The preceding anonymous collections, together with the work of Dygon and the Congesta, have brought us to the end of the period with which this book is concerned. Yet a few words must be added about sermon collections that lie beyond its chronological boundaries of 1450 and of 1350, as well as about others that, although they contain Latin sermons, lie outside the concept of “sermon collection” that I explained earlier.

English preachers continued to produce sermons around and after 1450, and for the second half of the fifteenth century, the names of several famous preachers are known to us. But their work, if it was written up at all, seems to have disappeared. What little has survived reveals that making sermon collections was considerably less original and vigorous than during the preceding one hundred years. To illustrate this I will discuss two collections of the later fifteenth century and then turn more briefly to others that are similarly marginal in terms of their date of composition.

Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26 (G)

This odd, very irregularly constructed codex contains 167 paper leaves with parchments strips and some parchment folios. Besides sermons (ff. 5–118) it holds some scattered sermon material, a version of the Gesta Romanorum with tabula, and a second incomplete series of Gesta Romanorum. The book has a medieval foliation of 1–78 for modern folios 4–80 (the medieval foliation skips the number 44 and does not count the column-wide strip that is modern f. 37).