The Preacher and His Audience: On Continuity in Medieval English Homilies

Ælfric's writings, in particular his Catholic Homilies, were not forgotten by the generations that followed; they continued to be copied and read even after the Norman Conquest. It is sometimes assumed that Orm, the author of the Ormulum - a collection of poetic homilies written in the middle of the 12th century, could have relied on Ælfric's works as well. This article examines how the writings of Ælfric and Orm represent the preacher and his sources as well as how they handle the relationship between the preacher and his audience.

Remembrance of Jews in contemporary catholic homilies

The paper discusses the problem of transferring the memory of Jews through Polish contemporary Catholic homilies. In the biblical pericopies read throughout the liturgical year during Catholic mass, generally Jews play a negative role – as persecutors and killers of Jesus. According to the provisions of the Second Vatican Council, anti-Jewish content cannot be proclaimed in the Catholic Church, and the Bible, which according to the doctrine must remain unchanged, should be adequately commented on in homilies. The paper – on the example of about 40 homilies – shows, however, that priests who preach homilies do not use modern exegetic knowledge, but replicate stereotypes deeply rooted in culture, thus reproducing the centuries-oldmyth of the Jews as killers of God.

The position of negative adjectives in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies I .

In Old English, negative adjectives, i.e. incorporating the negative prefix -un, are said to generally come in postposition to nouns (e.g. Fischer, 2001; Sampson, 2010). This paper investigates to what extent this general rule is followed in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies, the texts of this author being a typical choice for the study of Old English syntax (cf. Davis 2006; Reszkiewcz, 1966; Kohonen, 1978). The data have been obtained from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). The following research questions have been formulated: Do strong negative adjectives outnumber nonnegated adjectives in postposition? Do strong negative adjectives have a tendency to appear in postposition? Do strong negated adjectives occur in preposition? The results indicated that for the sample analyzed, strong adjectives in postposition are not predominantly negated. Additionally, the postposition of most of those which are may potentially be explained by other factors, such as modification by a prepositional phrase, co-occurrence with a weak preposed adjective (both mentioned by Fischer), or indirect Latin influence in a formulaic phrase. Also, the data does not appear to support the observation that negated adjectives tend to appear in post- rather than preposition.