The Mythographic Sermon in Late Medieval England: Classicism, Discourse, and Clerical Identity, 1330-1450

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In late-medieval England, the ancient pantheon awoke to new life in the pulpit. Between 1330 und 1450 an extensive body of sermons was composed, which conveyed Christian teachings using mythic imagery, mostly taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses. These texts are barely studied, not least due to an all too narrow research perspective, which separated them from their social, literary and discursive contexts. However, the agenda at which the mythographic sermons were aiming becomes only visible in front of a broader historical panorama, since they were not isolated, but belonged to a classicist literature, which flourished in intellectual and cultural centres like Oxford, London and St Albans Abbey. Other than Italian humanism, classicism in England rose not in opposition to the medieval university. Rather, it served as a means of cultural self-assertion of the orthodox, scholastic establishment in an age of controversies: William of Ockham and John Wyclif, lollardy and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 posed a threat to the status and self-perception of the clerical elites, which answered with a campaign-like display of their own traditions of learning and writing. Because of their public character, the sermons played a key role for propagandizing clerical identity. They are not mere school products, but conscious and widely perceivable interventions into public discourse. Based on an interdisciplinary concept of intellectual history, the project will approach to the development of mythographic preaching in three steps: it will study the interpretation of mythic narratives in selected (mostly Latin, but occasionally also Middle English, macaronic and Anglo-Norman) sermons, than focus on their role in political, religious, and scholastic discourse and finally describe the contemporary reactions to that practise. The project is of far-reaching relevance, not only because it throws light on the cultural environment of poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. It also points out the meaning of the reception of antiquity for the social and intellectual changes in England at the end of the Middle Ages and hereby illustrates the dynamics which merged into Renaissance culture on the British Isles.