This paper revisits an Early Middle English sermon first published by E. G. Stanley in 1961. It shows that another copy of this sermon was once the first of the Otho Homilies (London, British Library, Cotton Otho A. iii, fols. ‘202-216’, burnt in the Cotton fire but partly reconstructed by Pelle 2014). that this sermon circulated in the same milieu as the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies, and that its source is a nativity sermon by the twelfth-century archbishop of Bordeaux, Geoffrey Babion (d. 1158). It offers an account of the twelve Latin sermons which accompany it in Worcester Q. 29 and a handful of corrections to Stanley’s edition.
Reference: Mark Faulkner and Stephen Pelle, ‘Worcester, Cathedral Library, Q. 29, fols. 133-7: An Early Middle English Sermon and Its Context’, Mediaeval Studies 75 (2013), 147-176.
Mark Faulkner 