Congesta, written about the middle of the fifteenth century in England and only partially preserved, is a massive sermon commentary, originally in five volumes, covering the Sundays of the church year, some feast days and common sermons for saints, and two special occasions (“In Time of Persecution” and “For Religious”). Of the entire cycle only forty-six sermons are extant in two manuscripts (Oxford, Magdalen College MSS 96 and 212). The commentary deals at great length with the Epistle or Gospel lection of the respective Mass. Its anonymous author, probably an English Carthusian, excerpted long passages from over 130 named authors and anonymous works, including Petrus Berchorius, Saint Brigid of Sweden, and the Imitatio Christi. The sermons, which are basically moral postillation of the lections and show much concern with the qualities of a good pastor, can be seen as part of the reforming tendencies in the English church marked especially by Thomas Gascoigne. The article describes and discusses the sermon cycle, analyzes the sermon for 23 Trinity, and discusses the structure of the sermons and some of the authors of the later Middle Ages that are quoted or excerpted. An appendix lists the authors and anonymous works quoted in alphabetical order.

How does one rightly name and discern imitatio Christi, imitatio crucis, and the relation between them? In one provocative attempt to answer this question, John Howard Yoder identifies Christ-imaging in vulnerable enemy love and rejects all other criteria. This essay reads the iconoclasm of Yoder's approach through poetry of the cross by William Mure and John Donne. It then proceeds to repair Yoder's Mure-like posture with Donne, as well as the writings of Margaret Ebner and Margery Kempe. These texts destabilise the dichotomies that sustain Yoder's iconoclasm and illustrate the inadequacy of a single criterion for imitatio Christi. Yet Kempe and Ebner's texts are also infected with violence such that they, too, need repair. Vulnerable enemy love thus returns as a negative condition for Christ-imaging, and Yoder's strong iconoclasm is moderated to a weaker iconoclasm that breaks images purporting to be Christ-like but are, in fact, violent.