19 - Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 96 (CO)

Summary

One more unified collection originated about the middle of the fifteenth century, albeit an anonymous one. Magdalen College, MS 96, a fifteenth-century parchment codex, contains in its entirety a curious sermon collection entitled Tercia pars congestorum a festo pentecostes usque ad festum sancte Anne – the third volume of what must have been an entire cycle of mixed de tempore and de sanctis sermons named Congesta, of which the two preceding and the following parts are not known to have survived. On its 317 large folios the volume presents only twenty sermons, which cover the Sundays from Pentecost to the seventh Sunday after Trinity with some intervening ferial days and saints’ feasts including Corpus Christi, all in correct liturgical order. The last sermon in this volume is for St. James, so that the feast of St. Anne mentioned in the title would have formed the beginning sermon of part 4 of Congesta. The occasions for the individual pieces are clearly marked, and the pieces are consistently called sermones, both in the rubrics and internally.

The word Congesta for a book-title is rather unusual, and if for a modern reader the notion of congestion has unpleasant connotations, this collection fully lives up to them. For one thing, the sermons are exceptionally long: the shortest here covers forty-five, the longest over ninety-seven tightly written columns of fairly large size.