Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1987

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Mary P. Richards

Committee Members

John H. Fisher, Joseph B. Trahern, David W. Tandy

Abstract

The sermon cycle in Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 471 , Pt. II, is of interest to the student of Medieval sermon literature as a unique collection of sermons written in three languages (English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman) and arranged in temporale order, as a series that contains five, unique, early translations into English of Maurice de Sully's sermons, and as a testimony to the popularity of de Sully's French sermon cycle in thirteenth-century England. The interest the English translations, the Kentish Sermons, have received is primarily linguistic. Although the sermons have been analyzed as early MKt texts, this subject needs further treatment. To expand on the work that has been done on our text, the present study analyzes the Kentish Sermons not only as individual works of interest to the student of ME dialects, but as translations of French material, as texts in a unique sermon cycle, and as part of a MS that was compiled and circulated in thirteenth-century England. And since the sermon for Dominica Tercia post Octabus Epiphanie has not been edited since Hall 's 1920 edition of the sermons, this text is newly edited in the present study. In analyzing the Kentish Sermons, the sermon cycle of which they are a part, and the MS as a whole, this study accords fuller attention to topics that have been treated in the past and introduces others that suggest ways in which these texts may be valued by scholars.

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