A manuscript collection of homilies and sermons

[MANUSCRIPT]

Panegyrici et Homiliae. [19th-century hand-lettered title on front free endpaper]. Possibly French or Italian: likely very late thirteenth/ early fourteenth century. 19th-century Italian binding of quarter leather, marbled sides. 6 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches (17 x 12 cm); manuscript on vellum, 144 ff. written in 32 lines to the page in black ink with a good but heavily contracted Gothic textura bookhand, modestly rubricated throughout, f. 143 an index (possibly slightly later than the main text), f. 144 blank but ruled, the fore-edge of many leaves exhibiting pricking for rules. The binding worn, the front board creased, the vellum of rather low quality and somewhat irregular, occasional natural vellum flaws, a few sheets with (original) joints, occasional comparatively minor soiling and cockling, the final twelve leaves exhibiting minor losses in the lower margin.

This is a manuscript with a wide selection of homilies and sermons prepared for the major religious holidays and Saints' Days, including the Feast of the Nativity, the Assumption, the holidays of John the Baptist, St. Bartholomew, St. Nicholas, St. Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene, St. George, etc., etc. This would have been a work prepared fairly inexpensively (probably monastically) as a working manuscript for a busy and possibly itinerant cleric; as noted, many of the leaves show signs of marginal extension done at the time of the original composition, and the vellum in general is far from luxurious. The craft of homilectics, the art of preaching, was very highly considered as one of the branches of rhetoric, and a work of this kind would have been treasured and endlessly mined as a source for sermons.
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