Homiliaria

I haven’t been writing much over here. That’s primarily due to several major work projects which have given me no time to work on the dissertation. As these pressures are easing, I’m hoping to do something constructive with this space.

I was trying to figure out what I could do that would be helpful for me, interesting for readers, and that would add to the volume of useful material freely and easily accessible. After giving it a little thought, I’ve decided to try looking at the sermon collections of patristic and later thinkers who tended to be anthologized in the Western homiliary tradition.

My plan, therefore, is each month to take a collection—like Gregory’s 40 Gospel Homilies or Leo’s sermons—to give an overview and sketch the bounds of the collection and its later use at the head of the month. Then, I’ll try and look at a representative sermon fro it each week and then, at the end of the month, make some reflections on exegetical technique and practice and anything else that’s caught my eye while reading through them.

I’m hoping this will give me a vehicle for disciplined reflection on the corpus of patristic and early medieval preaching and an opportunity to give folks a sense of who the preachers were, a sense of their personality beyond just a name in a source list.

Greetings. This blog is a place where I discuss the history of interpretation of the Christian Scriptures from their composition through the end of the early medieval period. As one of my research interests is scripture interpretation in Anglo-Saxon England (particularly the Benedictine Revival), I will arbitrarily set the end of the early medieval period with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

Topics discussed here may range anywhere from codicology to homiletic theory, from Patristics to postmodernism, but will focus around how Scripture was used and experienced in late antiquity and the early medieval periods.  Hermeneutics and the rhetorical/grammatical arts will be central, especially as embodied in the preaching and liturgy of the periods. As my dissertation focuses on homiletics and liturgics in Benectine Revival England, topics relating to Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon culture are also on the table. While I am an active layman in the Episcopal Church, this site is for public discussion of academic topics; church politics will not appear here…