Wenzel presents the history of the concept of acedia, of spiritual sloth," from its origins among the Egyptian desert monks through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The investigation proceeds in ch
The twenty-seven reprinted essays and one so far unpublished lecture assembled in this collection deal with works by Chaucer, Langland, Dante, Petrarch, Middle-English lyrics and drama, and several br
Until the Reformation, almost all sermons were written down in Latin. This is the first scholarly study systematically to describe and analyse the collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Basing his studies on the extant manuscripts, Siegfried Wenzel analyses these sermons and the occasions when they were given. Larger issues of preaching in the later Middle Ages such as the pastoral concern about preaching, originality in sermon making, and the attitudes of orthodox preachers to Lollardy, receive detailed attention. The surviving sermons and their collections are listed for the first time in full inventories, which supplement the critical and contextual material Wenzel presents. This book is an important contribution to the study of medieval preaching, and will be essential for scholars of late medieval literature, history and religious thought.
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 se
Between the early thirteenth and late fifteenth centuries, theologians and preachers in Western Europe adopted a distinct and rigidly structured sermon format. The scholastic sermon, as it was known,
Introducing modern readers to the riches of preaching in later medieval England, distinguished scholar Siegfried Wenzel offers translations of twenty-five Latin sermons written between 1350 and 1450.
