Overview

In the later Middle Ages, preachers learned how to structure a sermon from technical treatises called artes praedicandi. These treatises taught and illustrated how to select a biblical text for the sermon of a given day and then develop it by means of divisions and various kinds of expansion. Their exposition is highly technical and sometimes can be obscure. About 240 such works are known to exist in Latin, but only a few of them have been edited and even fewer translated into modern English. Based on his wide-ranging knowledge of late-medieval Latin sermons from England as well as his editorial experience with medieval Latin texts, Siegfried Wenzel offers critical editions of five instruction manuals on the """"art of preaching"""" dating from 1230 to the fifteenth century. Four of the texts are edited and translated for the first time; the fifth is re-edited from all extant manuscripts. Each of the five sermons is accompanied by a facing-page translation into English. The book aims to stimulate interest and new research in a field that still awaits closer analysis of the relationships among existing treatises and of their historical development.

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9780813221373

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Reviews

The Art of Preaching will stimulate interest and new research into medieval homiletics, the predominant mode of communication throughout the Middle Ages until the advent of printing and lay reading in the Renaissance. The appearance of several of these artes in incunabula editions gives further witness to their longevity into early modern times. --Eugene Crook, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences Siegfried Wenzel's The Art of Preaching: Five Medieval Texts and Translations, an outstanding contribution to scholarship on the artes praedicandi, provides invaluable editions and translations of five artes praedicandi as well as four appendices Scholars will welcome the editions with accompanying side-by-side translations as a handy tool for research and a useful text in courses on medieval rhetoric, Latin, and preaching This volume will prove itself indispensable, as it makes valuable resources available to students and scholars who seek to understand the role of the artes praedicandi in medieval preaching. --Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Speculum This is, indeed, a great contribution to Medieval Studies, most welcome both by scholars and students alike. --Mediaevistik The work that Wenzel applies to the Latin text aims to make it both readable and semi-critical a book of reference in which one can be assured that the texts are well-constructed, accurate, and elegantly laid-out. The translations are graceful, correct, and stay close to the Latin text. The introductory and supplemental materials are to the point and knowledgeable. The Art of Preaching will stimulate interest and new research into medieval homiletics. --Eugene Crook, Humanities and Social Sciences Online This work is important and fascinating demonstrates how many of our present homiletical practices reflect the same principles taught in these five-hundred year-old manuals its significance for research, both in its content and in its approach, argues for its inclusion in institutional collections. --Timothy Warren - Dallas Theological Seminary, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society

Author Information

Siegfried Wenzel, a longtime professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA is author or editor of numerous books and articles, most recently Preaching in the Age of Chaucer (CUA Press). Wenzel is recipient of the Medieval Academy of America’s prestigious Charles Homer Haskins Medal for his contributions to medieval literature and religion.

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