The Composite Nature of Eleventh-Century Homiliaries: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 421

Summary

THE PRODUCTION OF English vernacular homilies in the eleventh century has often been studied with regard to textual transmission and adaptation. Much focus has been placed on the eleventh-century practices of adapting earlier sources to the needs of new users, and to studying the different purposes underlying the original production of, for instance, Ælfric and Wulfstan. These studies provide invaluable evidence regarding the interests and concerns of those preachers who were interested in using Ælfric and Wulfstan's homiletic texts in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. However, the form in which such adaptations of earlier homilies were collected physically and conceptually has not been easy to comprehend or to describe, because codicological analyses are only just beginning to illuminate eleventh-century homiletic production from a scriptorial perspective. Treharne's studies in the palaeography and codicology of eleventh- and twelfth-century English vernacular manuscripts have uncovered the multilayered structure of homiletic codices as far as the organisation of both the codicology and content are concerned. Many eleventh-century vernacular homiliaries seem indeed to have lacked the liturgical coherence that characterised the initial arrangement of Ælfric's two series of Catholic Homilies as conceived by the author himself, for example. Seemingly, many eleventh-century collections of homilies show hardly any liturgical rationale in the form in which they currently stand. This liturgical inconsistency may well be due to the fact that the volumes in which they appear have undergone substantial codicological and palaeographical alterations, often carried out in different stages throughout very long periods of time; however, in most cases it is difficult to discern liturgical, and at times thematic, coherence, even after a reliable codicological reconstruction of the volumes in question has been attempted and completed. The complexities of what may be termed an inconsistent nature make the explicit cogency of eleventh-century codices almost unintelligible when one seeks to make sense of their function and cultural value. This is even more the case because these volumes contain homilies whose contents and rigid preaching diction, when studied outside a liturgical context, do not facilitate the modern scholar's comprehension of their cultural significance, or the meanings that they had for eleventh-century audiences – whenever it is possible to identify those audiences, that is. One may observe that the principle underpinning many eleventh-century composite homiliaries seems to rest on the provision of a varied selection of texts, which can often occur independently from any specific religious occasion.