This volume contains nine papers, all but one of which were first presented at a 2019 conference on late antique anonymous sermons at the University of Namur. These papers delve at length into the language, sources, and manuscript transmission of particular sermons or homiliaries; roughly half include an edition of a previously unpublished Latin source. The philological acumen that went into this volume is astounding. My favorite essay is Raùl Villegas Marín's study of the so-called “Eusebius Gallicanus” homiliary: a series of sixty-seven sermons, largely arranged according to the liturgical year, which Marín demonstrates were produced in the diocese of Riez around the year 540 under the influence of Caesarius of Arles (although many sermons in the homiliary are at least a half century older).
Yet, despite the high-quality research, I am unsure whom this volume is for. That is, what type of scholar will want to own the whole collection, rather than scan a relevant essay or two out of a library copy? The problem is that, as Matthieu Pignot's introduction admits, “Latin anonymous sermon” is not a genre. Some of these texts were anonymous even in Late Antiquity. Others lost their author's name during transmission. Still others were deliberately pseudonymous. Some originated in Latin; others are translations from an eastern language. Their audience could be lay congregants, monks celebrating the office, or perhaps just private readers. The only thing these sermons share in common is that modern scholars relegated them all to obscurity, exiling them to the dubii or spurii sections at the end of most editions. Ironically, the goal of research on anonymous sermons is to make such research obsolete—to integrate each text instead into scholarship on, for example, asceticism, or Christianization, or the Fall of Rome, where these sermons will help far more.
