This book demonstrates that monastic preaching was a diverse activity which included preaching by monks, nuns and heretics. The study offers a preliminary step in understanding how preaching shaped monastic identity in the Middle Ages.

Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages presents research by specialists of preaching history and literature. This volume fills some of the lacunae which exists in medieval sermon studies. The topics include: an analysis of how oral and written cultures meet in sermon literature, the function of vernacular sermons, an examination of the usefulness of non-sermon sources such as art in the study of preaching history, sermon genres, the significance of heretical preaching, audience composition and its influence on sermon content, and the use of rhetoric in sermon construction. The study looks at preaching history and literature from a wide geographical and chronological area which includes examples from Anglo-Saxon England to late medieval Italy. While doing so, it outlines the state of sermon studies research and points to new areas of investigation.

The third Morton W. Bloomfield Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 1993.

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

Until the Reformation, almost all sermons were written down in Latin. This is the first scholarly study systematically to describe and analyse the collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Basing his studies on the extant manuscripts, Siegfried Wenzel analyses these sermons and the occasions when they were given. Larger issues of preaching in the later Middle Ages such as the pastoral concern about preaching, originality in sermon making, and the attitudes of orthodox preachers to Lollardy, receive detailed attention. The surviving sermons and their collections are listed for the first time in full inventories, which supplement the critical and contextual material Wenzel presents. This book is an important contribution to the study of medieval preaching, and will be essential for scholars of late medieval literature, history and religious thought.