Institute for Medieval Studies

Session	1343
Title	Visions of Authority, II: Latin Sermons - Laying the Foundation for Long-Lasting Authority
Date/Time	Wednesday 6 July 2022: 16.30-18.00
Sponsor	Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Organiser	Riccardo Macchioro, ERC Project 'Patristic Sermons in the Middle Ages (PASSIM)', Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen / Università degli Studi di Milano
Moderator/Chair	Riccardo Macchioro, ERC Project 'Patristic Sermons in the Middle Ages (PASSIM)', Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen / Università degli Studi di Milano
Paper 1343-a	Shaping Authority through Processes of Education in the Sermons of Peter Chrysologus (Language: English) Lina Hantel, Theologische Fakultät, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Index Terms: Ecclesiastical History; Language and Literature - Latin; Sermons and Preaching; Theology
Paper 1343-b	Caesarius of Arles: The Authority of the Patres at the Border between Tradition and Innovation (Language: English) Nicolas Anders, Theologische Fakultät, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Index Terms: Ecclesiastical History; Language and Literature - Latin; Sermons and Preaching; Theology
Paper 1343-c	Three Portraits of a Non-Existant Friar: Authority and Authorship in Printed Sermons (Language: English) Pietro Delcorno, Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà, Università di Bologna Index Terms: Ecclesiastical History; Language and Literature - Latin; Printing History; Sermons and Preaching
Abstract	The 'Visions of Authority' series investigates how medieval scribes and compilers manipulate the authority of their material. The focus is on genres connected to religious history, which are traditionally imbued with significant authority, but simultaneously exhibit strong instability and malleability in their transmission. This tension makes them interesting cases to study how authority is established, which practices can strengthen it, and how it influences the impact of a text. The vastness of the late antique and medieval sermons' corpora, their transmission through extensive manuscript collections of texts, their employment as educational tools, and their endless re-use in various historical milieux make for extremely frequent shifts in textual configurations, author attributions, and liturgical functions. In this session, we explore the processes and the cultural powers that shaped the authority of sermons and authors, and its perception in the medieval era. To this goal, we investigate the writing strategies that granted authority to sermons, the use of late antique textual material to compose medieval homilies, the codicological contexts of their circulation, and the impact of the work of renowned late medieval preachers.