Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations – serie

Ranulph Higden, monk of St. Werburgh's Abbey and well-known author of the «Polychronicon» and other treatises, penned a concise and user-friendly Art of Preaching about 1346. His «Ars componendi sermones» follows a schematic common to many members of this genre and includes attributes desirable or necessary in the preacher, methods for piquing an audience's interest, the process of effective repetition, and suggestions for creating rhythmic patterns in prose. Its major focus, however, is the clear and comprehensive discussion of each thematic sermon part: the theme or scriptural text, its development in protheme and introduction, its division, subdivision, and embellishment. In structure and content, Higden's prescriptive manual has affinities to contemporary rhetorical texts, especially the «artes poeticae» and «dictaminis», and displays an analogous relationship with Ciceronian «dispositio» as developed in the «De Inventione» and «Rhetorica ad Herennium». A few of the many items of interest scattered throughout the text are Ranulph's insistence that preaching be separate from university exercises and his comments about various subjects like direct entry into heaven «post mortem», the scope of medieval optics, what and who compose the church, and the quadruple levels of scriptural exegesis.

Adam of Saint-Victor’s († 1146) sequences are recognized as sophisticated liturgical poetry, the highest development of this literary genre. In addition to their merit as unique medieval cultural sources, they offer an expression of the lived theology of the twelfth-century Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. This translation of the collection of Adam’s sequences presents them as a whole, using language that seeks to retain the theological significance of the Latin terminology. The parallel Latin text allows readers to examine the original language used. The included introduction and notes situate the sequences in their historical context and offer references to Adam’s many sources.