Homilies and homiletic books in Norway, c. 1050-1550
Astrid Marner, post-doc with the project "from manuscript fragments to book history", investigates homilies and homiletic manuscripts using the Norwegian manuscript fragment material.
Main content
Homilies and homiletic books were written and read in Norway throughout the Christian Middle Ages. Single texts and collections are transmitted in Latin and Old Norse, but most of them in fragments. We know that the texts were read during mass and the prayer of the hours, but their use besides liturgy is somewhat blurred. My project investigates homilies and their book types that circulated in Norway in the period c. 1050-1550.
I chose 1050 as a starting point because our earliest manuscript fragments can be dated to the middle of the eleventh century. At that time, Norwegians used mostly homiletic books that had their roots in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, new mendicant orders came to the country, bringing with them new model texts and collections for preaching. These collections might have merged with earlier traditions. In addition, the early thirteenth-century Ordo Nidrosiensis - a set of rules prescribing the celebration of mass and Divine Office - specifies homilies for certain feast days, and the thirteenth century is also known for the development of a new book type, the breviarium plenum. The Norwegian fragment material displays relevant changes in the choice of homilies and their collection in manuscript, and it is these changes that the project focusses on.
The genre
A homily is preaching fixed in writing, which explains the gospel reading of the day verse by verse. By nature, it is an exegetical genre. It developed in Christian mass, but was also read in the night prayer of the Divine Office. It is also possible that people read homilies in order to learn more about their faith.
By the collective homiletic books/manuscripts I refer to all manuscript types that contain homilies and written preaching. Apart from florilegia and other religious textbooks, the most common manuscripts are liturgical:
- the homiliarium - a collection of homilies for the liturgical year
- the homily cycle - a collection of homilies by one author
- the lectionarium breviarii - a reading book for the night part of the Divine Office, it contains texts from the Bible and homilies
- the breviarium plenum - a book containing the readings, prayers and songs for all parts of the Divine Office
