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30 - Thomas Wimbledon, “Redde rationem”

from Part I - The Collections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Siegfried Wenzel
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

Another sermon in collection V which can be linked to a named author is V-33, on Redde rationem vilicationis tuae (Luke 16:2), which calls for some special attention. It has been preserved in English and in Latin, both extant in several manuscripts, and thus clearly enjoyed much popularity which continued in several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed editions. This long and complex sermon deals with the reckoning that the three estates – sacerdotes, milites, and laborarii, or priests, secular rulers, and everyman – must give on Judgment Day. In its first part it applies the three questions of how have you entered? how have you ruled? and how have you lived? to each of the estates. Then it turns to the questions of who shall call us to this reckoning, who shall judge us, and what our reward or punishment will be. In answering these the preacher tells us that for the special or individual judgment God sends three summoners: old age, sickness, and death. The coming general or universal judgment is similarly announced by the sickness and old age of the world and lastly by the final persecution by the Antichrist. If this sermon thus shares a number of conventional topics, which are developed with the usual array of authoritative quotations and biblical figurae, it also strikes a tone that is very unusual in the orthodox sermon collections of the period, an echo of the apocalypticism of the later fourteenth century: the sermon quotes “quidam doctor” who predicted the coming of the Antichrist for the year 1400.

Type
Chapter
Information
Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England
Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif
, pp. 171 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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