An edition of the sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent from the manuscripts of the Unexpanded Middle English Northern Homily Cycle : textual and dialectical introductions, text, table of variant readings, and glossary

The Northern Homily Cycle, extant in three redactions, is the largest collection of rhymed sermons in Middle English. The present work contains an edition of the sermon and exemplum for the Second Sunday of Advent in the Unexpended redaction of the Cycle. In addition to this text from the Bodleian MS. 6923, the work includes a table of variant readings from nine other manuscript versions of the Unexpended Cycle; the Bute MS.; the British Museum MS. Additional 30358; the British Museum MS. Additional 38010; the Cambridge University Library MS. Dd I.l; the Cambridge University Library MS. Gg V.31; the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh MS.; the Barley Library MS. 2391; the Huntington Library MS. 129; and the Lambeth Palace Library MS. 260. Also included are a study of the sermon and the exemplum's sources, a textual and dialectical study of the manuscripts, and a glossary.

The study of source materials includes a description of the Fifteen Signs before the Day of Judgement, the prominent eschatological topic of the sermon. Chapter ii describes the various sources for the tradition of the Signs, sources which range chronically from the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl incorporated in St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei to the twelfth century commentaries of Peter Comestor. The chapter also describes the narrative sources of the sermon's exemplum, the Black Monk Who Returned From Death.

Chapter IV utilizes random samplings of readings in the sermon and exemplum to determine genetic lines of descent for the Cycle manuscripts. Tabular comparisons of the readings are produced under four determining criteria: lexical similarity, morphological similarity, word order similarity, and graphological similarity.

Lastly, Chapter V contains dialect analyses or summaries of the manuscripts; the scribal dialect of each manuscript has been established in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (1986), Volume III, or has been analyzed for provenance using a number of Middle English dialect features geographically plotted in the Atlas, Volumes II and IV.