16 - Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 200 (L)

Summary

Although anonymous, this is a unified collection of Latin sermons made by a Wycliffite author. It combines a regular series of forty-two sermons on the gospels for the Sundays and major non-dominical feasts from 1 Advent to 1 Trinity (with four saints sermons included in the correct liturgical position), the last sermon ending incomplete (L-1 to 42), with an equally regular sequence of thirteen sermons for the saints’ feasts from Andrew to John the Baptist, all but one again on the respective gospel lections (L-43 to 55). Parts of the cycle have also been preserved in five other fifteenth-century manuscripts. The entire collection as a whole, both de tempore and de sanctis sermons, is unified by its use of a peculiar sermon structure and by clear Wycliffite positions of its unknown author. In MS Laud misc. 200 it is written in one hand, and the sermons contain many cross references.

The structure this author has used is somewhat reminiscent of Repingdon or of the Repingdon-derived collection M/3. Essentially the sermons here fall into two parts. In the first, the author gives a moral-psychological interpretation of the entire gospel reading. Sometimes this is done phrase by phrase, similar to the postillatio format of Repingdon, but at other times the author recounts the gospel more discursively by giving it a comprehensive moral interpretation and then going through its parts in linear order, thus achieving, as it were, a psychological narrative.