A Florilegium from Peter the Chanter’s Summa Abel

In her discussion of medieval florilegia in The Book of Memory, Mary Carruthers explains that such compilations equipped preachers to compose sermons like the one praised by one twelfth-century listener as being ‘adorned with flowers of words and sentences and supported by a copious array of authorities’. This essay gathers flowers from a distinctio in Peter the Chanter’s Summa Abel that could have served as a source for a sermon on the diversity of Christ’s followers, for it ‘distinguishes’ eight attributes of Ecclesia by means of as many flowers and herbs: roses, lilies, violets, crocuses, ivy, frankincense, myrrh, and aloe.