EMISCS13

Despite their large number and their potential significance for our understanding of the genesis of Christian thought and practice, early medieval sermons have been conspicuously neglected by modern scholarship. Taking their lead from recent studies that transformed our understanding of the post-Roman world, the various contributors to this collection of essays explore a wide range of topics related to the composition, transmission, and dissemination of sermons and homiliaries in the early medieval West. Some papers focus on individual sermons in an attempt to identify their authors and aims; others examine the manuscript evidence for the compilation and transmission of composite homiliaries; and a few question our concept of early medieval sermons as a peculiar genre that merits special attention. By bringing early medieval sermons into the centre of discussion this volume, which is the first book dedicated to early medieval sermons and homiliaries, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the religious culture of the early medieval West. This multi-lingual collection of papers examines a plethora of texts which, in the past, were pushed to the margins of historical research, and offers a fresh look at these works in their own cultural, religious, and social context.

How were identities created in the early Middle Ages and when did they matter? This book explores different types of sources to understand the ways in which they contributed to making ethnic and religious communities meaningful: historiography and hagiography, biblical exegesis and works of theology, sermons and letters. Thus, it sets out to widen the horizon of current debates on ethnicity and identity. The Christianization and dissolution of the Roman Empire had provoked a crisis of traditional identities and opened new spaces for identification. What were the textual resources on which new communities could rely, however precariously? Biblical models and Christian discourses could be used for a variety of aims and identifications, and the volume provides some exemplary analyses of these distinct voices. Barbarian polities developed in a rich and varied framework of textual ‘strategies of identification’. The contributions reconstruct some of this discursive matrix and its development from the age of Augustine to the Carolingians. In the course of this process, ethnicity and religion were amalgamated in a new way that became fundamental for European history, and acquired an important political role in the post-Roman kingdoms. The extensive introduction not only draws together the individual studies, but also addresses fundamental issues of the definition of ethnicity, and of the relationship between discourses and practices of identity. It offers a methodological basis that is valid for studies of identity in general.