Our knowledge of the preaching that took place in England during the later Middle Ages has over the past seventy years uniquely relied on the magisterial work of G. R. Owst. In his Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350–1458 (1926), Owst dealt with the various kinds of clergymen who preached, the occasions on which sermons were given, the various types of sermons and of related sermon books such as artes praedicandi and exempla collections, the forms that sermons took, and the “theory and practice of sacred eloquence” in general. A few years later, in a second volume entitled Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (1933), he continued to present the material he had gathered, but now argued that medieval preachers shared the same world as contemporary poets and pleaded that the former be read and studied as parallels to, and often even sources for, specific images, stories, and attitudes of social complaint that so delight the modern reader of The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and medieval drama. Both volumes were infused with a sometimes breathtaking amount of knowledge and information about late-medieval preaching: they quoted over four hundred manuscripts, brought for the first time the names of outstanding preachers of the period together, and provided a vast number of excerpts and snippets of interest to social historians and literary scholars. Their learning and collected material, which will retain its great value, was also clothed in a lively style.