The Trinity Homilies

The Trinity Homilies Synopsis

This is a new edition of an important collection of anonymous early Middle English sermons, the 'Trinity Homilies', copied towards the end of the twelfth century. This collection in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.52 has not been edited as a whole since Richard Morris included a lightly-edited text in his Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century (EETS, 1873). This new edition updates and supplements his work, giving more attention to the Latin elements of the sermons, and providing new translations, comprehensive annotation and a full glossary.

It also supplies, in appendices, separately edited texts and translations of sermon material shared with the Trinity manuscript in two other sermon-collections of about the same period, the 'Lambeth Homilies' in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487, and the collection formerly preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho A. xiii. Until recently the few surviving early Middle English sermon-collections have attracted relatively little scholarly attention, focused mainly on their debt to the pre-Conquest tradition of vernacular preaching.

Over the past two decades, however, their contemporary context has been investigated with increasing thoroughness, and their connections with recent developments in continental Europe are now taken more fully into account. The Trinity collection in particular shows the influence of two convergent factors: the evolution of new preaching techniques in the Paris schools of the later twelfth century, and the programme of pastoral reform introduced by the third Lateran Council of 1179 and reinforced by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

An extended introduction discusses the impact of these developments on preaching and pastoral care in twelfth-century England, the evidence for the pastoral milieu of the collection itself, and the ways in which its sermons reflect the transition from older to newer preaching methods in England during the inter-conciliar period.