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

在中世纪晚期的英格兰，古老的万神殿在讲坛上获得了新的生命。在1330年和1450年之间，大量的布道词被创作出来，这些布道词使用神话意象传达基督教教义，大多数来自奥维德的《变形记》。这些文本很少被研究，尤其是由于研究视角过于狭窄，将它们与社会，文学和话语背景分开。然而，神话布道所针对的议程只有在更广泛的历史全景面前才能看到，因为它们不是孤立的，而是属于古典主义文学，它在牛津、伦敦和圣奥尔本斯修道院等知识和文化中心蓬勃发展。除了意大利的人文主义，古典主义在英国的兴起并不是与中世纪大学相对立的。相反，它是正统学术机构在一个充满争议的时代进行文化自我主张的一种手段：奥卡姆的威廉和约翰·威克里夫，1381年的罗拉迪和农民起义对神职人员精英的地位和自我认知构成了威胁，他们以一种宗教式的展示自己的学习和写作传统作为回应。由于其公开性，布道在宣传神职人员身份方面发挥了关键作用。它们不仅仅是学校的产品，而且是对公共话语的有意识和广泛感知的干预。基于知识历史的跨学科概念，该项目将通过三个步骤来研究神话说教的发展：它将研究选定（主要是拉丁语，但偶尔也有中世纪英语，马卡龙语和盎格鲁-诺曼语）布道中神话叙事的解释，然后专注于它们在政治，宗教和学术话语中的作用，最后描述当代对这种做法的反应。该项目具有深远的意义，不仅因为它揭示了杰弗里·乔叟和约翰·高尔等诗人的文化环境。它还指出了古代接受对中世纪末英国社会和思想变革的意义，并在此说明了融入不列颠群岛文艺复兴文化的动力。

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.