The Homiliary of Saint-Père de Chartres ‒ A Hybrid Edition (Print and Digital)

This influential collection of 96 Latin sermons, originally written on the Continent in the ninth or early tenth century, is a significant testimony to Carolingian intellectual history and an important source for lay preaching in Western Europe until the 14th century. Vernacular homilists writing sermons in Old and Middle English as well as Old Norse, made use of this collection. The Saint-Père Homiliary thus forms a link between the worlds of Latin and vernacular literatures and cultures in the European Middle Ages. Of the 96 sermons, which were probably all compiled by one author and contain numerous references to writings of patristic theology and exegesis as well as to standard theological works of the Carolingian period, 65 have not yet been published.

The collection is preserved in thirteen manuscripts, the earliest of which dates from the first half of the tenth century and was almost completely destroyed during the World War II. The most complete and important textual witness is now Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 25 – a manuscript copied in Bury St Edmunds in England around 1100.

As the collection has never been critically edited in its entirety, its content cannot be found in the common digital repositories, so that the characteristic language, style, theology, liturgical practices and ideas of these sermons have remained largely unknown until now. A comprehensive edition of the homiliary (in print as well as digitally) with a thorough cataloguing of the sources will remedy this and thus contribute to the history of early medieval preaching and the religious education of the laity, to the transmission of patristic and early medieval ecclesiastical sources and to the development of medieval Latin in the period of transition from Late Latin to Early Romanesque. This critical edition should be of particular importance to medievalists, theologians and scholars of English.

The online edition will be integrated into the University of Göttingen's digital platform ECHOE (echoe.uni-goettingen.de) and will be curated by the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) in the long run. The print edition will be published in the series ‘Corpus Christianorum Series Latina’ by Brepols Publishers in Belgium. With the help of multispectral imaging technology, the 2026 project will attempt to recover the surviving text of the damaged Chartres manuscript.