Aelred, abbot of the Yorkshire Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147 to 1167, wrote six spiritual treatises, seven historical treatises, and 182 liturgical sermons, many of which he delivered as chapter talks to his monks. Translations of the first twenty-eight of these sermons appeared in CF 58 in 2001, translated by Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil Pennington, and sermons twenty-nine through forty-six appeared in CF 77 in 2015, translated by Marie Anne Mayeski. The current volume contains thirty-eight sermons for feasts from Advent through the Nativity of Mary, taken from the Durham and Lincoln collections, edited by Gaetano Raciti in CCCM 2B and 2C.

Isaac of Stella was an English-born Cistercian who studied in the schools before entering monastic life and becoming abbot of Stella in 1147. His liturgical sermons inject a speculative philosophical inquisitiveness into imaginative meditations on scenes from Scripture. This present volume includes sermons 27-55, along with three fragments. In these sermons, while treating biblical passages corresponding to the major feasts of the Christian calendar, Isaac tackles weighty dogmatic issues such as predestination, the problem of evil, and Christ's two natures.