10 - Robert Rypon (RY)

Summary

With Robert Rypon we return to the standard and conventional scholastic sermon in Latin. A Benedictine monk from Durham Priory, he was trained at Oxford, where he had become a bachelor in theology by 1392–1393 and incepted as doctor of theology by 1406. At home he served as subprior for about two decades and was prior of Finchley, a dependency of Durham Cathedral priory, at the turn of the century (1397–1405). He evidently was occasionally sent out from the priory to preach in the countryside. Rypon died at some time after 1419. Like his fellow Benedictines Sheppey and Brinton, he left an important collection of sermons.

Orderliness is the first impression one gets of the fifty-nine sermons ascribed to him in the unique manuscript, British Library, MS Harley 4894, which once belonged to Durham Priory. Almost a de luxe book, it is written in a careful Secretary bookhand of the early fifteenth century with some Anglicana features. All sermons bear clear indications of their occasions. Each begins with an enlarged, flourished, and illuminated capital, and the first page as well as the opening of the synodal sermons (f. 193) have a decorated border. The text is surrounded by large margins with annotations that call attention to the major sermon parts and to their subject matter; only rarely do they register a correction. The left margins also contain letters that, in the order of the alphabet, divide the pages for each sermon into two halves.