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Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval
repositories. Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by
Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories
of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six
manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose
were already present when the library was temporarily transferred
to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further
manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the
last few years the library has become home to the older part of
Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven
manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is
large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle
English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror,
for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as
are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles
(including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical
recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises.
Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items,
ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis
Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the
University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the
University of Hull.
This collection of essays by Douglas Jefferson from various periods
of his distinguished career and by fellow academics writing in
response to his work represents a novel dialogic form of literary
criticism. In his essays ranging from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" to the
"Canon", Jefferson is always stimulating and engaging, while
offering nuanced and informed readings of his chosen texts.
Replying to Jefferson's work, contemporary critics have variously
extended his ideas, disclosing new ways of reading texts in the
light of current debate and more theoretical developments, or have
adopted a more discursive strategy in using ideas derived from
Jefferson's essays to provoke further explorations. Douglas
Jefferson (1912-2001) spent virtually his entire academic life at
the University of Leeds, starting as an undergraduate in the School
of English in 1930, and interrupted only by his studies at the
University of Oxford (Merton College), where he gained a B.Litt in
1937, and his educational services in Egypt during the Second World
War. His was a career remarkable for distinguished service to his
profession, comprising not only an extensive range of publications
on writers from John Dryden to Iris Murdoch but in the care with
which he nurtured and encouraged generations of students and
colleagues both at home and abroad in the study of English
literature.
This Repertorium is part of a European initiative called SERMO,
which is distinct from the present eponymous book series, and is a
series of separate projects making available information about
sermons in various medieval vernaculars through the provision of
systematic catalogues or repertoria. Containing details of over one
thousand Middle English prose sermons in more than one hundred and
fifty manuscripts, mainly from the late fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, the current Repertorium incorporates sermons already
published alongside those that remain unedited. Each entry contains
a concise manuscript description, followed by a detailed analysis
of each catalogued sermon under various headings, including
authorship, occasion, summary of content, exempla, and biblical
citations: the whole work is supported by an extensive set of
indices. By representing the texts in a consistent and streamlined
manner the Repertorium will serve as a stimulus to future editions,
facilitate comparative study and open up new research questions.
This work of reference, which provides an overview of the whole
corpus of Middle English prose sermons, is not aimed just at sermon
specialists but at all scholars interested in medieval historical,
literary, and religious culture.
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