Blickling homilies
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Blickling Homilies are a collection of eighteen Old English prose homilies and sermons by anonymous writer(s). They date from the late Tenth Century, and are one of the earliest extant collections of English vernacular homiletic writings. Some of the sermons express concern with the then-current notion that the year 1000 would mark the end of the world, and one of the sermons, provision for Ascension Thursday (Blickling XI), even cites the date 971, which indicates composition in or around that year. The sermons take their named for the period mansion, Blickling Hall in Norfolk, in whose library they were housed when they came to the attention of the scholar Richard Morris, in 1851. He published an edition of The Blickling Homilies in three volumes in 1874, 1876 and 1880 (reprinted as one volume in 1967). This work was published by the Early English Texts Society. The Blickling MS is now in the Firestone Library at Princeton University in the U.S.A., but is privately owned by the Scheide family. It is one of the few important Anglo-Saxon collections to be located outside of the British Isles. A recent edition and translation of The Blickling Homilies by Richard J. Kelly was published in 2003.
There are eighteen homilietic texts in the MS, although several are in an incomplete or fragmentary state. Modern critical consensus is that the Blickling texts were intended for the temporale and sanctorale cycles of the liturgical year to include the significant periods including Lent and Easter as well as major saints's featsdays like the Assumption of Mary; it has also been asserted that the sermons are unified thematically rather than by function, but this interpretation has not been widely accepted. The sermons exhibit great concern for the Doomsday supposed to be coming, although they adhere to orthodoxy in their preaching against presumptuous millennialism. Historians of Anglo-Saxon literature have regarded the MS as an important predecessor of the homiletic texts of Ælfric.
[edit] Editions & Translations
Richard Morris, ed. & trans., The Blickling Homilies. Early English Texts Society, o.s. 58,1874; o.s. 63, 1876; o.s. 73, 1880; reprinted (as one volume) 1967.
Richard J. Kelly, ed. & trans, The Blickling Homilies: Edition and Translation. Continuum International Publishing Group - Academi (2003)ISBN 0-8264-6785-7
