A below) is clearly closely
related to ‘Seven Conditions of Pardon’ in Corpus 237 and HM 140. 68 The
same applies to another part of the combined pp. 180, 189 (first three lines),
184, and 185 (starting in that order — which make up section B). The contents
of the last three sections do not contain edited excerpts, however, but what
appear to be three distinct extracts from that part of the second division of the
PS which lists the pardons to be had at Syon on feast days. This applies to C,
pp. 197, 196, 200 and 193 (in that order, reading 193 sideways); D, parts of
pp. 177, 192, 188, and 181 (in that order); and E, parts of pp. 181, 188, 177,
and 192 (in that order).
Interestingly, there is some overlap of text between pages 188 and 192 in
the extracts above. They appear to originate from two different sheets which
contained, on one side only, copies of the same section of text, written in the
same hand, which were cut into strips of slightly different width, and therefore
do not now supply exactly the same text. This points to, if not mass production,
then at least to multiple copies being made of these handbills or posters. Spaces
were left for initials (supplied here in curly brackets). For some reason the ini-
tials were not filled in, and the handbills were not distributed. Instead the ink
67
Pages with underlying writing: 177, 180, 181, 184, 185, 188, 189, 192, 193, 196, 197,
200. Pages without underlying writing: 178, 179, 182, 183, 186, 187, 190, 191, 194, 195, 198,
and 199.
68
Hughes discusses the palimpsests in his thesis and includes transcriptions but must have
worked from inaccurate notes. Crucially, his page numbers for the strips of text are incorrect.
Mooney, in The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xi, p. 17, includes none of the underly-
ing text in her entry, but describes the hand as ‘large’, perhaps misunderstanding the implications
of James’s comment (‘The last quires are palimpsest over a xvth cent. MS. in English of larger
size’) in The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, i, 463.
Figure 24.
‘Palimpsested Handbill
about Pardons at Syon’,
Cambridge, Trinity
College, MS B.14.54,
p. 184. Late fifteenth
century. Reproduced with
permission of the Master
and Fellows of Trinity
College, Cambridge.
was washed off and the membrane put to new use. As will be apparent from
the image of p. 184 (see Figure 24), the same anglicana hand appears to have
written both the underlying text and the new, superimposed one. It seems likely
that this will have happened at Syon, but that remains a supposition.
I hope that the preceding pages and the texts that follow below convey the
interest of the Syon Pardon sermon in Harley 2321. Admittedly, although writ-
ten in the vernacular, in an accessible style and in the form of a sermon, it is in
itself patently unpreachable. Its influence spread by means of extracts which
constituted written advertisements for the Syon indulgences. Moreover, it pro-
vides a cornucopia of information about indulgences in late fifteenth-century
England and gives intriguing insights into practice and doctrine which have
relevance beyond Syon.69
69
This essay has benefited greatly from Veronica O’Mara’s considerable skills as an editor. I
am most grateful to her for giving so generously of her time.
336 Kari Anne Rand
Appendix 1
Extracts from the Pardon Sermon

Word division, punctuation, and capitalization are editorial. Contractions have
been silently expanded.
London, British Library, MS Harley 2321, fol. 24r, l. 10–fol. 24v, l. 25
So þat if alle þe peyne dew to a synner for his synnes be departid in thre, to
partes þerof ar foryeue iche day in Aduent, and bysyde þat þer is iche day in
þe same tyme of Aduent to ml and .iiij.xx yerre and too ml and .iiij.xx lentes.
And on Sent Andrew day when a falleth in Aduent and on Our Lady day, þe
Concepion, on Sent Nicholas day and Sent Lucyes day, and on Sent Thomas
day, þe Apostil, is all þe same pardon, and iijC moo. On Cristmasse day is remis-
sion of þe thridde parte of all synnes. And too ml and CCCCCCCC and .v. len-
tys and .iij. hondred dayes, and yche day within þe vtas of Cristmasse is remis-
sion of þe thridde parte of alle synnes a ml and .xl. yere. And a ml and .xl. lentes
and .vj. hondred dayes. On Newe Yere day is the remission of þe .iij. parte of alle
synnes a ml and .v. and .l. yere and as many lentes and | (fol. 24v) .iij. hondred
dayes. On the .xij. day is þe same pardon þat is on Newe Yerre day and wiþin the
vtas of þe .xii. day þe same þat is within þe vtas of Cristmas. On Candilmasse
day ys remission of the .iij. parte of alle synnes id est ml .vij. hondred and .v. and
.l. yere. And id est ml .vij. hondred and .v. and .l. lentes and CCC days. On Our
Lady lay [sic] in Lent that is cald þe Annunciacion if it fal in Estron tyme, þe
same pardon þat is yn Candylmas day. If it fal in Lent tofore the Friday in þe
.iij. weke of Lent, þan is þer remission of too partes of al synnes, and .ij. ml .vij.
C .iiijxx. and .xv. yere and als many lentes and .iij. C dayes. But and it falle from
þe Friday next tofore Mydlent Sonday vnto Estron þan þer is remission of too
partes of al synnes, and .iiij. ml .vij. C .iiijxx. and .viij. yerre and als many lentes
and .iij. C dayes on þe first Sonday in Lent. And yche day from thens vnto þe
Fryday next after þe .iij. Sonday of Lent is remission of too partes of alle synnes
and too ml and .xxxxxxxx. lentes. But a Friday tofor Midlent Sonday and from
thens vntil Estron is iche day remission of .ij. partes of al synnes and .iiij. ml and
.iiijxx. and .xiij. yerre and id est þat .iiijxx. and .xiij. lentes. And on Good Fryday
is .iij. C dayes moo.
London, British Library, MS Harley 2321, fol. 32r, l. 20– fol. 35r, l. 9
Vndirstondiþ þerfor þat þer be vij thynges necessary to hym þat schal receiue
þis pardon. The first is feyth. Not oonly þe comon faith of Holy Chirche in
byleue of þe articles of þe faith, but þat he haue also his faith specially applied
to þe pardon, beleuyng fully þat þe Chirche haþe power of God to graunt suche
pardon. And | (fol. 32v) þat by auctorite of þe Chirche his synnes and þe peyne
deseruit for hys synnes may be foryeue. For Seynt Augustin seithe in his boke
De doctrina christiana: quod Cristus claues ecclesie tradidit vt qui non credider-
unt in eis sibi dimitti peccata non dimittentur eis. Et qui crederunt indulgencias
accipient. Thus saith Seynt Augustin þat our Lorde Ihesu Criste haþe bytake þe
keyes of powere vnto þe chirche þat he þat beleueþ not þat his synnes may be
foryeue hym by auctorite of chirche, he schall haue no foryefness of his synnes,
and he þat beleueþ schall haue pardon and foryfnes. Þerfor feith and beleuenes
[are] nedeful to hym þat wil receyue pardon.
The secunde ys reuerence. Þat who desire pardon he muste dispose hym
þerto with grete reuerence and and [sic] with mekenes so þat he be not more
presumptuous and bolde to falle to synne by reson of þe pardon, as Y dred
me þat summe wrecchis are þat say or thynke in hemself þat þei will do suche
synnes as þei are temptid to do, thynkyng þat afterward þei wil go to Syon and
gete hem pardon and be asoyled of alle togeder. These foles erre gretly for þe
comoun grauntyng of plener indulgence is graunted vnder suche moderacion
þat if eny be þe more bolde to falle to synne for trust of pardon, þe pardon schal
stonde hym to noon avayle to þe foryefnes of suche synnes. | (fol. 33r) For he
[MS: hem] þat synnyth þe more in trust of indulgence not oonly disposith hym
[not] to gete þe pardon, but directly he indisposyth hym þertoo and doth euen
contrary to the entent þat pardon is grauntide fore. For the entent of euery par-
don that is truly graunted ys to thencres of our Lordes worschip and þe myghte
and profytte of soules. But he þat synneth þe more bycause of pardon, he doþe
euen þe contrary for he vnworschippeth God þe more for þe pardon by his
synnes, and hynderth and hurteth þe more his owne soule. And þerfor þe par-
don may stond hym in noo stedde after the comoun grauntynge, atte lest for
suche synnes as he dothe in hope of pardon. Namely where suche moderacioun
is expressyde in þe bulles or in þe grauntyng. But of þe pardon of Rome are selde
founde eny suche bulles, and þerfor Y trow to be vndirstonde aftyr þe comen
maner and forme of grauntyng. Þerfor euery man seinge þe grete mercy and
charite of our merciful Lorde þat he in grauntynge schewith of suche pardon,
wherby so greuous peynes are relesyd, owghte of kyndnes to be more lothe to
offend hym wiþ any synne, and be þe more bisie to dispose hym wiþ al reuerent
338 Kari Anne Rand
mekenes to receyue þe grace of pardon. For so sayd our lady to Saynt Burgitte
as it is writt, lio 6o, Reuelacionum, cao 105, þat sche schulde visite the | (fol. 33v)
holy places of pardon in Rome wiþ mekenes and diewe reuerence.
The iij thynge þat muste be had to getyng of pardon is a faithful desyre and
deuocion to haue it. For ye say þat a man lyste not to yeue eny grete yeftes to
hym þat settyth nought þerby, but raþer to hym þat setty[t]he muche þerby,
and will oon hym thynke. Ryght so our Lorde Ihesu Criste lyste not to yeue
this grete and mercyfull yifte of pardon to hym that desyreth it not hertly and
deuoutly, but to hem þat with deuocioun desire it and know it for a gret yefte
of our Lordes charite and mercy, and as for suche a yfte will thanke hym and
prayse hym þerfor. And Y drede lest þe necligens of muche folke þat þei are no
more feruent, ne besy, ne desirous to gete pardon and to despose hem þerto. Let
hem receyue þe frute þerof.
The iiij thyng þat is required to getyng of perdon is contricioun. Contricioun
is a wilful sorow for synnes, with purpose of schrifte and of satysfaccioun. There
be somme þat sorow for hir synnes oonly for drede of þe peyne þat þei haue
deserued to suffere, and suche sorow is not veri contricioun ne sufficient to þe
getyng of pardon. But he þat beholdeth þe goodnes and þe charite of our Lorde
God and for loue of hym sorweth þat he haþ offendyd hym wiþ wil to schryue
| (fol. 34r) hym and amend, willynge to leue synne and to offende our lorde
God no more, he haþ contricioun. And þus contricioun and dedely synne may
neuer abide togedyr in oon soule. For and a man had do als muche synne as all
þe worlde myght do, yf he had afterwarde þis very contricioun, he shulde neuer
be dampned for þo synnes but yf he fel aȝen to dedely synne. He must also be in
charite and in þe state of grace, for he þat hat [sic] very contricioun is in þe state
of grace and of charite.
The v thynge is confessyon. For þou a man be contrite yf he be not confessed
he may not haue þe pardon passynge undir þe customable wordis of þe popes
bulle. Ne he schal not haue þe perdon of þis place and custumable alle oþer
pardon to hem þat are very contrite and confessyd and non other. Therefore boþ
contricioun and confessyon are required in him that schalle receyue þis pardon
for he þat stondeth in sentence of cursyng may not be partener of þe benefetes
and sacramentis of Holi Chirche tille þat he be asoyled of þat sentence. Þerfor he
þat is bounde in suche cursyng may receyue no pardon till he be asoyled þerof.
The vj thynge is visytynge of þis place. For iche pardon is graunted by þe
pope Deuote visitantibus [….] visite þis place deuoutly, not vaynly but redely,
not dissolutly but mekely | (fol. 34v) and deuoutli.
The vij thyng is þat he þat schal receyue þe pardon do somme special good
dede for getyng of þe pardon. For þe indulgence þat is graunted generally to
þis ordir and too oþer places ys commounly graunted to hem þat offer or do
almes, or yeue of her goodes, or put helpy [sic] hondes to þe place wher þe
pardon is. But for as muche as þe wrechednes of some pepul demeth þerfor þat
suche pardon is grauntid on couetysse, and so þei haue lesse deuocioun þerto,
þerfor to exclude suche demyng and to stur þe pepil þe more deuoutli too seke
þe helpe of þer soules by getyng of pardon, our fadyr Ser Thomas Fisshborun,
God reste his soule, beyng at Rome, asked of the Pope þat alle þe pardon of
þis place schulde be fre wiþout offryng or eny oþer almes yeuyng to þe place,
but of his owne fre will. But for as muche as many doctoures say þat pardon
oweth not to be graunted, but to hem þat do some dede of pite for getyng of
þe pardon, and þe comissaries to whom the pepyl [sic for ‘pope’] committed
examinacioun of our bulle were of þe same opynyoun, þerfore þei wold nooun
othir wyse assente þat any man schulde gete þis pardon frely wiþout offrynge or
puttyng to of helpy [sic] hondes, but he dede somme othir gode dede in stede
of þis offryng, þat is to say in laboryng, fastyng or doyng somme oþer werke of
pite and of mercy. And wiche of | (fol. 35r) alle these he wold do, þat is to say
offir, or labowr, or faste, or do somme oþir ded of mercy and of pite, the pope
leuith it to þe choyse of iche man in his owne conscience. And þerfore who so
will offer offir. Who so wil not offir, he may leue, so þat he do some othir good
dede in stede þerof, for to able hym to þe pardon as I haue now sayde.
And þees are vij thynges þat iche man must haue yf he wil haue this holy
pardon in remissioun of synnes.
London, British Library, MS Harley 2321, fol. 46r, l. 14–fol. 46v, l. 7

[…]for iche man or woman þat with contrite hert and wil to amend entreth to
þe schirche by þis dore he schal haue thees vij gracious yeftes. First he schal be
esed in his temptaciouns so þat þei schal be more lyght to him to bere þan þei
were tofore. Secunde he schal haue strenketh to do gode dedys. 3m. He schal
haue deuocioun in preyer. 4m. He schal haue foryefnes of his synnes. 5m. He
schal haue warnes in thynges þat are to be do. Þat is to be war þat he do no euil
vndir coloure of goode, ne gode to euyl entent, ne leue þe mor good for þe lesse.
Ne þat he oweth to do for þat þat he is not bounde to, and in suche othir thyn-
ges. 6m. He schal haue godly charite. Þat is to loue God aboue alle | (fol. 46v)
thynges, and his neybour as hymself. 7m. He schal be strenketh in his feith in
trew beleue, and þerfore saith our Lord: þis dore schal be in þe este ende of þe
chirche. For as lyke in þe este þe sonne riseth and schewith first his liȝth, riȝth
so to hem þat entir by þe dore þe charite of God schal arise and þe liȝth of feith
shall be strenkehed in hem.
340 Kari Anne Rand
Another Version of the Pardon Sermon: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College,

MS 156, fol. 60v
Word division, punctuation, and capitalization are editorial. Contractions

have been silently expanded. The text has been collated with London, British
Library, MS Harley 2321, fol. 17. The remainder of fol. 60v and the next two
leaves are blank. MS Harley lacks the English heading in line 1 of MS Corpus.
Here begynnyth a sermon of pardon & specially of the pardon of Syon.

{T}ibi dabo claues regni celorum Matheus70 in euangelio huius festiuitatis &
pro themate hodierno. The gospelle of this fest tellith howe oure Lord
askede of his disciples what opynyon the peple had of hym. And they told
5 hym howe sum seyd one and sum seyd another. Than he askem what they
hemself seid of hym. And the holy apostelle Saynt Petur answerd oone for
alle & seide: Tu es Cristi filius Dei viui. That is: thowe art the son of God
alyue, and so Petur knowlychid bothe God and man.Than oure Lord blesside
Petir, and amongst othir good wordis that he seide to hym he behyghte hym
10 to make hym gouernovre vppon al the chyldreen of the Chyrche, seyng to
hym these wordes of oure theme: Tibi dabo claues regni celorum. That is: I
shall yeue the keys of the kyngdom of hevens. For lyke as with a key a
man may spere or open a dore, right so Saynt Petur to his successours, hyist
prelatys of alle Holy Churche, youe power to opyn heven to hem that er
15 worthy, and to sper heven to hem that arn vnworthy. And this power oure
Lord expressith more pleynly in wordes of byndyng and of losyng,
saynging forthewithe in the gospell thus: Et quodcumque ligaueris super
terram erit ligatum & in celis. That is: and whateuer thowe byndyst vpon
erthe, it shal be don also in hevens.
2 matheus] H matheus .16. 2–3 & pro themate hodierno] H hodierne

4 askede of ] H askyd 5 askem] H asked hem 6 the holy] H thys
7 the son] H criste the son 8 knowlychid bothe] H knowlechid hym both
9 he seide] H se seide 10 the chyrche] H his chirche 11 these wordes] H the wordes;
oure theme] H oure tyme; dabo claues regni celorum] H dabo & cetera
12 kyngdom ] H kyndoum 13 so saynt petur to] H so to peter and to
14 alle Holy Churche] H holy chirche; youe] H is youe; er] H are
16 of losyng ] H so losyng 19 don] H bound
70
I transcribe this as ‘matheus’, but the abbreviation used is that for ‘mathias’.
Appendix 2
Advertisements for the Syon Pardon
London, British Library, MS Harley 955, fols 72r –74v
The opening and ending of the text has been collated with Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Ashmole 750, fols 140r–141r. Contractions have been expanded,
word division, punctuation and capitalization are editorial; this procedure is
also used in the following three texts.
Indulgencia monasterij de Syon.
To alle ueraye contrite and confessid that comen bycause of deuocioun

to this cherche or monasterye, and there knelyng saye a Pater Noster and
Aue or what other deuoute prayer hit be, or in the same monasterye praye
hertli for the pees, tranquillite and stabulnes of this reume, or for the
5 vnite of Holy Churche, or for the en | (fol. 72v) crece of charite as well in
homself, as in all Cristen peple, or for synners that they be conuerted, or
for ryghtwes that they be confermed. To hem all also that at euene at knyl-
lyng of the belle say thre Auys or help lye handis to the makyng or conse-
ruacion of the sayde monastorye […] (fol. 74r) Also the furst Mondaie of
10 Lente and the Mondaie in Penticoste woke, either daie the same indul-
gence that is at the stacion of Rome, whiche is holden playner forȝeuenes
of all synnes. Also from the Fridaie aftur the | (fol. 74v) thridde Sonday of
Lente vnto the vtas of Esterne is euery day at the leste .ij. ml and .xxxiii.
ȝere of pardon, and as mony Lentes beside alle other indulgences tofore
15 saide. Also in alle the grete festes of the yere there is vnto an .viij. ml yere of
pardon and as many Lentes. Also there is graunted alle the pardon that is
to ony place of Seynt Austyns ordure thorowoute alle the worlde.
2 this] A the 8 help lye] A put helplie 9 the sayde] A of said

12 aftur] A of 15 vnto] A into 16 graunted] A omitted; that is] A that is
graunted 17 thorowoute] A throught
342 Kari Anne Rand
London, British Library, MS Harley 4012, fols 110r–113r
Here begynneth the pardon of the monastery of Shene whiche is Syon. Firste,
euery day in þe ere hosomeuer cometh to the saide monastary deuotly geuyng
sumwhat to the reperacions of the saide monastery and say fiue Pater Nosters
and fiue Aues and a Crede, shall haue CCCCC daies of pardon. And alsoo
hosumeuer saith deuotely owr Lady sauter in the saide monastery, shall haue
CCCCC dayes of pardone. And in the fest of Sent John the Baptiste whoso
will com to the saide monastery deuoutely and saithe a Pater Noster and an Aue
before thee image of Sent Briget and Sent John ther in the same place schal
haue CC dayes of pardone. Also whoosumeuer viset the said manaer of wise the
saide of [sic] monastery in the fest of Sent Mathe the apostill shall haue, with
any dede of charite, shall haue C daies of pardon […]
[…] (fol. 112 v) Item whosumeuer will come to the saide monastery |
(fol. 113r) in the fest of Cristismas, Estren, Whitsonday, Ascencion shall haue
euery daie, and euery daye within the vtas of them, shall haue for euery Pater
Noster, Aue Mare and Crede, or geuith any almes or goodes with the whiche
the saide monastory shal be edifide, and Goddis seruice therin mayntayned,
shall haue CCCCCCC dayes of pardon and forte. The sum of the indulgens
and pardone cometh to this, grauntid by diuers Holy Faders, popes of Rome,
archebisshoppis and bisshoppis, cardinallis and legatis, beside the cotidiall par-
don which is sheuid in the begynnyng, and the playne remyssion .iiii. thousant
yere of pardon, .x. Lentis, .xiii. houndred daies.
San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 140, fol. 170r

Here folowen seven thynges whiche a man or womman must haue for to be able
for to gete pardon.
Fyrst: He must haue faithe. Not oonly the common faithe of Holy Chirche
in bileve of the articles of the faithe, but he must haue also his faithe specially
applied to the pardon, bilevyng fully that the Churche hath full power of God
to graunte suche pardon. And that by power and auctoritee of the Chirche his
synnes, and the payne deseruyd for his synnes, may be foryeve.
Seconde: He must dispose hym to receyue the pardon with reuerence and
mekenesse, soo that he be not the more presumptuous to falle to synne by rea-
son of the pardon.
Thirde: He ought to haue a feithfull desire and deuocion to haue the pardon.
For God list not to yeve soo grete a yefte to hem that settith litill therby.
Fourte: Hym nedith to haue verray contricion for his synnes so that he be sory
for hem not oonly for drede of payne that he hath deservid, but more for love
of God whom he hath offendid. And for this contricioun and dedely synne
may not abide togider in oo soulle. Therfore he that shall receyue pardon must
stonde in the state of charitee and of grace and be oute of dedely synne.
Fyfte: He must be shreve and confessid of a preest that hath power to assoile
hym. And for noo man that stondyth acursid may be partener of the sacre-
mentes of Holy Chirche tyll he be assoiled. Therfore noo man may receyve
pardon that stondyth bounde in sentence of cursyng tyll he be assoiled.
Sixte: He must visite this monastery not rechelesly, ne veynly, but deuoutly. For
soo ys the pardon grauntid Deuote visitantibus, that ys to hem that deuoutly
visite the monastery.
Sevente: Yf he offre not, than he must doo summe other gode dede instede
therof. As in laboure, or in fastyng, or in summe other werke of pite and of
mercy after the discrecion of his owne conscience.
Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 237, fol. 242r

Euery man and woman owith to knowe .vij. thyngis þat is disposyd to receyve
þis pardon of Syon.
je. Fyrste: He mvste have feyth of Holy Chyrche. In belevyng he mvste have
feith spechaly, and aplye to þe pardon belevyng fully þat þe Chyrche hathe
power, and be that his synnys be foryevyn.
ije. The seconde: A [sic] mvste dispose hym to receyue it reuerently, and nott to
presume to falle to syn ayen be þe reson of þe pardon.
iije. The thyrde: He ought to have full ffeyth, and desyre with goode devocion
to have þe pardon.
iiije. The fourthe: He owith to have very contrycioun and be sory nott for þe þe
[sic] peynis þat he schuld have or doo for his synne, but for þe very love þat he
howith to have to God.
ve. The fyfte: He mvste schryve hym that hathe power to asoyle hym.
vje. The syxte: He mvste visyte þe monastry of Syon with devocioun, for so his
þe pardon graundid.
vije. The seventh his: Hyf he hofyr nat he mvste do sume odyr goode dede insted
theroff in ffasting, or in labour, or odyr sum goode dede, aftyr þe resoun of his
concience.
344 Kari Anne Rand
Because of the nature of these texts, the following five extracts have been tran-
scribed with no attempt at editorial intervention. Scribal punctuation has not
been retained. Lost text is indicated by dots enclosed in round brackets; initials
which have been omitted by the scribe are supplied in curly brackets.
A: pp. 184, 185, 180 and 189

(…)st haue for to be able to get pardon First he must haue faith (…)ot oonly the
comoun faith of holy chirche in b(…) the articles of the faith but he must haue
(…)his faith specially applied to the pardon bil(…) god to graunte suche pa(…)
and (…) auctorite of the (…) his synnes and the payne deseruide for his (…)es
may be foryeue
Seconde he must dis(…) him to (…) with reveren(…) sekenes so that he be not
the more presump(…)is and bolde to falle to synne by resoun (…)
Thridde he (…)aue a faithful (…) and deuocyoun to haue þe pardon for god lyst
not to yeue so gret a (..) to hym that settith litel therby
(…) hym nedith to haue very (…) of al his synnes (…) sory for his synnes not oonly
for drede of pey(…) that he had deseruid but moor for lo(…) this contricion and
ded(…)nne may (…) in oo soule the state of charite and of grace and b(…)
(…) he must be sh(…) and confessed of a prest that hath pow(…)ssoyle hym
And for no man that stondith (…)sed may be partener of the sacramentes (…)
may resceyue pa(…)oun that stondeth in sentence of (…)e tyl he be assoyld
Sixte he must visite this monastery ne veynly (…)uoutly for so is the pardon
graunted (…)vote visitantibus that is to hem that deuout(…)
(…)euente if he offir (…) than (…) good dede in(…)erof as in laboure or in
fastyng or in so(…) her werke of pite and of mercy after the (…)
B: pp. 180, 189 ( first three lines), 184, and 185

{A}lso to alle men and w(…) that eny day or tyme of the yeer with (…) herte and
(…) these seuen grete and gracyo(…)tes First eese and releuynge in tempt(…)
Seconde strengthe to do good dedes Thir(…) deuocyon in prayer Fourte
foryifnes of (…)ght bileve Fifte (…) that thai haue to do Sixte encresse in the
loue and charite of god Seuente moor light and strengthe in true faith (…)
C: pp. 197, 196, 200, and 193 (sideways)

(…) if al the peyne diew to a synner for his synnes (…)dred days (…) too thousand
and foure score yeer and too thousand foure score and thrittene yeer and foure
(…) and on Saint Thomas day the Apostil is al the same (…) viij hondred and
fyve lentes and thre hondred days and yche day (…) hondred dayes (…) as of
the twelfthe day the same that is withinne the vtas of christmasse (…) and fyve
and fifty yeer and a thousand seven hondred and fyue and fifty lentes and thre
hondred days (…) eyghte hondret and eyghte yeer and als many lentes and (…)
Sonday of Lent is remission of too partes of alle synnes a(…) the day remission
of too partes of alle synnes And foure thousan(…) foure score and thrittene
yeer and foure thousand (…) foure score and eyghte yeer and (…) many lentes
and thre hondret (…) thre thousand thre (…) hondred d(…) and day and wi(…)
the (…) of the Ascension and sexe days (…)ter Penthecost is the saam pardon
that is (…) Petir and Poule (…) of the three festis of Seynt Birgitte (…) on alle
halow day (…) on (…) thousand and fyve and fifty lentis and thre hondred days
and iche day within the vtas (…)ion (…) and sexe hondred days (…)hridde parte
of alle synnes a thousand and seven hondred and f(…) yeer and a thousand
seven hondred and (…)d and fourty yeer and als many Lentes (…)
D: pp. 181, 188, 177, and 192

(…) thynge necessari to the saam Awt(…) Margaret alle halown (…) and alle
soulen day and in the vtas sayde autier he shalle haue seuen hondred dayes of
pardon {A}lso hoo that helpith (…)he makynge of lyght ornamentes or (…)
as often as he doth so he shal haue {A}lso hoo that in his (…)stament or in
(…) other wyse byquet(…)ue or procure golde or seluer or cloth(…) eythir eny
other charitable yifte or dede (…) the sayde Awtyer to(…)quociens he shal haue
seuen hondred d(…) of pardon {A}lso the saam pardon (…)lle thre thynges
tofore said of the Awt(…)ynt Birgitte is graunted to the Awter (…) Saynt Anne
(…)urthermore ho euer disposid hym to (…) resceyue pardon atte tollynge of
th(…)t morwe and atte euen that saith thre pater n(…) and thre Aves prei(…)
ge for pees he schal ha(…)lso he that saith th(…)s atte euen whan the Aues
belle is tolle (…) monastery he shal haue three hondred(…)ys of pardon (…)
lso he that helpith to (…)ge and (…)ldynge of the monastery (…)th þerto gold
or seluer frutes or rentes ligh(…) ornamentes (…) or bokes or e(…) as often as
he doth eny (…) these thynges he shal haue tociens quociens(…)en hondred
days of pardon (…)lso hoo that in his (…)ment byqueth (…) or procurith to
(…) and brethren or to the monastery eny che(…)ble yiftes (…) haue thre ho(…)
urthermor hoo tha(…)nelynge on his knees saith deuoutly an (…) or eny other
346 Kari Anne Rand
prayer in this saide monastery (…) have foure hondred days (…)lso hoo that in
the (…) de monastery or in the chirche yerde o(…) monastery pray feithfully
to god for(…) and (…) of the reem (…) the getynge or (…) for sy(…) conuent
inor(…)amonge (…)harite in himself and in alle pep(…) thai mote (…) for eny of
thes thynges(…)often he shal have foure hondred da(…) pardon {A}lso hooeuer
deuou(…)go a boute the chirche yerde of this mon(…) saienge deuoute prayers
for alle c(…) soules as often as he doth so he shal (…) women as are buryed(…)
foure hondred dayes of pardon (…)lso thay that are prese(…)outly to here the
worde of god wha(…) prechid by eny of the brethren of the mo(…) they have
thre hondred days of p(…)
E: pp. 181, 188, 177, and 192.

Furthermore beside a(…)dulgence tofore sayde ther are tue(…)yes in the yere in
whiche is in this v(…)tery plener remissyon of alle syn(…) from the begynnge
(…)st euensonge on (…) even to (…) ende of the euensonge on the last day (…) ye
vtas is euery day plener remis(…) Seynt petirs chirche A(…)ncula in Rome and
graunted to this or(…)ur lorde Iesu crist {T}he nynthe day of p(…)er remissyon
is midlent sonday on (…) day is here the same pardon that our(…)de graunted
to Saynt Frauncys in A(…) {T}he tother thre daye(…)plener remyssion are thre
stacions of (…) of wiche one is the ffirst monday of (…) the tother on Saturday
in the saam (…)
Works Cited
Manuscripts
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ll.1.18
—— , MS 137
—— , MS 141
—— , MS 151
—— , MS 156
—— , MS 427
Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 353/580
Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 255
Cambridge, St John’s College, MS F.18
London, British Library, MS Harley 955
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 750
—— , MS Bodley 496
Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 237
Oxford, Merton College, MS 47
—— , MS 65
—— , MS 201
San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 140
Primary Sources
Birgitta of Sweden, Den heliga Birgittas Reuelaciones extrauagantes, ed. by Lennart Hollman,
Samlingar utgivna av Svenska Fornskrift-Sällskapet, 2nd ser.: Latinska skrifter, 5 (Upp
sala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1956)
‘The Syon “Pardon” Sermon Edited from MS Harley 2321 with Introduction, Notes and
Glossary’, ed. by Michael A. Hughes (unpublished master’s dissertation, University of
Liverpool, 1959)
Secondary Studies
Andersson, Roger, and Stephan Borgehammar, ‘The Preaching of the Birgittine Friars at
Vadstena Abbey (ca. 1385–1515)’, Revue Mabillon, 69 (1997), 209–36
Aungier, G. J., The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth and
the Chapelry of Hounslow (London: Nichols, 1840)
Borgehammar, Stephan, ‘Preaching to Pilgrims: Ad vincula Sermons at Vadstena Abbey’, in
A Catalogue and its Users: A Symposium on the Uppsala C Collection of Medieval Manu
scripts, ed. by Monica Hedlund (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1995), pp. 91–100
348 Kari Anne Rand
Briquet, C. M., Les Filigranes: dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur appa-
rition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600, ed. by Allan Stevenson, Jubilee edn, 4 vols (Amsterdam:
Paper Publications Society, 1968)
Dutton, Anne M., ‘Piety, Politics and Persona: Harley 4012 and Anne Harling’, in Pres
tige, Power and Authority: Studies in Later Medieval Manuscripts, ed. by Felicity Riddy
Eldredge, L. M., The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist ix: Manuscripts in the
Ashmole Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992)
Eldredge, L. M., Kari Anne Rand Schmidt, and M. B. Smith, ‘Four Medieval Manuscripts
with Mathematical Games’, Medium Ævum, 68 (1999), 209–17
Fletcher, Alan J., ‘The Preaching of the Pardoner’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 11 (1989),
15–35
Gillespie, Vincent, ed., Syon Abbey, with The Libraries of the Carthusians, ed. by A. I.
Doyle, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 9 (London: British Library,
2001)
Greatrex, Joan, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of
Canterbury, c. 1066 to 1540 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
Hanna, Ralph, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist i: A Handlist of Manuscripts
Containing Middle English Prose in the Henry E. Huntington Library (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1984)
Hulbert, J. R., ‘Some Medieval Advertisements of Rome’, Modern Philology, 20 (1923),
403–24
James, Montague Rhodes, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1912)
—— , The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: A Descriptive
Catalogue, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900–04)
Jolliffe, P. S., A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance, Subsidia
Lewis, R. E., N. F. Blake, and A. S. G. Edwards, eds, Index of Printed Middle English Prose,
Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 537 (New York: Garland, 1985)
McIntosh, Angus, M. L .Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medi
aeval English, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986)
Mooney, Linne R., The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xi: Manuscripts in the
Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995)
Ogilvie-Thomson, S. J., The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist viii: Manuscripts Con
taining Middle English Prose in Oxford College Libraries (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991)
Page, R. I., ‘Early Care and Conservation and the Problems They Produce’, in Care and
Conservation of Manuscripts: Proceedings of the Ninth International Seminar Held
at the University of Copenhagen, ed. by Gillian Fellows-Jensen and Peter Springborg
(København: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), pp. 157–71
Powell, Susan, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 31 (2000), 229–67
—— , ‘Syon, Caxton and the Festial’, Birgittiana, 2 (1996), 187–207
Rand, Kari Anne, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist xx: Manuscripts in the Library
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009)
Raymo, Robert R., ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, Section xx, in A
Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung, vii
(New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986), pp. 2255–378,
2470–582
Sharpe, Richard, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540,
Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997)
Swanson, R. N., Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge:
Stegmüller, Friedrich, Repertorium biblicum medii aevi, 7 vols (Madrid: Instituto Francisco
Suárez, 1949–61)
Thomson, R. M., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Corpus Christi
College Oxford (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011)
Walther, Hans, Initia carminum ac versum medii aevi posterioris latinorum: alphabetisches
Verzeichnis der Versanfänge mittellateinischer Dictungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1959); 1. 1, Ergänzungen und Berichtigungen zur 1. Auflage von 1959
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969)
Wilson, Edward, ‘A Middle English Manuscript at Coughton Court, Warwickshire, and
British Library MS. Harley 4012’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 24 (1977), 295–303
A Victorian Response to a
Fifteenth‑Century Incunabulum:
The ‘Boy Bishop’ Sermon and
How It Was First Edited
Veronica O’Mara
F
or a modern editor of a medieval text there can be few experiences to
cause more mixed emotions than the discovery of another manuscript or
incunabulum when the base text has already been chosen and work on
the edition is in full swing or, worse still, on the point of completion. Emotions
veer between the scholarly thrill of a new discovery and personal annoyance at
the need to rethink the whole edition. With this in mind, one is deeply sympa-
thetic to the first editor of an early printed Middle English sermon who had just
such an experience. Yet, as we shall see, Victorian editors were made of sterner
stuff and behaved quite differently from their modern counterparts when they
chanced upon discoveries that would send current-day editors considerably off
course. More particularly, the investigation of the case of John Gough Nichols’s
edition of the Boy Bishop sermon of c. 1496/c. 1497–98 also provides a special
opportunity to study the behaviour of earlier ‘editors’, that is, the fifteenth-cen-
tury printers or rather compositors, as well as providing a chance to examine the
sermon itself alongside an analysis of Nichols’s editing technique.
John Gough Nichols and the Boy Bishop Sermon

John Gough Nichols (1806–73), son of John Bowyer Nichols (1779–1863)
and grandson of John Nichols (1745–1826), who was the founder of the
Veronica O’Mara (v.m.omara@hull.ac.uk) is senior lecturer in the Department of English at
the University of Hull.
352 Veronica O’Mara
Nichols publishing and printing dynasty, attended a meeting on Friday, 6

November 1868.1 There he heard a talk by the Reverend John Fuller Russell
(1813–84), the ecclesiastical historian.2 On Saturday, 7 November, Nichols
wrote to Russell from his address at Holmwood Park in Dorking as follows:
My dear Sir,
In the course of your very convincing discourse to which I had the pleasure of
listening, yesterday, you mentioned among other books the Boy Bishop’s Sermon
printed by Wynkin de Worde.
This Sermon — together with another MS. sermon on the same occasion, I have
undertaken to edit for the Camden Society. But the only copy I have seen or heard
of is one in the British Museum.
I knew that the Sermon was said to have been printed by de Worde, but I
before suspected that the copy in the B.M. might be a reprint and this suspicion
is increased by what I heard yesterday, for you mentioned it on account of some
woodcut design, and I do not recollect that the copy in the Museum has any.
I did not quite catch whether it was one of the treasures of your own valuable col-
lection or no. I shall however be very glad if you can kindly assist me to a sight of it.
I inclose a description of the Museum copy — which bearing no Printer’s name
I should imagine might be one of a series. At least that is the idea it suggests to a
modern eye, with its bastard title, but my experience in early typography is not suf-
ficient to be sure of this. At any event, there can be no grounds for attributing it to
W. de Worde, unless his type be recognised. I remain, Dear Sir
Yours very sincerely John Gough Nichols
1
For the history of the Nichols family, and its extensive involvement in printing and pub-
lishing from c. 1760 to 1939, particularly in the area of local history and antiquarianism, see the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB), available at <http://www.oxforddnb.
com/> [accessed 13 April 2013], the source of the biographical information used here. Of particu-
lar value also is Julian Pooley’s online Nichols Archive Project (<http://www.le.ac.uk/el/resources/
nichols/index.html> [accessed 13 April 2013]), which aims to provide an analytical guide to the
letters and papers of the Nichols family (1745–1873) and, via a database, to make them acces-
sible to scholars; for a description see Pooley, ‘The Papers of the Nichols Family and Business’; see
also his ‘Beyond the Literary Anecdotes’, references therein, and further articles on the website. I
am immensely grateful to Julian Pooley for his ready generosity in sharing information about his
archive, for introducing me to the work of Yann Dahhaoui (see n. 11), and for searching his data-
base for any information that might cast further light on the discoveries in the current essay, which
he also kindly read; his timely and generous assistance has been of enormous benefit.
2
John Fuller Russell, the brother of the clergyman and hymn-writer, Arthur Tozer Russell
(1806–74), and a correspondent of Edward Pusey, was a member of a number of learned socie-
ties and produced various publications, especially on issues of high-Church doctrine; see his
entry in ODNB. For the two letters quoted here see n. 28.
A Victorian Response to a Fifteenth‑Century Incunabulum 353
On Saturday, 5 December 1868, Nichols wrote again to Russell. By this stage

it is clear that the latter had agreed to Nichols’s request to have ‘a sight of ’ his
copy of the Boy Bishop sermon and, moreover, that Nichols had decided to use
this copy (what he terms the ‘de Worde’) as his base text, rather than the previ-
ous one that he had been working on (what he calls ‘the Museum copy’):
My dear Sir,
I came to the meeting of the Archaeol. Institute yesterday, but too late to be able
to see you except at a distance, and I was obliged to leave for a 5 o’cl. train. I did
not bring the Boy Bishop’s sermon with me, intending to avail myself of your kind
permission to keep it somewhat longer, on this account.
On commencing the collation of it, I find the variation of spelling from the
Museum copy so numerous — amounting to 4 or 5 in nearly every line, that it
incurs a much more troublesome task than I anticipated. For on the whole I think
the spelling of W. de Worde is to be preferred to that of the other anonymous
printer, tho’ the latter is quite as archaic in many words though at the same time
very different, as W. de W.
————————
parfyght altered to perfyte
the ende thende
stand stond
wyll woll
which whyche [a letter crossed out before this]
dyrectid directyd
age aege
I cannot but think W. de Worde’s the earlier edition and to be preferred, tho’
there are many unquestionable errors in both, and particularly in the Latin.
I therefore propose to make W. de Worde the text to follow and I beg to retain
the book until the proof has been corrected and I may be able to read the revise
once more.
[…].3
Yours very sincerely
John Gough Nichols>’
3
The last paragraph of the letter does not concern the Boy Bishop sermon: ‘I found in
Litta an account <of the family of> Castiglione of Milan. arms, gules, a lion rampant argent,
holding a castle or. Crest, a demi wild man proper holding a compass or. Motto. Pour non faillir.
This quite supports Mr. Weale’s assigning of the similar coat to a Castiglione, but I could trace
in the pedigree no member of the family <that had settled in the Netherlands, or in Germany at
the requisite period.’; the insertion from ‘that’ to ‘Nichols’ is written horizontally on the page.
Leaving aside any speculation about the difficulty of catching trains to

Dorking on Fridays after 5:00 p.m., there are several other issues to be pondered
on here before investigating what precisely Nichols did with his edition. First
of all, the edition under discussion is that which eventually appeared two years
after Nichols’s death, printed by the Camden Society in 1875.4 This was hardly a
surprising choice for the edition as Nichols himself had been one of the found-
ing members of the Society in 1838, and the Camden proceedings were printed
by the Nichols family firm.5 Neither indeed was his attendance at a meeting
at the Archaeological Institute in any way out of the ordinary as this was yet
another society Nichols had helped to found (in 1844).6 In addition, there was
nothing unusual about the selection of Russell as speaker on 6 November, as he
was on the central committee of the Royal Archaeological Institute, as well as
being a member of the council for the Society of Antiquaries and on the com-
mittee of the Ecclesiological Society.7 (It is known that Russell, who lived at 4
Ormonde Terrace, Regent’s Park, at the time of his death on 6 April 1884 and
whose interest in things medieval is clear,8 had acquired the copy of the early
printed sermon from the sale of Richard Heber’s books. 9) What is intriguing
4
Two Sermons Preached by the Boy Bishop at St Paul’s, Temp. Henry VII., and at Gloucester,
Temp. Mary, ed. by Nichols. The introduction to the edition was prepared by Edward Francis
Rimbault, of 29 St Mark’s Crescent, Regent’s Park, London. As noted in ODNB, Rimbault
(1816–76) was a writer on music, an organist, and an antiquary. As a founding member of the
Percy Society, he was clearly someone who shared the same antiquarian interests as Nichols and
so was appropriate for the continuation of Nichols’s work. In the preface Rimbault notes that
‘Mr. Nichols had made considerable collections for a history of the festival of the Boy Bishop
throughout Europe, but, upon these papers being handed over to me, it was found that they
were jottings, to be investigated at leisure, and would take months, nay perhaps years, to work
out with any degree of satisfaction. Under these circumstances all that could be done was to con-
fine my remarks to the Boy Bishop — a subject to which I had given some little attention — and
to prefix them to the two Sermons which Mr. Nichols had already prepared for the press’ (p. iii),
that is, the present Boy Bishop sermon as well as the one dating from 1558.
5
His father, John Bowyer Nichols, was also an original member of the Camden Society, and
Nichols himself made some eighteen contributions to the Society’s publications, including, for
instance, the valuable edition of The Diary of Henry Machyn.
6
In 1830 he had visited his friend Robert Surtees and helped him to found the Surtees
Society in 1834.
7
See the entry on Russell in ODNB.
8
His entry in the ODNB mentions his ‘collection of fourteenth-century ecclesiastical pic-
tures’. In addition, his bookplate is found in London, British Library, MS Additional 34193, an
important volume of Middle English and Latin texts.
9
The information about its acquisition from Heber is recorded on the verso of the sec-
though is the fact that Nichols had remained ignorant — apparently until quite
late in the day — of another edition of his text owned by someone who clearly
mixed in the same sort of circles as he did.10 Had it not been for this talk at the
Archaelogical Institute, Nichols might never have discovered this important
addition to the few known sermon incunabula, and we might never have been
able to witness this example of the vagaries of nineteenth-century editing tech-
nique. This then is the hitherto undiscovered background to the Camden edi-
tion, but to understand what all this means we need to turn to the sermon itself
before examining the incunabulum and how it was edited.
The Boy Bishop Sermon

Much has been written on the ceremonial surrounding the feast of the Boy
Bishop both in England and Europe, and so there is no need to reiterate it
here.11 Suffice it to say that on 6 December, the feast of St Nicholas, a chorister
ond opening flyleaf (it was Part vi, lot 567 in the sale; see further n. 28 below). Richard Heber
(1774–1833) had one of the most extensive private libraries in the eighteenth century, roughly
estimated at between 145,000 and 150,000 books, besides manuscripts, letters, and pamphlets.
At his library sale there were thirteen volumes of sales catalogues for England (for 10 April 1834
to 22 February 1837) and three for the Continent (for 26 March 1835 to 7 October 1836). See
Heber’s entry in ODNB and also Hunt, ‘The Sale of Richard Heber’s Library’.
10
Julian Pooley kindly informs me that in his database of Nichols letters there is one, dated
1839, from Russell to John Bowyer Nichols (the father of Nichols), which suggest that Russell
was known to the family long before Nichols attended his lecture.
11
Apart from the introduction to Two Sermons Preached by the Boy Bishop at St Paul’s,
Temp. Henry VII., and at Gloucester, Temp. Mary, ed. by Nichols, there is earlier commentary,
for instance, a letter about the origins of the boy bishop ceremony by ‘M. H.’ (Maria Hackett)
in the September issue of volume 97, July to December (1827), of the Gentleman’s Magazine
and Historical Chronicle, 197–99, (unfairly) taking issue with an earlier anonymous item ‘On
the Burlesque Festivals of Former Ages’, printed in various parts in volume 91, July to December
(1821), 99–101, and especially 198–200. I am grateful to Julian Pooley for alerting me to the
1827 item and for indentifying ‘M. H.’. Some of the other material with regard to the Boy
Bishop and associated ceremonies include Leach, ‘The Schoolboys’ Feast’; Chambers, The
Mediæval Stage, i, chap. 15, ‘The Boy Bishop’, pp. 336–71, and ii, Appendix M., pp. 282–89;
Evelyn-White, ‘The Boy Bishop (Episcopus Puerorum) of Mediæval England’; Wooden,
‘Childermass Sermons in Late Medieval England’; Dudley, ‘Natalis innocentium: The Holy
Innocents in Liturgy and Drama’; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 13–14 and pp. 430–31;
and Mackenzie, The Medieval Boy Bishops. Many of these later studies repeat the same sort of
material found in the earlier ones. For a more wide-ranging and incisive survey from a European
perspective see Dahhaoui, ‘L’Évêque des Innocents dans l’Europe médiévale (xiie–xve siècle)’;
was chosen to take the part of the Boy Bishop and to fulfil his most onerous
episcopal duty by preaching on the feast of Holy Innocents on 28 December. In
England the tradition was officially abolished in 1541, but resurfaced in Mary
Tudor’s brief reign (1553–58) only to be abolished again by Elizabeth I (in
recent times the tradition has been revived in various Anglican cathedrals, for
instance, Hereford and Salisbury, and in some parish churches such as Claines
in Worcestershire). Who it was that preached the current sermon at some point
between 1489 and 1496 we do not know, unlike the identity of the preacher
in the only other surviving English Boy Bishop sermon, preached at the end
of Mary’s reign. As is made clear in the heading to that manuscript, London,
British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A.xxv, pp. 173–79, this sermon was
‘prownysyd by John Stubs, querester [chorister], on Childermas Day [Holy
Innocents], at Gloceter [Gloucester], 1558’ and, as noted at the end, the person
responsible for it was ‘Ex. Ric. [Richard] Ramsey’.12
The late fifteenth-century boy preached a fairly straightforward sermon,
largely dependent on triple divisions.13 Having opened with the theme, ‘Praise
ye childern almighty God’ (Psalm 112. 1), the preacher explains that those with
the necessary abilities can achieve their purposes. Those without such abilities
require assistance, as an arrow needs help to reach its target. Mankind is ordained
for a purpose beyond natural limits. With reason and knowledge, and directed by
free will towards God, man still needs faith and God’s grace (ll. 1–137). Children
especially need God’s help. When first sent to school, lacking reason and cog-
nition, they learn the ABC. Isidore in the Etymologies said that ‘Y’ symbolizes
man’s life: made of one straight line and the other half-straight and half-crooked;
this demonstrates that in the infant age a child is neither disposed towards vice
a third of this work is dedicated to the historigraphy of the subject which includes Nichols’s
contribution. Other publications by Dahhaoui include ‘Voyages d’un prélat festif ’, ‘Entre ludus
et ludibrium’, and ‘Le Pape de Saint-Etienne’. I am very grateful to Yann Dahhaoui for providing
me with these and other very helpful references, and for kindly commenting on my essay.
12
See Two Sermons Preached by the Boy Bishop at St Paul’s, Temp. Henry VII., and at
Gloucester, Temp. Mary, ed. by Nichols, pp. 14–29 (pp. 14 and 29). Some biographical detail
about Ramsey is provided in the introduction (p. xxxvi) where among other points it is noted that
he held the sixth prebendal seat at Gloucester and was rector of Shenington in Gloucestershire
from 1555 to 1559. For further information see Ward, ‘Richard Ramsey’s Sermon for a Boy
Bishop (1558)’, p. 479, who says that Ramsey was a Benedictine monk of Ramsey Abbey in
Huntingtonshire before the Dissolution. Ward provides an edition (pp. 481–95) and transla-
tion of the sermon (pp. 496–505).
13
A brief summary of the sermon is given here, followed by the line numbers of the rel-
evant section from the edition below.
nor virtue, and that in the adolescent age (probably meaning pueritia), he is alter-
nately disposed towards both. Solomon (actually Proverbs 30. 18–19) says that
three things are difficult to understand: the flight of an eagle in the air, the behav-
iour of a serpent on earth, the course of a ship on the sea; but that the hardest to
comprehend is man in his ‘growynge age’ (l. 67). Children who lack discretion,
reason, and knowledge should especially praise God, and so attain to the same
blessed end as the Innocents celebrated on this day (ll. 38–78).
The preacher makes clear that he is a child (l. 79), preaching to children
(ll. 83–84), in a cathedral which is evidently St Paul’s Cathedral, London
(l. 91). He opens ‘this symple exhortacyon’ (l. 79) with prayers for the Church,
pope (either Innocent VIII, d. 1492, or Alexander VI, d. 1503), clerg y,
archbishop of Canterbury ( John Morton, d. 1500), the bishop of London
(Richard Hill, d. 1496), and the dean of St Paul’s (William Worsley, d. 1499)
— both described as his ‘broder’ — as well as residentaries and prebendaries
(ll. 79–92).14 He then divides the prayers into three. In praying for himself
he ‘reminisces’ about how he has suffered the rod in childhood and wishes to
convey Nero’s message to Seneca to his master (that is, that he should commit
suicide). In turn he hopes that his other masters would sit in the ‘Kynges owne
Benche’ (l. 112) at Southwark (the debtors’ prison) and end their days on the
‘Via Tiburtina’ (l. 118) or on the high way to Tyburn (execution) (ll. 93–124).
In the second section he prays for the following (all obviously identified albeit
unnamed): Henry VII (d. 1509), his wife Elizabeth of York (d. 1503), his son
Arthur (d. 1502), his mother Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509), and her husband,
Lord Stanley (d. 1504), together with all the lords of the realm, mayor, alder-
men, and sheriffs (ll. 125–30). Finally, in the third section prayers are devoted
to all the souls in purgatory, including ‘my lorde, Thomas Kempe, late bysshop’
(d. 1489), and all the benefactors of St Paul’s (ll. 131–36, 132–33).
The preacher then starts the sermon proper by noting that Christ says
‘Suffre ye childern to come to me’ in the gospel. As Augustine says, this means
not only children but all those who are free from sin. All should be pure as
children. God should be praised in infancy, adolescence, and in ‘etate humana’
(ll. 137–57, l. 153).15 These three ages may be likened respectively to natural
14
I owe the information about William Worsley to the Records of Early English Drama:
Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy Bishops’, pp. 234–49 (p. 235), and see also
pp. xxv–xxvii where Erler discusses ‘The Boy Bishop’ and surveys much evidence from London
parishes for the celebration of the feast. I am very grateful to Yann Dahhaoui for alerting me to
Erler’s discussion and to Mary Erler herself for her kindness in answering a query about it.
15
These form the three divisions of the sermon; the preacher is clearly thinking of the
three ages of childhood: up to seven (infancy); from seven to fourteen (boyhood) and from
law, written law, and the law of grace. A child in its infant age is unconstrained
and not condemned for misdemeanours. Man after the fall was in the infant
state following no express law. There was no correction, only punishments, for
instance, Noah’s flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. As a child
without a guide or a nurse, man ran into the fire and the water; nowadays peo-
ple need to be corrected by the afflictions of fire and water (ll. 158–86). These
days masters and nurses are inattentive. This brings secular processes into the
Church: manslaughter is ignored, lechery is deemed to be pleasurable (and
so forth). Previously the realm prospered; now it is miserable. Righteousness
was chief; now Falsehood is quarter-master (and so on). Truth has fallen in
Lombard Street, in Bucklersbury, and in every street (ll. 186–214).
When the infant age is over, the child’s father provides him with a master,
who instructs him in the Donatus and punishes him for any faults by wringing
him by the ears, striking him with a ferrule, and beating him with a rod.16 As
mankind grew, God provided Moses as an ‘enfourmer’ (l. 230) or instructor,
and the Old Testament taught man the Donatus, how to make sacrifices and
offer oblations and tithes. So in this ‘growynge age’ (ll. 244–45) man cannot
be more praised than by oblations, and so on, that is, by alms deeds and the
forgiveness of sins (ll. 215–54). In Moses’ time people were given strict punish-
ments. These days people do not hold themselves content and yet God spares
them. In the Old Law God displayed wrath so that Mercy requested a new mas-
ter and so a New Law was given. As long as people remain in the ‘scole of mer-
cyfull benygnyte’ (ll. 282–83), purposing to amend, God tolerates them. But
if they do not correct themselves, the sword of righteousness will befall them.
Therefore, in the three ages people should praise God, amend themselves, and
do good deeds (ll. 255–97).
The preacher then moves on to the second half of his sermon: how God
should be worshipped in the three ages: childhood, youth, and manhood. To
explain this he uses the analogy of the calendar, which is divided into Kalends,
Nones, and Ides (which are all explained). Kalends signifies childhood. In
the same way as the first Kalends were devoted to the solemnization of the
gods ‘Hely, Iuno, and Iupyter’ (l. 316) so childhood is dedicated to devotion.
Children are sent to school to serve God, to say grace, sing, be meek, and to
fourteen onwards (adolescence), except that he tends to collapse the second and third stages so
that the divisions become indistinct, and his third division is that of manhood. On the various
stages of childhood see Shahar, ‘The Boy-Bishop’s Feast’.
16
The punishment meted out to children is discussed in Salisbury, ‘“Spare the Rod and
Spoil the Child”’.
say Our Lady’s Matins (ll. 298–325).17 The second age, youth, is represented
by Nones. On that day the Romans did not honour any god but held a fair or
market. Likewise, youths from the ages of fourteen to eighteen do not wor-
ship God but devote themselves to mercantile things. There is no vanity in any
part of the world in which they do not indulge: ‘longe heres and shorte collers
of the Almayns [Germans], euyll fasshenyd garmentes and deuyllsshe shoon
[shoes] and slyppers of Frens[h]men; powches and paynted gyrdels [belts]
of Spaynardes; newe founde hattes of Romayns [Italians]’ (ll. 347–51). Such
alternating vanity in clothes demonstrates that English men are as changeable
as their garments.18 If such vanity occurred only in youth, it could be tolerated,
but ‘boyes’ of fifty are as ‘newe fangled’ (l. 362) as any young man (ll. 326–69).
The third age is called Ides, which means separation or division, signifying the
last part of life when man is separated from the world by death. There is only
one day called Kalends at the beginning of the month, but many towards the
end. Therefore, one is disposed to devotion in childhood, but in youth and mid-
dle age one can be disposed alternatively to vice or virtue, whereas one should
not divide one’s life but it should be like Christ’s seamless coat (ll. 370–94).
Man spends two lives on earth: indulging in the pleasures of the world and
living in virtue, hoping to attain eternal bliss. People dispose part of their lives
to virtue and part to vice, and so they divide the coat of the soul. If a person’s
coat is whole in virtue, it must never be divided. As one gave oneself to devo-
tion in childhood, so one must increase in virtue in middle age so that the end
shall be without division like that of the Holy Innocents, and, if amendment is
made, God may be praised, ‘as I exhorted you before’ (ll. 395–433, ll. 431–32).
Apart from the occasional asides calling attention to the fact that the preacher
is actually a youth and the sardonic comments about the treatment of children,
the technique and procedure used here are the same as that encountered in
many Middle English sermons. Setting aside the in-jokes about the preacher’s
school masters, there is nothing parodic in the sermon, and its teaching was
obviously meant to be taken seriously.19 The sermon, described internally both
17
This gives a good indication of what was expected of children; see Shahar, Childhood in
the Middle Ages, chap. 9, ‘Education for Service in the Secular Church and in the Monastery’,
pp. 183–208 and 315–20; Orme, Medieval Schools.
18
Criticism of fashionable indulgence is common in medieval times; see, for example,
Boffey, ‘The Treatise of a Galaunt in Manuscript and Print’. See Records of Early English Drama:
Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy Bishops’, pp. 234–49 (p. 236) for references
to edicts from the statutes of the realm on the price of hats and caps.
19
For a discussion of parodic sermons see Jones, ‘The Parodic Sermon in Medieval and
Early Modern England’.
as a collation and an exhortation, is the same sort of length, or slightly longer

than many parish homilies, and this sets it apart from some known public ser-
mons, for instance, Thomas Wimbledon’s Paul’s Cross sermon of c. 1387 which
is about a thousand lines in its modern printed format.20 It is reckoned that the
sermon would have taken about thirty minutes to preach, which would have
been ample for whatever chorister had been chosen for the occasion.
In structure the sermon is entirely straightforward, with the usual sermon-
ist’s tendency to use triple divisions. Arguments are supported by the normal
battery of biblical citations, given first in Latin and then sometimes translated.
There is a preponderance of Old Testament citations, twenty-nine, in contrast to
ten from the New Testament; references are usually given to the biblical books
and virtually all these references are accurate. Of the quotations given there
is a restriction to certain biblical books: in the Old Testament only Exodus,
Tobit, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Habacuc
are cited, with two allusions to Genesis; of these the favourite books are Psalms
with eleven quotations, Isaiah with six (plus a seventh Isaiah quotation that is
actually from Matthew), followed by Jeremiah with three, and one from each
of the other books. With regard to the New Testament quotations, there is one
quotation each from Matthew, Mark, and John, plus a quote from Matthew
attributed to Isaiah; in addition there are two quotes from Corinthians and one
each from Philippians, Titus, Hebrews, and Apocalypse. The biblical quota-
tions occur in the following order: Psalm 112. 1 (sermon theme); Isaiah 64. 4
(ll. 16–17); i Corinthians 2. 9 (ll. 17–19); Hebrews 11. 6 (l. 28); Jeremiah 10. 23
[cited as Jeremiah 4] (ll. 33–34); Proverbs 30. 18–19 [this omits part of verse
19 but translates it all in the English] (ll. 61–63); Apocalypse 14. 4 (ll. 73–74);
Jeremiah 1. 11 (ll. 97–98); Psalm 37. 8–9 (ll. 100–01); Psalm 68. 8 combined
with Habacuc 3. 16 (ll. 103–04); Matthew 19. 14 and Mark 10. 14 [this quo-
tation is a part combination of both references] (ll. 137–38); i Corinthians
14. 20 (ll. 144–45); [Genesis 7 alluded to] (ll. 171–73); [Genesis 19 alluded to]
(ll. 173–74); Philippians 2. 21 combined with Isaiah 56. 10 (ll. 189–90); Isaiah
1. 23 (ll. 190–92); Isaiah 1. 21–22 (ll. 199–201); Psalm 54. 12 (ll. 205–06); Isaiah
59. 14 (l. 211); Ecclesiasticus 35. 10 [here scripture says ‘Da Altissimo secundum
datum eius’, which is rendered here as ‘Donatum eius’, either a mistake or delib-
erate word-play] (l. 236); Psalm 149. 1 (l. 246); Tobit 1. 8 (ll. 253–54); Exodus
20
An indication of the length of these sermons may be gained from O’Mara and Paul, A
Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons. It is about twice the length of an average sermon
in John Mirk’s Festial, which are actually quite short, and, like those other model sermons, the
Speculum sacerdotale, would each have taken about ten to fifteen minutes to preach.
21. 24 (l. 257); Psalm 93. 1 (l. 270); Titus 3. 5 (ll. 273–74); Isaiah 30. 18 (l. 287);
Psalm 23. 6 (ll. 323–24); Isaiah 29. 13 [cited but the quotation is actually from
Matthew 15. 8] (ll. 337–38); Jeremiah 2. 5 [cited as Jeremiah 11] (ll. 352–53);
Daniel 13. 52 (l. 361); Psalm 9. 24 (ll. 368–69); Psalm 91. 11 (ll. 385–86); John
19. 24 (l. 392); Psalm 21. 21 (ll. 400–01); and Psalm 83. 8 (ll. 422–23).21
Not surprisingly, a small proportion of these quotations centre on the topic
of children, for instance, ‘These and such like things did he observe when but
a boy according to the law of God’ (Tobit 1. 8).22 Yet the vast majority of the
quotations are vehement Old Testament complaints against vice and on the
need for righteous behaviour, such as ‘Deliver, O God, my soul from the sword:
my only one from the hand of the dog’ (Psalm 21. 21) or ‘And judgement is
turned backward and justice hath stood far off; because truth had fallen down
in the street and equity could not come in’ (Isaiah 59. 14). One might say that
these fit in well with the discussion of the ill-treatment meted out to children
by their masters and with the general theme of the degeneration of the times.
Indeed, the almost exclusive concentration on biblical quotations would also
serve to reflect the sort of scriptural knowledge that the ideal schoolboy might
be expected to have; there are few patristic or other references, except for the
mention of Isidore, Aristotle, Augustine, and Jerome. In addition, the sermon
gives some close insights into the schooling of medieval children. There is
much mention of that medieval standard textbook, the Donatus, and telling
incidental detail, for instance, when speaking about the ABC in the first part of
the sermon, the preacher says that the child begins to learn by saying ‘Christis
crosse be my spede’; in other words, the child asks that Christ’s cross help him,
makes the sign of the cross, and is then ready for the alphabet.23 Elsewhere the
sermonist serves up the usual list of complaints about misspent youth in his
condemnation of the changeable fashions of the day, while all the time link-
ing his strictures both with the geographical locale around St Paul’s (Lombard
Street and Bucklersbury Street are both adjacent to the cathedral) and taking
care at all points to refer to his audience of fellow choristers and masters. 24
21
In addition there are two antiphons, as well as a few patristic citations; for full details of
these see Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy
Bishops’, pp. 234–49 (pp. 238–47, a transcription of the first edition).
22
Apart from Psalm 112.1 (the theme), the others are Matthew 19. 4 combined with Mark
10. 14, and i Corinthians 14. 20. All translations here are from the Douay-Rheims version.
23
In his description of children learning to read Orme takes his cue from the words in the
sermon and explains the process in detail; see Medieval Schools, pp. 237–72 (pp. 251–54).
24
Criticism of the times is a recurrent topos in the sermons cited in Owst, Literature and
Pulpit in Medieval England.
Given the wealth of Middle English sermons subsequently discovered, it is

perhaps ironic that what was effectively the first homiletic incunabulum to be
edited in ‘modern’ times was such an engaging, albeit somewhat idiosyncratic,
exercise aimed at children as much as adults. It is perhaps doubly ironic that
this simple discussion should have quite a complicated textual and chronologi-
cal history, as we shall see.
Editions of the Boy Bishop Sermon

That which Nichols calls in his letters the ‘Museum copy’ is now IA. 55282
(STC 282) in the British Library.25 It is dated in the Catalogue of Books Printed
in the xvth Century now in the British Library as c. 1496.26 This copy was owned
in the sixteenth century by a ‘frater Georgius Faringtonus’ and was bought from
the bookseller, Henry Stevens, in November 1855.27 What Nichols terms the
25
Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland,
and Ireland (hereafter STC).
26
See Catalogue of Books Printed in the xvth Century Now in the British Library, Part 11:
England, pp. 208–09 (hereafter BMC xi). IA. 555282 is described (with my comments in
square brackets) as ‘185 × 132 mm. The title is touched in pink. Early nota bene [a triangular
pointed device] marks occur on a2a and a correction to the text on b6a [this must be a mistake
for b1b]. Formerly bound, but probably not before the second half of the 16th century, after IA.
55253 (Fitzjames, Sermo, Duff 151; see pp. 199–200) with which it shares matching stains and
a blind impression of bearer type (a line of 3-line lombard initials) still visible on a1a below the
title. On a1a is written, in a 16th-century hand, “frater Georgius Faringtonus (anglus)”. At the
end of the last line on b6a the price “14.d”’ (p. 209). The volume, which is in a dark (modern)
binding, with marbled red endpapers and four gilt lines near the perimeter of the cover, gilt
foredges, and turn-ins, is in excellent condition, with no underlining, crossing-out, or annota-
tion. There are two flyleaves at beginning and end, with the current classmark and an earlier one
(‘C.25.e.35’) in pencil on the verso of the second one; above the medieval title a nineteenth-cen-
tury hand has written ‘Innocents Day’; and the British Museum stamp is at the back of the title
page. The title ‘innocents’ day. sermo pro episcopo puerorum.’ is in gilt on the spine,
with the current classmark pasted on. I am grateful to John Goldfinch of the British Library for
his kindness in granting me permission to examine both this copy and IA. 55281 below. See also
Hellinga, Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 208 and 220.
27
In BMC xi, 80, it is noted that ‘the bookseller Henry Stevens sold in this period
[1848–1900] more English incunabula than any of his colleagues, and most of them were also
devotional books’. There then follows a list of the above with the dates on which the British
Museum bought eight books from Henry Stevens between April 1855 and April 1867; these
works include four sermon items: John Mirk’s Festial (IB. 55146) bound with Quattuor ser-
mones (IB. 55145, STC 17959), Richard Fitzjames’s Sermo die lune in ebdomada Pasche (IA.
55253, STC 11024), as well as the Boy Bishop sermon.
‘de Worde’ copy, the one formerly owned by Russell, was subsequently bought
by Robert Hoe and then later acquired by the Huntington Library in San
Marino, California (now call number 47899) and dated to c. 1497–98 (STC
283).28 To make matters slightly more complicated, there are today two copies
of the sermon in the British Library (IA. 55282 above), and also another copy
previously owned by Stonyhurst College (now IA. 55281), the same edition as
that in the Huntington (STC 283).29 In addition, there is a third copy of this
28
See Mead, Incunabula in the Huntington Library, p. 241. There is no contemporary
underlining, crossing-out, or annotation in the Huntington copy. It is now bound in dark blue
morocco, with two gilt lines on the cover, gilded edges, and a floral design on the spine, with
the title in the centre, ‘sermo pro episcopo puerorum w.c.’. There are two flyleaves at the
beginning and ten at the end; on the recto of the last flyleaf is noted ‘Cat. 16 July ’17 B’ and then
the current call number. In the box housing the text there is a slip of cardboard, headed ‘Caxton
Celebration. Class A’ (in red) and then a typescript pasted on to this with details, ‘249. sermo
in die Innocencium pro Episcopo Puerorum. Wynkyn de / Worde. 4to. Lent by the Rev. J. F.
Russell./ Woodcut of the Crucifixion from Caxton’s Fifteen Oes.’ On the back of this in pencil
are added the words ‘Hoe bought this copy for $100’; the bookplate of Robert Hoe occurs on
the inside front cover. The reference to its acquisition from Heber (see n. 9 above) is on the verso
of the second opening flyleaf together with various information in pencil, noting that the text is
described by Dibdin and giving his reasons for the dating: ‘Dibdin says that this tract must have
been printed before the year 1496, as the soul of Bp. Kemp is prayed for in it, who died in 1489
& his successor Hill in 1495 or 1496’. The name ‘Russell’ is on the top recto of the penultimate
flyleaf. The box (wooden but covered with turquoise morocco and lined with green silk) con-
taining the volume is made to look like a book (and has clasps like a lap-top computer); it has
double gilt lines on the front and back, five bands on the spine, with the title given in the second
panel from the top on the spine, sermo / pro/ episcopo/ puerorum’; the third panel has
‘wynkyn / de worde’; the remaining panels have a gilt leaf decoration. This box was clearly
purpose made in modern times to house the book, a handwritten description of the BL copy
(headed with its original classmark, ‘C.25.e.25’), together with the letters from John Gough
Nichols quoted above and their transcription in type (which is not completely accurate). I am
very grateful to the Huntington Library for granting me permission to examine this work and to
edit the text below, and the private copyright owners to edit the letters. My thanks are also due
to Steve Tabor, curator of Early Printed Books and to all the Library staff, for their helpfullness
and kindness to me while I was a short-term fellow at the Huntington Library in 2011.
29
See BMC xi, 217, for a full description of IA 55281 (with my comments in square brack-
ets); it is noted here that ‘The second edition of John Alcock’s sermon is best ranged with De
Worde’s other Alcock editions, Duff 18–20, all printed in Type 4B (used 1497–8) and all includ-
ing lombards of set 12, first used in the Chronicles of England, Duff 102, with the date 1497 […]
184 ×125 mm. Two couplets written on the verso of the final leaf, in two different 16th-century
hands, read:
Heu vivunt homines tanquam mors nulla sequatur
Et velut infernus fabula vana foret
Dum tua borsa sonat populus te laude coronat
Dum sic cassata tua borsa laude est vacua [followed by the initials ‘CP’]
second edition (STC 283), owned by Corpus Christi College Oxford.30 This
(Cf. Walther (1959), 6761.) Two more lines (in cypher?) in another 16th-century hand have
been deleted. Other inscriptions on the same page are a pen-trial, ‘Be hyt know to All men’
(copied below in a later hand); a monogram of ‘Iesu’; and the additions of sums of money. Some
words written in an early hand across the woodcut are no longer legible. “Chal 6” is written on
the recto of the first leaf and, below, a pencil note in an 18th-century hand “printed by Wynkyn
de Worde before 1496” [now very faint]. A label pasted on the back cover relates to the exhibi-
tion of the volume at the Liverpool Catholic Exhibition (1929). Formerly owned by Stonyhurst
College, near Clitheroe, Lancashire. Lot 5 in the Stonyhurst sale, Sotheby’s London, 18 June
2003. Bound in 19th-century blind-stamped brown calf.’ Apart from that noted above, there
is no further annotation, crossing-out, or underlining in the volume, except for a later attempt
(in ink) to imitate the Caxton initials in the device and the word ‘Passion’ written in a seven-
teenth- or eighteenth-century hand underneath the woodcut at the end. Three modern flyleaves
precede and follow the text; on the verso of the third flyleaf the current classmark and the date
‘1498?’ are found in pencil; on the verso of the title page there is the British Library stamp and
‘30 June 2003’ in pencil, and on the recto of the final endleaf a few cataloguer’s references dated
‘6/03’. The title and the (misleading) date are given in gilt on the cover, ‘sermo pro episcopo
puerorum | w. de worde. ante. 1496’, with the current classmark pasted on the spine and
the date of ‘1496’ in gilt on the third panel from the top (the middle two panels are plain and
the outermost couple is decorated with a gilt chevron pattern). The book is in good condition
apart from some staining and foxing (especially evident on the woodcut). Its history before its
acquisition by Stonyhurst College is not known.
30
There is no published description of the Oxford copy; it is merely listed in Rhodes, A
Catalogue of Incunabula in all the Libraries of Oxford University outside the Bodleian, p. 11; see
pp. xxvi–xxviii for a brief description of the benefactors of the Corpus Christi incunabula. I
am grateful to Joanna Snelling, librarian at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for facilitating my
examination of this volume. On the inside front cover there is the current classmark, Φ.C.1.a.
There are two modern flyleaves before the early printed text; beside the title in the right-hand
corner is the number ‘4’ in dark pencil. There is no annotation or underlining in the main text,
apart from the following. In column b of sig. a iijv, ‘Our holy fader the Pope with’ is crossed
through in dark ink; ‘Oure’ and ‘with’ are just lightly crossed through but ‘holy fader the Pope’ is
very deliberately crossed through on a number of occasions although the words are still visible.
On the bottom line of column a of sig, iiijv ‘purgatory’ is crossed out. In column a of sig. b iiijv in
the indulgences that follow ‘Rome’ is crossed out as is ‘domino papa Clemente .v. concessos’ in
column a of sig. b vr. Otherwise the text is in good condition, apart from a little occasional light
staining and the missing section at the bottom of the final woodcut. This may even have been
torn deliberately as the part missing occurs just below John the Evangelist; his head is present
but not the weeping Mary whom he is holding. Given the verbal excision (and probably the torn
page), the volume was clearly owned and/or read by someone in the post-medieval period with
strong anti-Catholic feelings. Nothing further is known or can be surmised about any previous
owners. On the verso of the woodcut there are a few squiggles or letter-forms in ink towards
the top of the page; around the centre there is some indecipherable wording in a paler ink;
beneath this at the extreme left (above the point where the woodcut is torn) there is the top of
some more wording in ink (all that is visible is some elaborate flourishing). The volume has been
rebound in a plain dark brown binding. There are twenty blank pages added at the end of the
means that whereas Nichols knew of only two extant copies in two different
versions, today we have one copy of the first edition of c. 1496 and three of the
second of c. 1497–98, and contrary to what Nichols thought, both editions
are by De Worde (he admits in the first letter to some inadequate experience
with early typography).31 It is obvious from the dates given that Nichols got the
order of priority wrong.32 In his second letter he categorically says, ‘I cannot
but think W. de Worde’s the earlier edition’. And yet he was not alone in this.
In STC the dates for the sermon for the Boy Bishop were given as ‘in 1499?’
for STC 282, the British Library edition (IA. 55282) now dated to c. 1496,
and as ‘in 1498?’, for STC 283, the Huntington, British Library (IA. 55281),
and Corpus edition, now dated as c. 1497–98, though STC said that the order
might have been wrong.33 It was not until further detailed research was carried
out in BMC xi on the typography that the current dates were agreed upon. Yet,
as we shall see below, had Nichols or any later commentators carried out any
textual comparisons between the two editions, it would have been quite obvi-
ous what the order of priority was.
Part of the rationale for the dating has always been internal. In the prayers
at the beginning of the sermon, the preacher refers to ‘the ryght reuerende
fader and worshypfull lorde, my broder bysshopp of London, your dyocesan’
(ll. 88–90). At this point it is not clear who this is. Yet in the last, the preacher
asks for prayers that ‘all the soules lyenge in the paynes of purgatory, specyally
early printed text. An early notice (in blue pen) is pasted on to the recto of the first blank page,
‘This sermon is by John Alcock, bp. of Ely: no other copy of this edition is known. 1 July 1928’.
Underneath this and on the blank page is written in pencil ‘[P. S. Allen]’, which identifies the
above writer as Percy Stafford Allen, Erasmian scholar and president of Corpus Christi College
from 1924 until his death in 1933. The rebinding was therefore carried out at some point after
1928 (and most likely, given its appearance, in the first half of the twentieth century). Nothing
is known about the previous ownership of the volume.
31
Both editions end with material on the indulgences of John XXII and a piece begin-
ning ‘Virtutes aque benedicte’, consisting of various theological comments of an aphoristic and
numerological nature; as noted in BMC xi, 208, ‘The additional texts are probably added to fill
the quire.’
32
BMC xi, 208 (with regard to IA. 55282), notes ‘Type 4: 96G includes here some char-
acteristics produced for printing the Statutes as well as L2, suggesting a dating c. 1496’; for the
dating of IA. 55281, see p. 217 (cited in n. 29).
33
The online English Short Title Catalogue <http://estc.bl.uk> [accessed 23 May 2013]
gives the dates as 1498? for STC 283 and 1499 for 282, but repeats STC’s comment that STC
282 may be the ‘later edition’; the correct dates are given in the online Incunabula Short Title
Catalogue <http://istc.bl.uk> [accessed 13 April 2013].
for the soule of the reuerende fader, my lorde, Thomas Kempe, late bysshop’
(ll. 131–33). This clearly implies that the first bishop has to be Kempe’s suc-
cessor, Richard Hill. The sermon therefore had to have been preached at some
point between Kempe’s death on 28 March 1489 and Hill’s death on 2 March
1496, or in actual fact after 15 November 1489, the date of Hill’s consecration.
Commentators have therefore put forward the date of 1496 for the sermon.
While there are other typographical reasons for the date of the actual print, in
real terms there is no reason why the sermon could not have been preached at
any point between 28 December 1489 and 28 December 1496. In fact there
are other reasons why a date nearer to 1489 might have seemed more appropri-
ate. Unless prayers for Kempe were to be a continuous feature of Boy Bishop
sermons — and this may have well been so — it would seem slightly odd
that he was still being mentioned by name over seven years after his death.34
However, it might seem more reasonable for him to be remembered in the year
of his death, 1489, or indeed a year or two after. An earlier dating might also
be decoded from the members of the royal family for whom prayers are to be
said, ‘our souerayne lorde the kyng, our soverayne lady the quene, my lord the
prynce, my lady the kynges moder, my lorde her husbonde, with all the lordes
of the realme’ (ll. 126–29). These are in the main not helpful for narrowing
down the date of the sermon: Henry VII and his mother Margaret Beaufort
both died in 1509; his wife Elizabeth of York died in 1503 and Lady Margaret
Beaufort’s third husband, Thomas Stanley, in 1504. Yet it is noticeable that
only one prince is prayed for, Arthur Tudor, who was born in 1486 and died in
1502. The second prince, Henry, was not born until 28 June 1491, although his
sister Margaret had arrived on 29 November 1489; and by 1496 there was also
Mary who was born probably in March of that year.35 If the information here
is taken at face value (and the fact of Margaret’s arrival ignored as she may not
have ‘counted’ being a mere girl), then it would suggest a date of 28 December
1489 or 1490 for the sermon’s delivery.36
34
In the ODNB entry on Kempe there are references to various suffrages ordained for
him, but the dates of these are not known.
35
Elizabeth was born on 2 July 1492 but died in infancy, as did several other children; see
the entry for Elizabeth of York in ODNB.
36
Of course, it is perfectly possible that irrespective of when the sermon was preached only
the first born son was to be prayed for, in which case the date of delivery has to revert to any time
between 1489 and 1496. The argument here for a date of 1489 or 1490 was made independently
of that in Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy
Bishops’, pp. 234–49 (p. 234), who likewise argues for this span of dates.
A different argument, taking the date of delivery nearer to the 1496 cut-off
point, is that it would seem that medieval sermons in the early period may have
been printed relatively soon after delivery. There are six early printed single ser-
mons recorded for the pre-1500 period, all published in the very late 1490s or
very early 1500s: Sermo die lune in ebdomada Pasche; Mons perfectionis or ‘the
hyll of perfeccion’; Gallicantus Iohannis alcock episcopi Eliensis ad co[n]fratres
suos curatos in sinodo apud Bernwel […l; a Sermon on Luke VIII; ‘Spousage of a
Virgin’, as well as the Boy Bishop sermon.37 Of these sermons the first is attrib-
uted to Bishop Richard Fitzjames (d. 1522) and the other five to Bishop John
Alcock (1430–1500). As is noted in BMC xi, these texts were some of the very
few printed that were by contemporary authors.38 To take just one example,
because Fitzjames is only called ‘reverendus doctor’ in the colophon (he did
not become bishop of Rochester until 1497), it has been suggested that the
edition should not be dated later than 1495; this information in conjunction
with clues from the type suggest a date of c. 1495–96, which would support the
thesis that the sermon was printed soon after delivery.39
Having weighed up all the information about the potential date of delivery,
it is still not possible to be categorical: the internal evidence about the prayers
would appear to point to an earlier date in the span from 1489 to 1496, and
the external evidence about printing mores would seem to suggest a later one.40
These external factors also have a part to play in the attribution of the sermon
to John Alcock. This attribution is not mentioned in the Camden edition and
seems to have originated in modern times with E. Gordon Duff.41 No evidence
37
Fitzjames, Sermo die lune in ebdomada Pasche (STC 11024) was printed in c. 1495–96;
Mons perfectionis (STC 278–281) in 1496, 1497, 1497–98, and 1501; Gallicantus […] (STC
277) in 1498; a Sermon for the Boy Bishop (STC 282–283) in c. 1496 and c. 1497–98; a Sermon
on Luke VIII (STC 284–85.5) in c. 1496, c. 1497–98, and 1502?; and ‘Spousage of a Virgin’
(STC 286–287) both in c. 1497–98; see http://istc.bl.uk and http://estc.bl.uk for details.
38
See BMC xi, 21, 49.
39
The point about Fitzjames’s status is first made by Francis Jenkinson in the preface to
the facsimile edition, Fitz-James, Sermo die lune in ebdomada Pasche, s.p. See BMC xi, 199,
where it is further noted that ‘Device B does not show the damage to the bottom line evident
in the Directorium, Duff 293, with the date 1495. The state of the type […] first observed in the
Statutes, Duff 385, suggests, however, a date not earlier than 1496.’ The reference to ‘Duff ’ is
to Duff, Fifteenth Century English Books, now revised in Hellinga, Printing in England in the
Fifteenth Century.
40
It could be speculated that there was an earlier edition printed around 1489 but there is
no evidence for this.
41
See Duff, Fifteenth Century English Books, items 15 and 16, pp. 4–5.
for this is provided, and it has simply been reiterated by all commentators since,
including BMC xi. Yet in the other four sermons said to have been by Alcock,
the attribution and date are clear in all cases. The title (and accompanying date)
of Gallicantus speak for themselves; in the Mons perfectionis editions the attri-
bution to Alcock is provided in Latin at the beginning, and the date in English
in the colophon; in the ‘Spousage of a Virgin’ Alcock is given as the author
in English at the beginning and the end (where the date is also provided); in
the Sermon on Luke VIII a woodcut of a preaching bishop is provided at the
beginning alongside the attribution of the sermon to Alcock. Admittedly the
Boy Bishop sermon is supposed to have been by a chorister, so there may have
been a reason for this anonymity; yet this did not prevent the disclosure in
the manuscript of the author of the 1558 sermon, Richard Ramsey — and fif-
teenth-century printers were also clearly very keen to acknowledge their epis-
copal authors. Apart from his close association with St Paul’s and his interest
in education, there is no real satisfactory explanation as to why this sermon
would have been produced by such an eminent figure as John Alcock, the son
of William Alcock of Hull, who became chancellor of the realm in 1485 and
performed the baptism of Henry VII’s first son, Arthur, born in 1486.42 Indeed,
on 6 October 1486 Alcock was translated to the see of Ely and so one wonders
why, given such responsibility, he would have been writing sermons for choris-
ters in London around this time.43 In truth, it is hard not to suspect that Duff
linked the sermon to Alcock as much for typographical reasons as any other,
in addition to the fact that Alcock was clearly a favourite sermonist with con-
42
For Alcock’s biography see his entry in the ODNB. According to Records of Early English
Drama: Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy Bishops’, pp. 234–49 (pp. 234–35),
‘His connection to St Paul’s came early in his career, when he became a prebendary of the cathe-
dral on 16 December 1468, and his interest in education, [p. 235] demonstrated by his founda-
tion both of Jesus College, Oxford, and of Hull grammar school, made him a natural choice to
compose the sermon on this occasion.’
43
The possible association of authorship with almoners is noted in Two Sermons Preached
by the Boy Bishop at St Paul’s, Temp. Henry VII., and at Gloucester, Temp. Mary, ed. by Nichols:
‘The sermon at St. Paul’s appears to have been usually prepared by the almoner of that church;
and the same practice was probably established elsewhere’ (p. xxxi). However, as is clear from
the introduction, this information is based just on a single reference, the 1329 will of William de
Tolleshunte, an almoner at St Paul’s, who bequeathed ‘all the quires of sermons of the Feasts of
the Holy Innocents which the boy-bishops were wont to preach in my time’ (p. xxxii). Records of
Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy Bishops’, pp. 234–49
(p. 235), notes that the ‘identity of the almoner at this time [1489–90] and of the choristers, is
unknown’.
temporary printers.44 It would seem that this reasoning has not been queried by
later commentators, and so rightly or wrongly, this sermon is deemed to be one
of Alcock’s.45 How this sermon was first brought to general attention by a com-
mentator who did not see Alcock as the author will now be considered.
How Nichols Edited the Boy Bishop Sermon First Edited

in the Fifteenth Century
As noted above, the relevant printing priority of the editions is the opposite
of what Nichols surmised; that is, he saw the ‘de Worde’ copy that he obtained
from Russell (the Huntington edition, STC 283) as the first edition and the
‘British Museum copy’ (the British Library edition, STC 282) as the second
one. Yet, irrespective of when the sermon was originally preached or indeed
the exact dates of printing, it is certain that from a textual viewpoint his order
of priority was clearly wrong. Nichols’s reasons for his preferences, as outlined
in his letter of 5 December 1868, are flimsy at best: ‘For on the whole I think
the spelling of W. de Worde [the Huntington copy] is to be preferred to that of
the other anonymous printer [the British Library copy], tho’ the latter is quite
as archaic in many words though at the same time very different, as W. de W.’.
Having provided a list of variants, which will be dealt with below, he then says
rather airily, ‘I cannot but think W. de Worde’s the earlier edition and to be
preferred, tho’ there are many unquestionable errors in both, and particularly
in the Latin’, before he states that ‘I therefore propose to make W. de Worde the
text to follow’.
It is not entirely clear why Nichols changed his mind so quickly about the
copy-text; no doubt the fact that one had a printer’s name attached and the
other did not (though they were both actually by De Worde) would seem to
have swayed him. This in turn may have influenced his view of the spelling,
which, being slightly less ‘coloured’ in what we now call the Huntington edi-
44
There is even a woodcut found in Gallicantus […] (STC 277) and in an edition of the
Mons perfectionis (STC 280) that is probably a portrait of Alcock; see Smith, ‘An Image of a
Preaching Bishop in Late Medieval England’; this image is also discussed in Martha W. Driver’s
essay in the present collection.
45
Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, p. 351, who
notes ‘[This sermon is attributed to Alcock by the S.T.C. (no. 282) but it is probably not by
him.]’ As far as I am aware, Blench is the only critic to question the attribution, though he does
not furnish any reasons.
tion seems to have predisposed him to think it earlier. In turn this all must
have led to a belief that the one with a known printer must be the earlier of the
two. When the first edition from c. 1496 (the British Library copy, IA. 55282,
STC 282) (hereafter BL) and the second from c. 1497–98 (as represented by
the Huntington copy, STC 283) (hereafter H) are examined, the following
obvious differences are apparent. In BL the tendency is to provide the Latin
in an abbreviated fashion, which is mostly expanded in H, though as H goes
on more Latin is unexpanded. Yet even here there is a difference as the unex-
panded Latin in one edition does not necessarily equate with that in the other.
It is obvious that each compositor has a mind of his own when it comes to
expanding or contracting. It would seem highly improbable for a compositor
to have supplied the expanded Latin abbreviations in the first edition and leave
them unexpanded in the second, whereas the reverse seems more plausible. 46
This argument alone would imply that BL (with its largely unexpanded abbre-
viations) is the earlier edition.47 In turn — setting aside modern advancements
in typographical recognition — it is clear that BL must be the earlier edition
because of some typographical and textual improvements made to the text in
H. The general layout is the same, and the pattern of punctuation similar (albeit
with some variation from one to the other in the use of virgule or period at the
same points in the texts), and the use of paraph marks in both is very close. Yet
extra care is taken in H to exclude paraph marks where they are not needed;
for instance, on sig. a ijr the H compositor rightly omits the paraph mark in BL
that separates the English translation from a Latin quote. In BL too there is a
tendency to get opening brackets (which are used in both editions to enclose
quotations) the wrong way round, for example, ‘But )carencia cognicione)’ (sig.
a ijr), put them on the incorrect line as in ‘(| Qui non loquendo sed moriendi
confessi sunt)’ (sig. a ijv) or to omit them, for instance, ‘a.b.c.Y’ (sig. a iijr); this
is all corrected in H. Neither does H confuse ‘u’ and ‘n’ which very occasion-
ally happens in BL (for instance, ‘landatur’ for ‘laudaur’). While the texts are
virtually identical, apart from spelling variants and a few changes of Roman
numerals to cardinals from one to the other, in the small number of variant
readings, the better reading (where this can be chosen) is almost always that
of H, apart from two cases where there are missing letters, ‘pry[n]cypall’ and
46
I owe to Joseph Gwara the observation that Latin might sometimes remain unexpanded
if a printer did not have the necessary supply of Latin type.
47
It is also possible, as mentioned in n. 40, that the compositor of the later edition actually
used another putative edition to set up his text or even a manuscript (no longer extant) and that
BL is simply copying its unexpanded abbreviations.
‘Fre[n]shmen’.48 Apart from the addition of De Worde’s imprint in H, there

is also the inclusion of a (very common) crucifixion woodcut at the end. This
is clearly another factor that has influenced Nichols in his choice of what he
regards as the earlier edition, as he notes in the letter of 7 November 1868:
I knew that the Sermon was said to have been printed by de Worde, but I before sus-
pected that the copy in the B.M. might be a reprint and this suspicion is increased
by what I heard yesterday, for you mentioned it on account of some woodcut
design, and I do not recollect that the copy in the Museum has any.
48
Apart from spelling differences, the only variant readings are as follows: sig. a ijr (in
both): BL: phylosopre, H: phylosophre; BL: Tho thinges, H: All those thynges; BL: more perfyte,
H: more parfyghter; BL: and conuey, H: and so conueye; BL: to theyr naturall ende, H: vnto
theyr naturall ende; BL to þe prycke, H: vnto the prycke; BL: eere, H: eeres; sig. a ijv (in both):
BL: pryncipall, H: prycypall; BL: to plese, H: for to please; BL: inpossible, H: impossible; BL:
to ouercome, H: for to ouercome; BL: founde (sig. a iij r), H: he founde (sig. a ijv); sig. a iijr (in
both): BL: the other, H: and the other; BL: hath two lynes, H: and hath two lynes; BL: thenne,
H: and thenne; BL: to godenes, H: or to goodnes; BL: knowe not, H: I knowe not; BL: the fourth
moste harde, H: the fourth and moost hardest; sig. a iijv (in both): BL: the ryghte reuerend fader,
H: and the ryght reuerende fader; BL: that, H: so that; BL: neuer, H: neuer more; sig. a iiijr (in
both): BL: illucionibns, H: illusionibus; BL: wolde they, H: wolde that they; BL: perpertuall, H:
perpetuall; BL: sytte in þe kynges owne benche, H: sitte into the kynges owne benche; BL: whan
I was; H: whan that I was; BL: deyed. callyd, H: deyed and is called; BL: nother beten. Ther is
no defaute (sig. a vv), H: nother beten and there is no defaute (sig. a vr); sig. a vv (in both); BL:
Gomor, H: of Gomor; BL: in to fyre, H: in to the fyre; BL: stonde in. in thyse dayes, H: stande in
now in thyse dayes; BL: nourices (sig. a vir), H: nouryce (sig. a vv); BL: cheyf (sig. a vir), H: the
chyef (sig. a vir); BL: somtyme trouth (sig. a viv), H: and somtyme trouth (sig. a vir); BL: who is
cause. is none other (sig. a viv), H: The cause is none other (sig. a vir); sig. a viv (in both): BL: eere,
H: eeres; BL: He taughte (sig. b ir), H: Also he taught (sig. a viv); BL: geue also (sig. b ir), H: gyue
(sig. a viv); BL: to saye (sig. b ir), H: for to saye (sig. a viv); sig. b ir (in both): BL: forgeuynge, H:
and forgeuynge; BL: as it writen of Thoby [is added in pen in the margin], H: as it is wryten of
Thoby; BL grutche (sig. b iv), H: grutched (sig. bir); sig. biv (in both); BL: spareth, H: spared; BL:
snam, H: suam; BL: trisecimo (sig. b ijr), H: xxx (sig. biv); sig. b ijr (in both); BL: how we sholde,
H: how that we sholde; BL: named of Kalendas (sig. b ijv), H: named Kalendas (sig. b ijr); BL: is
namyd (sig. b ijv), H: is nameth (sig. b ijr); BL: scole. Thenne (sig. b ijv), H: scole. And thenne (sig.
b ijv); sig. b ijv (in both): BL: to say, H: and to saye; BL: frenshmen (sig. b iijv), H: frensmen (sig.
b iijr); BL: .l. (sig. b iijv), H: fyfty (sig. b iijr); BL: they ben (sig. b iijv), H: the ben (sig. b iijr); BL:
landatur (sig. b iijv), H: laudatur (sig. b iijr); BL: Psalmo. The thyrde (sig. b iijv), H: Psalmo et
cetera. And the thyrde (sig. b iijr); BL: Multpylye (sig. b iiijr), H: Multeplye (sig. b iijv); BL: kepte
thy lyfe (sig. b iiijr), H: kepe thy lyf (sig. b iijv); BL: counsell (sig. b iiijr), H: counseylles (sig. b
iijv); BL: Johannis (sig. b iiijr), H: Johannes (sig. b iijv). A full transcription of BL is provided in
Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Erler, Appendix 3, ‘Boy Bishops’,
pp. 234–49 (pp. 238–47).
Nichols, therefore, uses what modern editors would probably consider the
‘right’ copy-text (if one is looking for the one with the better readings and
improved layout), but he does so for the ‘wrong’ reasons — thinking it the
earlier of the two. When it comes to the actual edition of the text itself, we can-
not say what Nichols’s statement of his editorial procedure would have been, if
any. Rimbault simply states that ‘the earlier edition, according to Mr. Nichols,
is to be preferred. Typographical misprints occur in both editions, particu-
larly in the Latin. These the Editor has silently corrected’.49 Nichols routinely
replaces thorn with ‘th’, changes ‘u’ to ‘v’ or vice versa, and transcribes short and
long ‘i’ as ‘i’ or ‘j’ depending on context (though not entirely consistently). He
also displays various quirks in that he almost invariably transcribes ‘bene’ and
‘childerne’, irrespective of how they are spelt in the text, which must clearly be
the result of early transcriptional errors that are then blindly reproduced each
time, while in keeping with classical rather than medieval tradition he uses ‘æ’
for ‘e’ in Latin words when there is no supporting evidence in either edition.
With regard to the spelling differences between the two editions, Nicholas
says in his second letter: ‘On commencing the collation of it, I find the varia-
tion of spelling from the Museum copy so numerous — amounting to 4 or 5
in nearly every line, that it incurs a much more troublesome task than I antici-
pated.’ He then goes on to cite the main spelling differences from H to BL:
parfyght altered to perfyte

the ende thende
stand stond
wyll woll
which whyche [a letter crossed out before this]
dyrectid directyd
age aege
Admittedly, H has twenty-nine examples of ‘age’ plus six of ‘ages’ to BL’s routine
use of the very marked ‘aege’/‘aeges’. Yet there are problems with Nichols’s list.
Broadly speaking, while he is acutely aware of the spelling differences between
the two editions, these are in some ways more variable — and in others more
consistent — than Nichols believes. For instance, to take just one example of
difference, his ‘parfyght’/‘perfyte’ distinction: while there are four examples
of ‘parfyght’, and one each of ‘parfyghter’ and ‘parfyghtly’ in H (plus one of
49
Temp. Mary, ed. by Nichols, p. xxxvi.
‘parfyte’), the spellings in BL are respectively ‘perfite’, ‘more perfyte’, ‘perfyte’,

‘perfyghtly’, ‘perfighte’, ‘perfyghte’, and ‘perfyghte’. The other examples from
Nichols may likewise be corrected with regard to H: ‘the ende’ occurs eight
times while there is one example of ‘thende’; ‘stand’ (or ‘stond’) does not occur
at all but there are three examples of ‘stande’; ‘wyll’ (in the verbal sense) is found
three times and there is one example of ‘wol’ (though none of ‘woll’); ‘which’
is only found once but there are twenty-two examples of ‘whiche’ and one of
‘whyche’; and finally, there is no ‘dyrectid’ but four examples of ‘dyrected’ and
none of ‘directyd’.
Nichols’s account of the spelling is therefore an understandably impression-
istic one. When the sermon is edited afresh, it is clear that what he presents is
largely a transcription from H but with frequent readings from BL. In fact care-
ful scrutiny of H alongside Nichols’s edition demonstrates a remarkable overall
consistency in spelling that has been somewhat occluded in the 1875 edition.
This is apparent in everything from verbal endings to common words and spe-
cific spellings. H has ‘ed’ in eighty-one cases for past participle, past tense, and
participle adjectival endings, with only the following past participles ending
in ‘yd’: ‘callyd’ (twice), and ‘verefyd’; the past tenses ‘askyd’, ‘sayd’ (five times),
‘mysusyd’, and ‘entreatyd’; and three participle adjectives, ‘blessyd’, ‘expressyd’,
and ‘fasshenyd’. In his transcription Nichols has mistakenly imported four-
teen ‘yd’ forms for past participles, all on the basis of BL: ‘movyd’, ‘formyd’,
‘extendyd’, ‘callyd’ (four times), ‘inserchyd’, ‘correctyd’, ‘namyd’ (four times),
‘undoubtyd’, ‘disposyd’, and ‘exhortyd’. Of the plethora of examples of present
participle in H, virtually all end in ‘ynge’, apart from seven in ‘enge’: ‘sygne-
fyenge’, ‘edifyenge’, ‘lyenge’, ‘destroyenge’, and ‘sayenge’ (three times). Nichols
renders two of the ‘ynge’ type as ‘growyng’ and ‘consideryng’ and two of the
‘enge’ type as ‘sayeng’ (twice), both on the basis of BL. It is obvious from this
that the H compositor has a definite feeling for how the present participle
should be spelt; he is even consistent in the examples above in following ‘y’ in
the stem by ‘enge’. With regard to the ‘small’ words, the situation is similarly
clear. In H the absolutely dominant form of the definite article is ‘the’; there
are, however, eight examples of ‘þe’, but these are all changed by Nichols to ‘the’
(in BL four of these are ‘the’ and four ‘þe’). H has twenty-one non-abbreviated
examples of ‘with’ and none of ‘wyth’, together with sixteen of ‘without’ and
one of ‘wythout’; Nichols’s edition includes five cases of ‘wyth’ and two exam-
ples of ‘wythout’ introduced from BL. H has ‘soo’ three times and ‘so’ seventeen
times so Nichols’s introduction of ‘soo’ on four occasions on the basis of this
reading in BL is clearly not right. Likewise, the consistency of H can be illus-
trated from particular spellings chosen at random. For instance, H has four
examples of ‘gyueth’ but ‘geveth’/‘gevyth’ is introduced by Nichols from BL on

two occasions. So consistent is the H compositor with his spelling that he also
has ‘gyuen’ on two occasions and ‘gyue’ on four others, one of which Nichols
has changed to ‘geve’, on the basis of BL. H has two examples of ‘contynue’ and
no other spelling but Nichols introduces ‘contynewe’ on one occasion on the
strength of BL’s standard spelling (with or without final ‘e’). H has six spell-
ings of ‘moneth’ and no other spelling but Nichols introduces ‘monthe’ on one
occasion from BL (which in turn is consistent in only using the ‘monthe’ spell-
ing, albeit twice without the final ‘e’). Although both compositors demonstrate
a wider variability than is permissible in modern spelling, the fact that it is pos-
sible to isolate quite minute spelling tendencies in each compositor shows how
relatively careful each one is with his own spelling system, and this seems to be
particularly the case with H.
Space does not permit a full analysis of all the spelling differences, but
enough has been said to show that the edition produced in the Camden Society
in 1875 is actually somewhat of a blend of the two early printed editions.50 The
full evidence for this is given clearly below in the new edition that shows each
of Nichols’s variant readings (shown as N with the BL reading preceding it).
There are many instances where Nichols has imported a word from the BL text
into H, sometimes adopting idiosyncratic spellings (as outlined above) in the
process. In doing so he not only disrupts what are exceptionally stable spell-
ing systems in both editions, but he also opens up some speculation about his
working methods. Clearly we do not know how far Nichols had got with his
transcription by the time he discovered Russell’s new version. But looking at
the text that he presents, it would seem that he had a full transcription of the
BL text which he then checked against H and made the changes, except that in
many cases he overlooked the differences, so that effectively what we have now
in his 1875 edition are some BL readings visible like a palimpsest in the midst
50
As indicated above (n. 48), Erler provides a transcription of the first edition (STC 282).
In Ward, ‘A Sermon for a Boy Bishop by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely’, there is an edition on
pp. 62–73, with a translation on pp. 74–81. It is noted in the introduction that the edition by
Nichols ‘was not without errors, and so for the present contribution recourse has been had to a
thorough retranscription of the original printed text’ (p. 61). Unfortunately, a careful analysis
of Ward’s text shows that it is simply an exact repeat of Nichols’s edition (with all its blend-
ing of the two early printed texts) and even with the same punctuation and capitalization.
The identification of biblical quotations (all set out in full) and the patristic citations is useful
(these citations are also more readily available in Erler’s edition and so are not repeated in the
edition below).
of his edition of the H version.51 We can, of course, postulate that such errors
would have been removed had Nichols lived to publish the edition himself; his
standard of general transcription, the quirks above not withstanding, is very
good and indeed there is little difference between his general attitude to punc-
tuation and paragraphing and that of a modern editor.52 He also notes in the
second letter that ‘I beg to retain the book until the proof has been corrected
and I may be able to read the revise once more’, so although Rimbault says in
the introduction that the text had been prepared for the press by Nichols, it is
unlikely that Nichols had seen the final proofs before his death, which took
place two years before the edition was published.
For now, what the study of this edition does is to hold up to the spotlight
yet another instance of how some early compositors — like many medieval
scribes as a whole — have been unfairly maligned for their wayward and care-
free attitude to spelling and for a general lack of linguistic consistency. As dem-
onstrated by this new edition below, while their laws of standardization were
not as ours, they were neither uncaring about orthographical rigour nor erratic
in their typographical behaviour.53 The sermon of the Boy Bishop, first edited
by John Gough Nichols — with all the complications that have been addressed
in this essay — acts then as a sort of mirror of editorial attitudes and editing
techniques from the fifteenth to the nineteenth — and now beyond — to the
twenty-first centuries.
51
In checking out what Nichols had done I began with his transcription which I double-
checked systematically and corrected against H and so was in a position to restore his BL read-
ings in the course of providing a completely new edition.
52
In the ODNB entry on Nichols we are told that he had attended the meetings of the
Society of Antiquaries from the age of twelve and had become a skilled palaeographer by the
time he left school.
53
As shown also by Jeremy J. Smith’s essay (in the current volume) on punctuation, there
is much work to be done both linguistically, stylistically, and typographically on early printed
sermons, a subject to which I hope to give some attention in the future.
Editorial Procedure
In this new edition of the ‘Boy Bishop’ sermon based on the version in H (San
Marino, California, Huntington Library, call number 47899), the second edi-
tion (STC 283), punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing are editorial;
abbreviations are expanded and italicized; thorn is preserved; ‘u’ an ‘v’ are dis-
tinguished but ‘i’ is used for short and long ‘i’ except in final numerals where
‘j’ is used. Emendations, which are very rare, are provided in square brackets.
Changes of folio are also signalled in square brackets but not changes of col-
umn so as to cut down on the number of square brackets. Where John Gough
Nichols gives a different reading in his edition, this is provided in italics in
square brackets as [N] preceded by the reading in the first edition (STC 282)
in [BL] (London, British Library, IA 55282); where there is a substantive vari-
ant (not a spelling change) between BL and H, this is also provided in square
brackets in italics, with the accompanying reading in Nichols. In both editions
it is common to indicate Latin quotation with the use of opening and closing
round brackets, although BL sometimes omits these, gets them the wrong way
round or on the wrong line. In his edition Nichols sometimes shows these but
mainly omits them and instead uses italics for his Latin quotations. For this
edition it was decided to omit reference to these round brackets because to
include reference each time to their presence or absence in H, BL, and N would
have filled the text with an excessive number of brackets of various kinds. In
this edition the round brackets of H are replaced with inverted commas for the
Latin quotations (and the corresponding English quotations or translations).
Omitted too from the variants is Nichols’s routine change of Latin ‘e’ to ‘æ’;
this is merely an arbitrary change introduced by him and does not cast any light
on the early printed texts (in every case neither of the printed texts support
Nichols’s change). Rather than providing the critical apparatus in the tradi-
tional way where readers would have to search for the variants, the sermon is
set out with the variant readings embedded in the text. This will enable readers
who are interested in Nichols’s procedure to see at a glance the way in which he
was transcribing from H but effectively carrying over some of his earlier tran-
scription from BL into his edition and so mingling H and BL spelling; readers
who are more interested in the content can skip these variant readings in square
brackets and concentrate on the sermon itself.
In die innocencium sermo pro episcopo puerorum

‘Laudate, pueri, dominum’, psalmo centesimo xij, et pro huius collacionis fundamento
‘Prayse, ye childern, [BL: children; N: childerne] almyghty God’, as the

phylosophre [BL: phylosopre; N: Phylosophre] sayth in dyuerse places. All
[BL: Tho; N: All] those thynges that haue the habyte of parfyght cognycyon
may moue themself and conueye themself to theyr ende, as a beest hauynge
5 sensyble knowlege, and man more parfyghter, [BL: more perfite; N: more
parfyghter] bothe sensyble and intellygyble, may moue themself whether
they wyll, and so [BL: and; N: and so] conueye all [BL: al; N: al] theyr
accyons and dedes vnto [BL: to; N: to] theyr naturall ende. But ‘carencia
cognicione’, ‘those thynges that lacke cognycyon’, haue no mocyon of
10 themself, nother be dyrected to theyr ende without the helpe of another, as
an arowe of hymself cannot be moued [BL: mouyd; N: movyd] ne dyrected
vnto [BL: to; N: unto] the prycke without the redy conueyaunce of hym
that shoteth, thrugh whom dyrectly he attayneth his ende and is shotte
to the prycke. In as moche thenne as mankynde is ordeyned vnto an ende
15 ferre excedynge the lymytes of nature, as it is wryten by þe [BL: the; N: the]
Holy Ghost in Ysay lxiiij, ‘Oculus non vidit, Deus, absque te, que preparasti
exspectantibus te’; et prima ad Corintheos secundo, ‘Oculus non vidit, nec
aures audiuit, nec in cor hominis ascendit, que preparauit Deus diligentibus
illum’, ‘The eye of a man hath not seen, nother his eeres [BL: eere; N: eeres]
20 herde, nother it cannot be thought in his herte, thende that almyghty God
hath or[sig. aij verso]deyned [BL: or|dened; N: ordened] for them that loueth
hym.’ To this ende man, hauynge the vse of reason and parfyte knowlege,
is dyrected by his free wyll as by a pryncypall in hymself to moue hym to
God. And also by fayth as a pryc[n]ypall [BL: pryncipall; N: pryncypall]
25 aboue naturall knowlege, without the whiche it is impossyble for to [BL: to;
N: to] please [BL: plese; N: plese] God and attayne to the ende of grace in
this present lyf and glory in heuen, as it is wryten, [BL: wreten; N: wreten]
‘Sine fide impossibile [BL: inpossible; N: impossibile] est placere Deo’. Whyle
it is so that man endowed with vse of reason, hauynge naturall knowlege
30 and free [wyll], [BL: om.; N: om.; H: om.] may [BL: maye; N: maye] not
suffycyentely [BL: suffycyently; N: suffycyently] dyrecte [BL: direct; N:
dyrect] hymself to the ende that God hath ordeyned to without the helpe of
fayth, as it is wryten, Iheremie iiij, ‘Non est enim hominis vincere, neque viri
esse vt ambulet ei [BL: ambulet ei; N: ambuleter] et dirigat gressus eius’, ‘It
35 is not in mannes power for to [BL: to; N for to] ouercome vyce of hymself,
nother for to walke parfyghtly and dyrecte his gooynge in the lawe of God,
but by his grace assystente.’
Moche more those that ben [BL: ben; N: bene] childern [BL: chyldren;
N: chylderne] for tendernesse of age and lacke of knowlege cannot
40 dyrecte [BL: direct; N: dyrect] theyr dedes conuenyentely to that ende
without specyall helpe of God. In token herof childern [BL: children; N:
childerne] newely sette to scole, lackynge the vse of reason and the habyte
of cognycyon, haue a recourse to Goddes dyreccyon, fyrste lernynge
this, ‘Christis crosse be my spede’, and so begynneth [BL: begynnyth; N;
45 begynnyth] the ‘A.B.C.’. In wytnesse of defawte of this perfeccyon [BL:
perfeccion; N: perfeccion] in knowlege, Pyctagoras, to the dyreccyon of
childern, [BL: chyldren; N: Chylderne] he [BL: om.; N: he] founde fyrste
this letter [sig. a iij recto] in the ‘A.B.C’, ‘Y’, the whyche as Ysyder [BL:
Ysider; N: Ysider] sayth, Ethimologis, is fourmed [BL: formyd; N: formyd]
50 and made after the symylytude of mannes lyf. [BL: lyfe; N: lyfe] For this
letter ‘Y’ is made of two lynes: one is a right lyne; and [BL: om. N: om.]
the other is half ryght and half crokyd. And so [BL: soo; N: soo] verely the
infant age of a childe is ryght neyther dysposed to vertue neyther to vyce,
as the phylosophre sayth, ‘Tanquam tabula nuda in qua nichil depingitur’.
55 But the seconde age is called ‘Adolescencia’ and [BL: om.; N: and] hath two
lynes: a ryght and a crokyd, sygnefyenge the dysposycyon [BL: dysposycion;
N: dysposycion] that he hath thenne to vyce and [BL: om.; N: and] thenne
to [BL: to, followed by what looks like a superscript r] vertue. In the whiche
age is the brekynge of euery childe to [BL: chylde to; N: chylde to; H: childe
60 or to] goodnes or to lewdenes. Therfore, that age is moost uncertayn in
knowlege, as Salomon sayth, Prouerbiorum, xxx. ‘Tria sunt michi difficilia
ad cognoscendum, et quartum penitus ignoro. Viam nauis in medio maris,
et viam viri in adolescentia’, ‘Thre thynges’, sayth Salomon, ‘ben [BL: ben;
N: bene] harde to me to knowe, and the fourth vtterly I [BL: om.; N: I]
65 knowe not: the flyght [BL: flyghte; N: flyghte] of the egle in the ayer; the
waye of the serpent on the erthe; the sayllynge of a shyppe in the see; but
the fourth and moost hardest [BL: fourth moste harde; N: fourth and moost
hardest] is to vnderstande the waye of a man in hys growynge age.’ Tho
childern [BL: children; N: children] thenne the whiche lacke dyscrecyon,
70 vse of reason, and parfyght cognycyon, and yet attayne to the ende that is
prepared for mannes blysse, as thyse blessyd innocentes whoos solempnyte
we halowe this daye, ‘Qui non loquendo sed moriendo confessi sunt’, may
[sig. a iij verso] moost in a specyall laude that gloryous lorde ‘sequentes
agnum quocumque ierit’, to whom by our moder, Holy Chirche, in tytle
75 of tryumphe may contynually be applyed the wordes of my tyme, ‘Laudate,

pueri, Dominum’, ye chosen childern [BL: chyldren; N: chylderne] of God,
lackynge the vse of cognycyon and yet gloryfyed by your passyon in lyf [BL:
lyfe; N: lyfe] euerlastynge, ‘Prayse ye God.’
In the begynnynge thenne of this symple exhortacyon, that I a childe
80 [BL: chylde; N: chylde], wantynge the habyte of connynge, may [BL: maye;
N: maye] be dyrected by hym that gaue to that childe Danyell, ‘Sermonem
rectum et spiritum deorum’, somwhat to saye [BL: say; N: say] to his laude
and praysynge, and to all [BL: alle; N: alle] pure childern [BL: chyldren; N:
chylderne] that ben [BL: ben; N: bene] here present edifyenge, we shall atte
85 this tyme deuoutly make our prayers. In the whiche prayers I recommende
vnto your deuocyons the welfare of all Crystys [BL: Crystis; N: Chrysts]
Chirche, our holy fader the pope, with all [BL: alle; N: alle] the clergye,
my lorde of Caunterbury, and [BL: om.; N: and] the ryght [BL: ryghte;
N: ryghte] reuerende fader and worshypfull lorde, my broder bysshopp of
90 London, your dyocesan, also for my worshypfull broder [N: the added]
deane of this cathedrall chirche, with [BL: wyth; N: wyth] all resydensaryes
and prebendaryes of the same.
And moost intyerly I praye you to haue myself in your specyal deuocyon,
so that [BL: that; N: so that] I may contynue in this degree that I now
95 stande, and neuer more [BL: om.; N: never more] herafter to be vexed with
Ieroms vysyon, the whiche is wryten, Ieremie primo. Whan the good lorde
askyd of Ieremye, ‘Quid tu vides, Ieremia?’, he answer[sig. a iiij recto]red
and sayd, ‘Virgam vigilantem ego video’, ‘A waken rodde I see’, sayd Ieremye.
Truely thys waken rodde often tymes hath troubled me in my childehode,
100 that ‘Lumbi mei impleti sunt illusionibus, [BL: illucionibns; N: illusionibus]
et non est sanitas in carne mea; afflictus sum et humiliatus sum nimis’. And,
therfor, though I be now in hye dygnyte, yet when I see other here my
mayster þat [BL: þat; N: that] was thenne, ‘Operuit confusio faciem meam;
a voce contremuerunt labia mea.’ As Nero the emperour wold to his mayster
105 Seneca, the same wysshe I wolde [BL: wolde; N: wold] to my mayster I loue
so [BL: soo; N: soo] well. And for theyr true dylygence that all my maysters,
the whiche taught [BL: taughte; N: taughte] me ony connynge in my youthe
gaue to me, I wolde that [BL: om.; N: om.] they were promytted to be
perpetuall felowes and collegeners of that famouse college of the kynges
110 foundacyon in Southwerke that men calle the Kynges Benche. Gretter
worshyppe [BL: worshypp; N: worshypp] I cannot wysshe than for to sytte
[in] [BL: in; N: in; H: into] the Kynges owne Benche. And for bycause
charyte is parfyght yf it be extended [BL: extendyd; N: extendyd] as well to
the ende of the lyf as it is the lyf self, I wolde they sholde ende ther lyf in that
115 holy waye, the whiche [BL: whyche; N: whyche] often tymes I radde whan
that [BL: om.; N: that] I was querester, in the Marteloge of Poules, where
many holy bodyes deyed, and is called [BL: deyed. callyd; N: deyed, callyd]
in Latyn ‘Via Tiburtina’, in Englysshe as moche to saye as ‘the hygh [BL:
highe; N: highe] waye to Tyburne’. In this behalf ye shall praye specyally for
120 all prelates that cometh to theyr dygnytee as I dyde; for, thanked [sig. a iiij
verso] be God, without [BL: wythout; N: wythout] conspyracy, lordshyp,
or symony I was sette in thys degree; for verely promocyon in ony realme
hadde ‘per demonum, simonem et principem’ hath and shall brynge Crystys
Chirche ‘in confusionem dampnabilem’.
125 In the seconde partye, ye shall praye for the wele and peas of all Crysten
reames, specyally for the reame of Englonde, our souerayne lorde the kyng,
our soverayne lady the quene, my lord [BL: lord; N: lorde] the [BL: þe; N:
the] prynce, my lady the kynges moder, my lorde her husbonde, with all
the lordes of the realme, the welfare of this cyte, for my ryght worshypful
130 broder and louer the mayer, with all the aldermen and shyrefs.
In the thyrde partye, all the soules lyenge in the paynes of purgatory,
specyally for the soule of the reuerende fader, my lorde, Thomas Kempe,
late bysshop, and for the soules of all benefactours of thys chirche of Poules,
with [BL: wyth; N: wyth] all Crysten soules, for the whiche and for the
135 entent premysed I praye you deuoutly saye a ‘Pater Noster’ and an ‘Aue’.
‘Laudate, pueri, Dominum’, vt supra.
In as moche as Cryste sayth in the gospell, ‘Sinite peruulos venire ad
me, quia talium est regnum celorum’, Mathei xix, ‘Suffre ye childern [BL:
children; N: childerne] to come to me, for of suche the kyngdom of heuen
140 is fulfylled’. By whom after Saynt Austyn (in originali, vbi thema), it is
not oonly vnderstonde those that ben [BL: ben; N: bene] childern [BL:
chyldren; N: chylderne] of age, but those that [sig. a. v recto] ben [BL: ben;
N: bene] childern [BL: children; N: chylderne] pure in clennesse from synne
and malyce. As the holy appostle saynt Poule sayth, ‘Nolite effici pueri
145 sensibus, malicia autem paruuli estote’, prima ad Corintheos xiiij, ‘Be ye not
childern [BL: chyldren; N: chylderne] in your wyttes, but from all synne
and malyce be ye childern [BL: chyldren; N: chylderne] in clennesse.’ And
in this fourme all [BL: alle; N: alle] maner of people and all [BL: al; N: al]
maner of ages in clennesse of lyf ought to be pure as childern, [BL: children;
150 N: childerne] to whom generally may I saye, ‘Laudate, pueri, Dominum’:
‘laudate, pueri, Dominum in infancia; [BL: infantia; N: infantia] laudate
Dominum in adolescencia; [BL: adolescencia; N: adolescentia] laudate
Dominum in perseuerante etate humana’, ‘Prayse, ye childern, [BL: chyldren;

N: childerne] your God in your infant age; prayse ye hym in your growynge
155 age; and prayse ye hym perseuerauntly “vsque in senectum et senium”, in
your mannes age.’ And in thyse thre praysynge of thre ages shall stande the
processe of this symple collacyon.
Thyse thre ages after the consceyte of the appostle, ad Galathas and ad
Romanos, is lykened to the thre lawes, that is to saye, to the lawe of kynde,
160 the lawe wryten, and the lawe of grace. The fyrste [BL: fyrste; N: first] age
is lykened [BL: lickenyd; N: likenyd] vnto the lawe of kynde. A childe fyrste
whan he is in his infant age is not constreyned vnto no lawes; he is not
corrected nother beten; and there [BL: beten. Ther; N: beten; and there] is
no defaute layde vnto hym, but vtterly he is lefte vnto the lawe of kynde. Do
165 he what someuer he wyll, noo [BL: no; N: no] man doth blame hym. Morally
the state of man inmedyatly after synne was verely the state of childe[sig. a
v verso]hode and infans hauynge no [BL: noo; N: no] nouryce. Whan that
man was vtterly left without ony expressyd lawe, hauynge no mayster, to
his owne naturall inclynacyon as to his lawe, there was no lawe of God
170 newe put to hym. Many defawtes dyde he, and to many inconuenyences
he ranne. Correccyon was there none, but vtter destruccyon, as Noes
flood, [BL: fludde; N: floode] destroyenge alle [BL: all; N: all] infantes of
mankynde saue viij persones (Genesis vij); the destruccyon of Sodome and
of [BL: om.; N: of] Gomor with other cytees (Genesis xix). And lykewyse
175 as a childe, hauynge noo nouryce nor guyder deputed to hym, may as well
renne into the fyre [BL: in to fyre; N: in to the fyre] or water as to go besyde,
soo verely in the fyrste age of man, in the lawe of kynde, a man beynge
wythout a nouryce or guyder, lefte to hys naturall guydynge, mysusyd soo
ferre hymselfe, that he ranne to water where he was vtterly destroyed, as
180 I sayd [BL: sayde; N: sayde] before — saue Noes housholde — and also
to the fyre, where a grete parte was destroyed. And verely, maysters, yf we
clerely consydre our lyf and state that we stande in now in thyse dayes, [BL:
stonde in. in thyse dayes; N: stande in now in thyse dayes], I fere me, we shall
fynde ourself soo ferre guyded by our sensuall nature, that we shall nede to
185 be purefyed to our streyte correccyon with [BL: wyth; N: wyth] a streyte
afflyccyon, as the water or the fyre. And all for lacke of our maysters and
nouryces all wrapped in neclygence taketh none attendaunce to vs. Our
maysters and nouryce[s] [BL: nourices; N: nouryces; H: nouryce] spyrytuall,
‘Querentes que sua sunt et non que [sig. a vi recto] Ihesu Christi, sunt canes
190 muti non valentes latrare’, Ysaye lvi. Our temporall rulers, ‘Infideles, socii
furum, diligunt munera, sequuntur retribucionis; [BL: retribucionis; N:
retribuciones] pupillo non iudicant causa vidue non ingreditur ad eos’, Ysaye
i. This neclygence in our nouryces spyrytuall and temporall causeth in the
Chirche insolent lyf, seculer conuersacyon, ‘In habitu interiori et exteriori, vt
195 qualis populus talis sit et sacerdos’. In the temporalte it causeth þat [BL: þat;
N: that] manslaughter is not sette by; lechery is pleasure; [BL: pleysure; N:
pleysure] robbery and dysceyte is called cheuesaunce; extorcyon, lordshyp,
power; falshede, a fete of wytte; vsury counted no synne, ‘Quomodo facta
est meretrix ciuitas fidelis, plena iudicii? Iusticia habitauit in ea, nunc autem
200 homicide. Argentum tuum versum est in scoriam. Vinum tuum mixtum est
aqua’, Ysaye i. A merueyllous chaunge! somtyme our reame was prosperous,
now it is in mysery; somtyme Ryghtwysnesse was the chyef [BL: cheyf; N:
cheyf] ruler, now Falshede is quarter-mayster; somtyme was inhabytaunt
Peas, Loue, and Charyte, now Wrathe and Manslaughter and false
205 Dyssymulacyon; somtyme Trouth was mayster of our marchauntes, ‘nunc
vero Vsure [BL: vsura; N: usura] et Dolus’. And somtyme [BL: somtyme;
N: And somtyme] Trouth stode vpryght, now he is fallen. Good men haue
inserched [BL: inserchyd; N: inserchyd] the strete where he felle; some sayd
[BL: sayd; N: sayde] he felle [BL: fell; N: fell] in Lombarde Strete; some sayd
210 [BL: sayd; N: sayde] in Buklarsbury. And whan it was vtterly knowe he was
fallen in euery strete, ‘Veritas corruit in plateis’, the cause is none other [BL:
who is cause. is none other; N: the cause is none other] but we lacke our [sig. a
vi verso] maysters and guyders that sholde streytly attende in this infant age
of condycyon that we ben [BL: ben; N: bene] in.
215 Whan that infant age is ended, the fader prouydeth for his childe for
a mayster, the whiche [BL: whyche; N: whyche] gyueth instruccyon in
smal [BL: small; N: small] doctrynes, as in hys Donate, partes of reason,
and suche other, the whiche mayster comunely is called Pedagog[u]s [BL:
pedagogis; N: Pedagogus; H: Pedagogis] in Latyn. [BL: latin; N: Latyne]
220 This mayster gyueth [BL: geuyth; N: gevyth] commaundementes to the
childe in his growynge age; and he breke them, he is sharpely corrected.
[BL: correctyd; N: correctyd] There is no fawte that he doth but he is
punysshed. Somtyme he wryngeth hym by the eeres. [BL: eere; N: eeres]
Somtyme [BL: Somtyme; N: Sometyme] he gyueth [BL: geueth; N: geveth]
225 hym a strype on the honde with [BL: wyth; N: wyth] the ferell. Sometyme
[he] [BL: om.; N: om.; H: om.] beteth hym sharpely with the rodde. And
so with commaundementes and sharpe correccyon he gyueth [BL: geuyth;
N: geveth] hym full instruccyon in the lawer scyence. So in lyke maner [BL:
manere; N: manere] after the lawe of kynde. As mankynde grewe in age,
230 almyghty God prouyded to man an enfourmer that was called Moyses, the
whiche sholde teche man his pryncypalles and small and rude doctrynes.
And so the olde lawe taught to man his Donate and partes of reason. Also
he [BL: He; N: Also he] taught hym how he sholde gyue to God his partes,
the whiche [BL: whyche; N: whyche] were sacrefyces, oblacyons, and tythes
235 iustely and truely to be gyuen to God as it is wryten, Ecclesiasticis xxxv,
‘Da Altissimo secundum Donatum eius.’ That what thou sholdest gyue
[BL: geue also; N: gyve also] to thy neyghbour and broder his partes, that
is for to saye, [BL: to saye; N: to saye] [sig. b i recto] almes dedes freely [BL:
freely; N: frely] without [BL: wythout; N: wythout] grutchynge, lenynge
240 of thy good without ony trust or hope of vsury, and [BL: om.; N: and]
forgeuynge thy neyghbour yf he be in necessyte without trouble for Goddes
sake. And lykewyse as the people vnder Moyses growynge in childhode
[BL: chyldehode; N: childehode], thyse thynges were taught by the whiche
specyally Goddes lawe and praysynge was encreaced, so in our growynge
245 [BL: growyng; N: growyng] age in vertue that good [BL: gode; N: gode]
lorde cuius ‘Laus est in ecclesia sanctorum’ can[BL: canne; N: canne]not be
better praysed than yf we gyue vnto hym iustly and truely his Donat, to hym
oblacyons, sacrefyces, and tythes; to our neyghbour mercyfully geue oure
almesse, and pyteuously forgyue offences and dettes to theym that ben [BL:
250 ben; N: bene] nedy and may [BL: maye; N: maye] not paye. Thyse ben [BL:
ben; N: bene] the thynges that longeth to Goddes praysynge in mankyndes
childehode, as it is [BL: it plus handwritten marginal additon of is; N: is]
wryten of Thoby, Thobie primo), ‘Hec et his similia puerulus secundum
legem obseruabat.’ [BL: obseruabant; N: observabat; H: obseruabant]
255 In Moyses tyme streyte commaundementes were gyuen to man, streyte
punysshmentes, and sharpe correccyons. They were taken by the eere streytly,
whan it commaunded in the lawe, ‘Aurem pro aure, dentem pro dente’,
without ony mercy. He that gadred styckes on the Sabot daye was stoned
vnto the deth [BL: deth; N: dethe]. And for one grutched [BL: grutche; N:
260 grutched] ayenst theyr mayster Moyses, þe [BL: the; N: the] whiche was but
Pedagogus, the chosen woman moost accepte, Maria, Aarons sister, was
smytten of God with the infyrmyte of leprehode. How ofte tymes breke we
our holy daye! How oft tymes grutche we ayenst our maysters, not holdynge
vs con[sig. b i verso]tente [BL: content; N: content] with noo kyng, [BL:
265 kynge; N: kynge] nother prynce, archebysshop, [BL: archebisshop; N:
archebysshopp] nor bysshopp, beynge as varyaunt as the mone! And yet the
good lorde spared [BL: spareth; N: spareth] vs. The olde [BL: old; N: old]
lawe was harde to obserue, in the whiche tyme God entreatyd mankynde
after his wrathe [BL: wrath; N: wrath] and punysshement, wherfore he
270 was callyd ‘Deus vlcionum’, for whoos delyuer Mercy cryed to almyghty
God to sende mankynde [BL: mankinde; N: mankinde] a newe mayster
þat [BL: that; N: that] sholde entreate hym and teche more curtously
[H: first u looks like o], and it lyked hym, ‘Non ex operibus iusticie que
fecimus nos, sed secundum suam [BL: snam; N: suam] misericordiam’, Ad
275 Titum iij, to come downe hymself and toke on hym oure mortallyte, gaue
vs a newe lawe, wolde [BL: wolde; N: wold] suffre none but hymselfe to
be oure mayster, wher [BL: where; N: where] with all loue and benygnyte,
without sharpnesse, he taught vs noo rude nother grose erthly doctrynes, as
they were taught [BL: taught; N: taughte] in the olde lawe, but he taught
280 [BL: taughte; N: taughte] vs subtyll thynges, heuenly dyuynytee, our glorye
[BL: oure glory; N: oure glory] and our [BL: oure; N: oure] blysse, ‘Docebat
eos de regno Dei’. And as longe as we ben [BL: ben; N: bene] in the scole
of mercyfull benygnytee and gentylnesse, though we do [BL: doo; N: doo]
fawtes, purposynge to amende, so [BL: soo; N: soo] longe he abydeth vs
285 pacyently, holdynge hymself contente, [BL: content; N: content] for by cause
we ben [BL: ben; N: bene] now in mannes state and parfyght age with oure
owne correccyon, ‘Propterea expectat Deus vt misereatur vestri’, Ysaye xxx
[BL: trisecimo; N: tricesimo]. And yf we dyferre [BL: differre; N: dyfferre]
and wyll not correcte ourselfe here in the scole of mercy, full greuously
290 and moost sharpely [BL: sharply; N: sharply] shall we abyde the swerde of
correccyon of his ryghtwysnesse, as dayly by experyence we may [BL: maye;
N: maye] fe[sig. b ij recto]le.
Therfore, in the thre ages of our lyfe lete [BL: lete; N: lette] vs besye
ourselfe to prayse God with [BL: wyth; N: wyth] pure childern, [BL:
295 chyldren; N: childerne] amendynge our lyfe by dedes of penaunce and
vertuous [BL: vertuouse; N: vertuouse] dedes vsynge, exhortynge you with
the wordes of my tyme, ‘Laudate, pueri, Dominum’.
The fourme and the maner how that [BL: om.; N: that] we sholde
worshyp and loue almyghty God in the thre ages, that is to saye, in
300 Childehode, Yongthe, and Manhode, is shewed to vs by a prety conceyte
of our [BL: oure; N: oure] comyn kalender in euery boke of seruyce. Ye
shall vnderstande that euery moneth noted in the kalender is dyuyded in
thre partyes, that is to saye, Kalendas, Nonas and Ydus. The fyrst daye of
euery moneth is called and named Kalendas; the seconde is named, [BL:
305 namyd; N: namyd] not Kalendas, but quarto, quinto, or sexto Nonas, and
so [BL: soo; N: soo] tyll ye come to Nonas; and after Nonas, the dayes ben
[BL: ben; N: bene] named [BL: named; N: namyd] Ydus tyll ye come to
the myddell, and thenne all the moneth after named Kalendas [BL: of
Kalendas; N: Kalendas] after certayn [BL: certen; N: certen] nombres,

310 as the myddes of the moneth [BL: monthe; N: monthe] is nameth [BL:
namyd; N: namyd] xix other xviij Kalendas, countynge lesse tyll ye come to
the ende. Morally by these thre, Kalendas, Nonas, and Ydus, is vnderstande
the thre Ages of Man. By Kalendas is vnderstande Childehode. Kalende is
as moche to saye, quasi colendo, for the consuetude of the Romaynes was,
315 the fyrste daye of the moneth that is called Kalendas falleth, to solempnyse
to ther goddes Hely, Iuno, and [BL: and; N: et] Iupy[sig. b ij verso]ter.
So verely the Childehode of man is dedycate to deuocyon. Thenne sette
the faders the childern [BL: children; N: childerne] to scole; and thenne
[BL: scole. Thenne; N: scole; and thenne] be they taught [BL: taught; N:
320 taughte] to serue God, and to [BL: to; N: to; H: and to] saye grace, to helpe
the preest to synge, for to be meke, gentyll, and lowely. Thenne saye they
our Lady Matens, and ben [BL: ben; N: bene] ryght deuoute. Of whom
may be verefyd that is wryten by Dauyd, ‘Hec est generacio querencium
Dominum’, þat [BL: þat; N: that] is, ‘The generacyon that besely [BL:
325 be|syly; N: besyly] by deuocyon seke almyghty God’.
By the seconde daye that is callyd Nonas I vnderstande the seconde age,
that is called [BL: callyd; N: callyd] ‘Iuuentus’, Youthe, ‘Non [BL: Non;
N: Nonæ] dicuntur quasi nulle’, for in þat [BL: that; N: that] daye the
Romayns worshypt no Goddes, nother in þat [BL: that; N: that] season
330 was noo festyuall dayes; or elles, ‘None dicuntur quasi nundine’, ‘as moche
to saye as a fayer’, for in that tyme they occupied themself in fayers and
marchaundyses. And herto conuenyently may be þe [BL: þe; N: the] Youthe
of man applyed, that is in specyall from xiiij yeres vnto xviij, in the whiche
he is ful of vndeuocyon, and all moost forgeteth [BL: forgetith; N: forgetith]
335 to worshyp his God or ony saynt. And yf he do it with his mouth, [BL:
mouthe; N: mouthe] his herte is full [BL: ful; N: ful] ferre from God about
[BL: aboute; N: aboute] worldly vanytees, as it is wryten, ‘Populus hic labiis
me honorat, cor autem eorum longe est a me’, Ysay xxix. Congruently also
Youth [BL: youthe; N: Youthe] may [BL: maye; N: maye] be named [BL:
340 namyd; N: namyd] ‘None i. nundine’, ‘a fayer or market’, for in this age is
the marchaundyse of the deuyll, the worlde habundauntly bought. Here the
yonge man byeth a strompettes body for his body and soule. Here all vayne
marchaundyses of þe [BL: the; N: the] worl[sig. b iij recto]de ben [BL: ben;
N: bene] bought, to the whiche is very prone and redy our [BL: oure; N:
345 oure] youthe of Englonde, as we may see dayly. Ther [BL: There; N: There] is
no vanyte in no partye of the worlde but we ben [BL: ben; N: bene] redy to
bye it: longe heres and shorte collers of Almayns, euyll fasshenyd garmentes
and deuyllysshe shoon [BL: de|uyllisshe shoon; N: devyllisshe shoone] and

slyppers of Frens[h]men; [BL: frenshmen; N: Frensmen; H: frensmen]
350 powches and paynted gyrdels [BL: gyrdylles; N: gyrdylles] of Spaynardes;
newe founde hattes of Romayns; and so is fulfylled the wordes of oure lorde
[BL: lord; N: Lord] wryten in holy scrypture, Ieremie xi, ‘Elongauerunt a
me, et ambulauerunt post vanitatem, et vani facti sunt’, ‘This youthe’, sayth
our lorde, ‘hath ferre put hymselfe fro me, and they have walked after theyr
355 owne vanytees, and by theyr inuencyons they ben [BL: ben; N: bene] all
vayne and undoubted’. [BL: undoubtyd; N: undoubtyd] This alterable
vanytees in garmentes is a true argument and a faythfull conclusyon to all
wyse straungers that Englysshmen [BL: englysshe men; N: Englysshemen] be
[BL: ben; N: bee] as chaungable in theyr maners and wyttes as they be in
360 outwarde garmentes. And yf this vayne marchaundyse were oonly in youth
of the reame it were more tollerable, but ‘inueterati dierum malorum’, boyes
of fyfty [BL: .l.; N: fyfty] yere of age are as newe fangled as ony yonge men
be, the whiche by reason sholde [BL: reason sholde; N: reasons holde, clearly
a typographical error] torne theyr face from þe [BL: þe; N: the] worlde,
365 considerynge [BL: consideryng; N: consideryng] the ende of theyr lyf. [BL:
lyfe; N: lyfe] But lytell þat [BL: that; N: that] is consydered — ye, rather in
theyr vanytees the[y] ben [BL: they ben; N: they bene; H: the ben] praysed,
‘Quoniam laudatur [BL: landatur; N: laudatur] peccator in desideriis anime
sue, et iniquis benedicetur’, Psalmo et cetera. [BL: Psalmo.; N: Psalmo, etc]
370 And [BL: om.; N: And] the thyrde daye is called [BL: callyd; N:
callyd] Ydus, the whiche is as moche to say [BL: saye; N: saye] as ‘diuisio’, a
departynge. By whom [sig. b iij verso] I vnderstande the latter age of man,
in the whiche man is dyuyded from the worlde by deth, [BL: deth; N: dethe]
to the ende for to receyue good or euyll as he hath deserued in this presente
375 [BL: present; N: present] lyfe. Lykewyse thenne, as in the fyrste [BL: fyrst;
N: fyrst] parte [BL: parte; N: part] of the moneth there is but one daye that
is called Kalende, the [BL: callyd Kalende þe; N: callyd Kalendæ the] whiche
is the fyrst [BL: fyrste; N: fyrste] daye of all, but in the later ende there be
many dayes that ben [BL: ben; N: bene] named of the worde Kalendas, so, in
380 comparyson of the fyrst daye of thy lyf, [BL: lyfe; N: lyfe] that is to saye [BL:
say; N: say] of thy childehode, in the whiche thou were [BL: were; N; wert]
wel [BL: well; N: well] dysposed [BL: disposyd; N: disposyd] in deuocyon,
multeplye [BL: Multpylye; N: multeplye] thy good lyf and holy dysposycyon
in thy latter dayes, that þu [BL: þat thou; N: that thou] mayest deserue oure
385 lordes mercy, sayenge with the prophete in the sawter, ‘Et senectus mea in
misericordia vberi.’ And how be it thou hast often before in thy yonge age
and myddell age dyuyded thy lyf [BL: dyuydyd thy lyfe; N: dyvydyd thy lyfe]
somtyme to vertue, somtyme to vyce, ye — as now in thy latter age kepe
[BL: kepte; N: kepe] thy lyf [BL: lyfe; N: lyfe] holy in vertue. Dyuyde it no
390 more tyll deth [BL: dethe; N: dethe] dyuyde it, after the counseylles [BL:
counsell; N: counsell] of the gospelles, Iohannes [BL: Iohannis; N: Joh’is] xix:
‘Non scindamus eam, sed sorciamur de ea cuius sit’, ‘Lete vs not cutte it, but
lete vs drawe [BL: draw; N: draw] lottes whoos [BL: whose; N: whose] it
shall be.’
395 How be it this texte after the letter is vnderstande [BL: vnderstonde;
N: understonde] of Crystys cote without seme, yet conuenyently it may be
vnderstande [BL: vnderstonde; N: understonde] of euery mannes lyf [BL:
mannys lyfe; N: mannys lyfe] or soule, ‘Tunica dicitur quasi tua vnica.’
Whether is more surer thyne owne than thy soule, for the whiche prayeth þe
400 [BL: þe; N: the] prophete, sayenge, [BL sayeng; N: sayeng] ‘Erue a framea,
Deus, animam meam, et de manu canis unicam [sig. b iiij recto] meam.’
And whyle it is so that man lyueth [BL: liueth; N: lyveth] here in two lyues,
[one] [BL: and; N: one; H: and] lyuynge after þe [BL: the; N: the] pleasur
of the worlde, the tother lyuynge here in vertue by grace to come to blysse,
405 tho that wol gyue [BL: woll geue; N: woll geve] one partye of theyr lyf [BL:
lyfe; N: lyfe] to vyces and another to vertue, and specially in theyr age, thyse
maner of men dyuyde theyr cote, and they, nother all the tayllers in þe [BL:
þe; N: the] worlde, shall neuer make it hole ayen, for, as Saynt Ierom [BL:
Ierom; N: Jerome] sayth in a pystle, ‘Difficile, ymmo impossibile est, vt quis
410 in presenti et in futuro fruatur gaudiis, vt hic ventrem et ibi mentem, et de
deliciis transiat’, ‘It is harde — ye it is impossyble — that a man may have
alle ioye in this worlde and also in heuen here to fylle his body and there to
fylle his mynde.’ For truly the delytes of this worlde and the ioyes of heuen
can neuer be togyder in one cote of thy soule. Wherfore yf thy cote of thy
415 soule be ones hoole in vertue, without ony seme of vyce, [BL: vice; N: vice]
departe it neuer, but lete it retorne ‘in sortem Domini’, and contynue [BL:
contynewe; N: contynewe] thy lyf [BL: lyfe; N: lyfe] in goodnesse without
ony interrupcyon. And lykewyse as in thy childehode thou begannest vertue
oonly, where thrugh in that age thou prayseste almyghty God, so in thy
420 myddel [BL: mydyll; N: myddell] age, all wanton vanytees layde aparte, [BL:
layed a part; N: layed apart] encresse thy vertue [BL: vertu; N: vertu] as tho
dyde of whom it is wryten, ‘Ibunt de virtute in virtutem quousque videatur
Deus.’ And that the ende may be conformable to his pryncyple without
dyuysyon, folowynge [BL: diuysion folowynge; N: dyvysion, followynge]
425 the wayes of innocency with thyse holy Innocentes, [BL: Innocentes; N:
Innocents] in whoos [BL: whose; N: whose] commendacions syngeth our

moder Holy Chir[sig. b iiij verso]che, ‘Nouit Dominus viam innocentum
qui non steterunt in viis peccatorum.’ And, yf we be in synne, to repare
ourselfe to the state of grace without wyll to falle agayne. [BL: agayn; N:
430 agayn] And in recognysaunce of this gracyous benefyte of remyssyon,
we may louyngly prayse God, as I exhorted [BL: exhortyd; exhortyd] you
before, sayenge, [BL: sayeng; N: sayeng] ‘Laudate, pueri, Dominum’, graunt
us all, Cryste Ihesus, ‘Splendor patris, corona innocencium’.
Amen.
Explicit sermo ista.
Works Cited
Manuscripts
—— , MS Cotton Vespasian A.xxv
Early Printed Texts

Alcock, John, Gallicantus Iohannis alcock […] (London: Richard Pynson, 1498), STC 277
—— , Mons perfectionis (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1496, 1497; London: Richard
Pynson, 1497–98, and Wynkyn de Worde, 1501), STC 278–281
—— , Sermo in die innocentium pro episcopo puerorum (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde,
c. 1496 and c. 1497–98), STC 282–283
—— , [Sermon on Luke VIII] (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, c. 1496, c. 1497–98, and
?1502), STC 284–285.5
—— , Spousage of a Virgin (Westminster; Wynkyn de Worde, c. 1497–98; c. 1497–98),
STC 286–287
Fitzjames, Richard, Sermo die lune in ebdomada pasche (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde,
c. 1495–96), STC 11024
—— , Sermo die lune in ebdomada Pasche by Richard Fitz-James: Printed at Westminster by
Wynkyn de Worde about the Year 1495, facs. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1907)
Primary Sources
Machyn, Henry, The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. by John Bowyer Nichols, Camden
Society, n.s., 42 (London: Nichols, 1848)
Temp. Mary, ed. by John Gough Nichols, Camden Society, n.s., 14 (Westminster:
Nichols, 1875)
A Victorian Response to a fifteenth-Century Incunabulum 389
Secondary Studies
Blench, J. W., Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study
of English Sermons, 1450–c. 1600 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964)
Boffey, Julia, ‘The Treatise of a Galaunt in Manuscript and Print’, The Library, 6th ser., 15
(1993), 175–86
Catalogue of Books Printed in the xvth Century Now in the British Library, Part 11:
England (’t Goy-Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2007)
Chambers, E. K., The Mediæval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903)
Dahhaoui, Yann, ‘Entre ludus et ludibrium: attitudes de l’Eglise médiévale à l’égard de
l’évêque des Innocents (xiiie–xve siècle)’, in Tempus ludendi: chiesa e ludicità nella
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Ludica: Annali di storia e civiltà del gioco, 13–14 (2007–08)), pp. 183–98
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—— , ‘Le Pape de Saint-Etienne: fête des Saints-Innocents et imitation du cérémonial pon-
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par ses collègues et élèves de l’Université de Lausanne, ed. by Bernard Andenmatten
and others, Cahiers lausannois d’histoire médiévale, 48 (Lausanne: Université de
Lausanne — Section d’histoire, 2008), pp. 141–58
—— , ‘Voyages d’un prélat festif: un “évêque des Innocents” dans son évêché’, Revue histo-
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(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 233–42
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Erler, Mary C., ed., Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London (London:
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Journal of the British Archaeological Association, n.s., 11 (1905), 30–48, 231–56
Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 91 (1821); 97 (1827)
Hellinga, Lotte, ed., Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century: E. Gordon Duff ’s
Bibliography, with Supplementary Descriptions, Chronologies, and a Census of Copies
(London: Bibliographical Society, British Library, 2009)
Hunt, Arnold, ‘The Sale of Richard Heber’s Library’, in Under the Hammer: Book Auctions
since the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote
(London: British Library, 2001), pp. 143–72
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Ævum, 66 (1997), 94–114
Leach, Arthur F., ‘The Schoolboys’ Feast’, The Fortnightly Review, n. s., 59 (1896), 128–41
Mackenzie, Neil, The Medieval Boy Bishops (Leicester: Troubadour, 2012)
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1937)
Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006)
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for the Book Trade Biography’, in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from
the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, ed. by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles
Mandelbrote (London: British Library, 2002), pp. 119–50
—— , ‘The Papers of the Nichols Family and Business: New Discoveries and the Work of
the Nichols Archive Project’, The Library, 7th ser., 2 (2001), 10–52
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outside the Bodleian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)
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Bishop Sermons, and Pedagogical Violence’, in Speculum Sermonis: Interdisciplinary
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and Richard Utz, Disputatio, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 141–55
Shahar, Shulamith, ‘The Boy-Bishop’s Feast: A Case-Study in Church Attitudes towards
Children in the High and Late Middle Ages’, in The Church and Childhood, ed. by
Diana Wood, Studies in Church History, 31 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 243–60
—— , Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990)
Smith, Julie A., ‘An Image of a Preaching Bishop in Late Medieval England: The 1498
Woodcut Portrait of Bishop John Alcock’, Viator, 21 (1990), 301–22
Ward, Anthony, ‘Richard Ramsey’s Sermon for a Boy Bishop (1558): Tudor Catholic
Sermons 2’, Ephemerides Liturgicae, 111 (1997), 476–505
—— , ‘A Sermon for a Boy Bishop by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely (1430–1486–1500):
Tudor Catholic Sermons 3’, Ephemerides Liturgicae, 112 (1998), 58–81
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Literature of the English Renaissance, ed. by Jeanie Watson (Lexington: University
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195–205)
Susan Powell: List of Publications
Prepared by Ronald Waldron
Books
Middle English Texts, 13 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981)
The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist vi: A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing
Middle English Prose in Yorkshire Libraries and Archives (with O. S. Pickering) (Cam
bridge: Brewer, 1989)
New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift in Honour of R. A. Waldron (ed.
with Jeremy J. Smith) (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000)
1491 Edition of John Mirk’s ‘Festial’, Middle English Texts, 37 (Heidelberg: Winter,
2007)
John Mirk’s ‘Festial’: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II., EETS, o.s.,
334–35, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–11)
Chapters in Books
‘The Transmission and Circulation of The Lay Folks’ Catechism’, in Late-Medieval Reli
gious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. by A. J. Minnis
‘Why Quattuor Sermones?’, in Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society,
ed. by John Scattergood and Julia Boffey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 181–95
‘Untying the Knot: Reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’, in New Perspectives on
Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron, ed. by Susan Powell and Jeremy
J. Smith (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 55–74
‘All Saints’ Church, North Street, York: Text and Image in the Pricke of Conscience Window
at All Saints’, North Street, York’, in Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, ed. by
Nigel Morgan, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 12 (Donington: Tyas, 2004), pp. 292–316
392 Susan Powell: List of Publications
‘The Festial: The Priest and his Parish’, in The Parish in Late Medieval England: Proceedings
of the 2002 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Clive Burgess and Eamon Duffy, Harlaxton
Medieval Studies, 14 (Donington: Tyas, 2006), pp. 160–76
‘John Audelay and John Mirk: Comparisons and Contrasts’, in ‘My Wyl and My Wrytyng’:
Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. by Susanna Fein, Medieval Institute Publications
(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009), pp. 86–111
‘John to John: The Manuale Sacerdotis and the Daily Life of a Parish Priest’, in Recording
Medieval Lives, ed. by Julia Boffey and Virginia Davis, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 17
(Donington: Tyas, 2009), pp. 112–29
‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’, in Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena:
Papers from a Symposium in Stockholm, 4–6 October 2007, ed. by Claes Gejrot, Sara
Risberg, and Mia Åkestam, Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien,
Konferenser, 73 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien,
2010), pp. 50–70
‘After Arundel but before Luther: The First Half-Century of Print’, in After Arundel:
Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik
Ghosh, Medieval Church Studies, 21 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 523–41
‘‘‘For ho is quene of cortaysye”: The Assumption of the Virgin in Pearl and the Festial’,
in In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife. Essays in Memory
of J. J. Anderson, ed. by David Matthews (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2011), pp. 76–95
‘Lady Margaret Beaufort as Patron’, in Patrons and Professionals in the Middle Ages, ed. by
Elizabeth New and Paul Binski, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 22 (Donington: Tyas,
2012), pp. 100–21
Journal Articles and Other Contributions

‘The Origins of a Fifteenth-Century Sermon Collection: MSS Harley 2247 and Royal 18
B XXV’ (with Alan J. Fletcher), Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 10 (1978), 74–96
‘“In Die Sepulture seu Trigintali”: The Late Medieval Funeral and Memorial Sermon’
(with Alan J. Fletcher), Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 12 (1981), 195–228 (repr. in
Alan J. Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry in Late-Medieval England (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 170–97)
‘Connections between the Fasciculus Morum and Bodleian MS Barlow 24’, Notes and
Queries, n.s., 29 (1982), 10–14
‘A New Dating of John Mirk’s Festial’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 29 (1982), 487–89
‘Another Manuscript of Index of Middle English Verse No. 2627’, Notes and Queries, n.s.,
34 (1987), 154–56
‘An Accident-Prone Anglo-Saxon’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 35 (1988), 154–57
‘Lollards and Lombards: Late-Medieval Bogeymen?’, Medium Ævum, 59 (1990), 133–39
‘John Mirk’s Festial and the Pastoral Programme’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 22 (1991),
85–102
Susan Powell: List of Publications 393
‘The Medieval Church in the Sixteenth Century: The Post-Reformation History of a

Fourteenth-Century Sermon Collection’, University of Salford, European Studies
Research Institute Working Papers in Literary and Cultural Studies, 2 (1994)
‘Syon, Caxton, and the Festial’, Birgittiana, 2 (1996), 187–207
‘Prolegomena to a New Edition of the Festial’, Manuscripta, 41 (1997), 171–84
‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, The Library, 6th ser., 20 (1998), 197–240
‘What Caxton Did to the Festial: From Manuscript to Printed Edition’, Journal of the
Early Book Society, 1 (1998 for 1997), 48–77
‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 31 (2000), 229–67
St George of England: An Edition of the Sermon for St George’s Day from Mirk’s Festial’,
Tant d’Emprises — So Many Undertakings: Essays in Honour of Anne F. Sutton, ed. by
Livia Visser-Fuchs, Ricardian, 13 (2003), 371–83
‘John Mirk’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004)
‘Pastoralia and the Lost York Plays of the Creed and Paternoster’, European Medieval
Drama, 8 (2004), 235–50
‘Margaret Pole and Syon Abbey’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), 563–67
‘A Neglected Copy of John Mirk’s Mary Magdalene Sermon’ (with O. S. Pickering),
Medieval Sermon Studies, 49 (2005), 59–68
‘Syon Abbey and the Mother of King Henry VII: The Relationship of Lady Margaret
Beaufort with the English Birgittines’, Birgittiana, 19 (2005), 211–24 (one of four
fascicules devoted to papers delivered at the Jubilee Symposium ‘Seven Centuries of
Birgittine Spirituality and Culture’, Vadstena, Sweden, August 2003)
‘Cox Manuscript 39: A Rare Survival of Sermons Preached at Syon Abbey?’, Medieval
Sermon Studies, 52 (2008), 42–62
‘The Nativity of the Virgin and St Katherine: Additions to John Mirk’s Festial’, Leeds
Studies in English: Essays in Honour of Oliver Pickering, ed. by Janet Burton, William
Marx, and Veronica O’Mara, n.s., 41 (2010), 172–85
Forthcoming and Works in Progress

A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558 (co-editor with Vincent
Gillespie) (Cambridge: Brewer)
An Edition and Translation of the ‘Manuale Sacerdotis’ of John Mirk (edition and transla-
tion; with James Girsch) (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies)
An Edition of the Household Papers of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Housed in St John’s College,
Cambridge (London: British Academy), in the series Records of Social and Economic
History
‘In Praise of the Variant: Why Edit Critically? A Pragmatic Viewpoint’, in Probable Truth:
Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Vincent
Gillespie and Anne Hudson, Texts and Transitions, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols)
Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, 1350–1550: Packaging, Presentation and Con
sumption (co-editor with Emma Cayley) (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press)
Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval,
and Reformation Sermons and Preaching
All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic
grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned
by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the
screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive
texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being
approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the
publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field.
Titles in Series
Ruth Horie, Perceptions of Ecclesia: Church and Soul in Medieval Dedication Sermons (2006)
Veronica O’Mara and Suzanne Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons (2007)
Constructing the Medieval Sermon, ed. by Roger Andersson (2007)
Kimberly A. Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice: Memory, Images, and
Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (2010)
Alan John Fletcher, Late Medieval Popular Preaching in Britain and Ireland: Texts,
Studies, and Interpretations (2010)
Holly Johnson, The Grammar of Good Friday: Macaronic Sermons of Late Medieval
England (2012)
The Last Judgement in Medieval Preaching, ed. by Thom Mertens, Maria Sherwood-
Smith, Michael Mecklenburg, and Hans-Jochen Schiewer (2013)
In Preparation
Sermo doctorum: Compilers, Preachers, and their Audiences in the Early Medieval West, ed.
by Maximilian Diesenberger, Yitzhak Hen, and Marianne Pollheimer
Preaching and Political Society: From Late Antiquity to the End of the Middle Ages / Depuis
l’Antiquité tardive jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. by Franco Morenzoni

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[Sermo_ Studies on Patristic, Medieval, And Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 11] Martha W. Driver, Veronica O&#39;Mara - Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England_ Essays in Honour of Susan Pow

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Preaching the Word

in M anuscript and P rint

Essays in Honour of Susan Powell

Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara

Preaching the word in manuscript and print in late medieval England :

© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Preface: Susan Powell and the Growing Study

A Cycle Recycled: Sermons from Carolingian Italy in a

So Far and Yet So Near: Distance or Proximity of Author

Preaching by Numbers: The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost in

Preaching with a Pen: Audience and Self-Regulation in

Scribal Performance in a Late Middle English Sermon Cycle

Sacerdotis predicacio operibus confirmanda est:

Punctuating Mirk’s Festial: A Scottish Text and its Implications

Dating Wynkyn de Worde’s Devotional,

Preachers in Pictures from Manuscript to Print

Some Middle English Sermon Verse and

The Syon Pardon Sermon: Contexts and Texts

A Victorian Response to a Fifteenth‑Century Incunabulum:

Susan Powell: List of Publications

anteed entertaining, thought-provoking, and (mildly) subversive conversation.

Martha W. Driver and Veronica O’Mara

influenced by Latin traditions and homiletic procedures. The B-version of the

Abbey (1415–1539), the Martiloge of the brethren (London, British Library,

reduce its outspokenness — in consequence modifying the effectiveness of its

J. J. Jusserand.4 It is a specifically English kind of ‘social gospel’, and Owst looks

eral manuscripts of which Owst used; the Florarium Bartholomei of John of

There is an alarming banality or naivety about Owst’s contemporary parallels.22

He compares the excitement of a medieval congregation at the bestiary exempla

There is a problem. How could such original scholarship, brought so suc-

a fierce polemicist, famously contentious, who made his public reputation as

R. N. Swanson (r.n.swanson@bham.ac.uk) is professor of Medieval Ecclesiastical History at

in Bodley 123 have been linguistically located to Cheshire and Staffordshire,

James, Montague Rhodes, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St

Anne Hudson (anne.hudson@lmh.ox.ac.uk) is emeritus professor of Medieval English at the

coverage: it is now Praha, Narodní Knihovna (formerly Praha, Universitní

stedter Handschriften, i, 251, and ii, 45–46.

Krakow university), found on an opening flyleaf; the name is that of Andrzej

but the other two have:

but the two continental copies have:

The Trinity scribe not infrequently writes nonsense, or has an incomprehensi-

(p. 292/14) speaks of the Earthquake Council, at which twenty-four theses

published in 1997) and more recently in ‘From Oxford to Bohemia’.

William Marx (w.marx@tsd.ac.uk) is reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Wales,

According to this stanza The Devils’ Parliament is intended to be read on

It is possible that the B-version of The Devils’ Parliament is an example of a

And now hath he xij dysypulys to his attendauns.

Goddys son he pretendyth, and to be born of a mayde,

In al þis ioyȝe Sathanas fro erþe gan go;

‘Certes I drede me’, quod þe deuel, ‘lest truþe do hem fecche.

For þe body, while it on bones yede, aboute was euere

‘But Ihesus soule ys Y not neuere where

This passage suggests that a popular interpretation was in circulation, but

Early Printed Text

Mirk stresses the transformational effect of the coming of the spirit:

Similarly, whereas the disciples had previously been reluctant to proselytize

Humeleté, pride he dothe downe falle;

requisite knowledge, such concepts might be readily conveyed via preaching,

devotion were taken up by the early printers: Quattuor sermones, a compila-

further investigation it might be possible to locate some versions with particu-

Early Printed Texts

Utilizing the time-honoured idea of ignorancia sacerdotum, the Festial is here

[Sermo_ Studies on Patristic, Medieval, And Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 11] Martha W. Driver, Veronica O'Mara - Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England_ Essays in Honour of Susan Pow

[Sermo_ Studies on Patristic, Medieval, And Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 11] Martha W. Driver, Veronica O'Mara - Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England_ Essays in Honour of Susan Pow

Liber privilegiorum monasterii Vadstenensis, ed. by Ernst Nygren (København: Munks