Blickling Homilies - 9780826467850

The Blickling Homilies, which date from the end of the tenth century, are one of the earliest extant collections of English vernacular homiletic writings. The homiletic texts survive in a composite codex consisting of Municipal Entries for the Council of Lincoln (fourteenth to seventeenth century), a Calendar (mid-fifteenth century), Gospel Oaths (early fourteenth century) and the eighteen homiletic texts that are based on the annual liturgical cycle. The Blickling Homilies are an important literary milestone in the early evolution of English prose.
The manuscript, in the William H. Scheide collection which is housed in Princeton University Library (MS. 71, s.x/xi), was edited in facsimile by Rudolph Willard and published as Volume 10 of Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile (Copenhagen, 1960). The previous edition of The Blickling Homilies is by Richard Morris, published as three volumes in 1874, 1876 and 1880 (reprinted as one volume in 1967) by the Early English Texts Society (London), though individual items from the collection have also been published in readers and anthologies.
This new edition makes certain corrections to Morris's editing of the manuscript and the translations are modernized and made more exact. It also formats both the original text and facing-page translation into paragraphs based on the considered opinion of the editor, which makes it easier to comprehend the flow of the prose. Finally, the text and translation are accompanied with a general introduction, textual notes, tables and charts, select bibliography and index.