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2 - John Sheppey (SH)

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

I begin this survey with a small group of sermons which, although they barely reach the threshold of our period, yet possess a number of unusual advantages for this study. For one thing, we know their author as well as the occasions and dates of his sermons. They reflect English preaching before our period because their author collected and studied the work of English preachers who were active in the two preceding generations. And they also foreshadow some of the major features of later collections.

John Sheppey was a Benedictine monk at Rochester who studied at Oxford in the early 1330s and incepted in theology in 1332. He then served as prior of his monastery (1333–1350) and as bishop of Rochester (1353–1360), where his tomb and effigy can still be seen. At his death, the archdeacon of his diocese, William Reed, who later became bishop of Chichester, bought three “volumes” of sermons that Sheppey had gathered “in his time at the university of Oxford” and bound two of them together (in MS New College, 92). The resulting two manuscripts Reed then gave, respectively, to Merton and to New College. Thus, we know more about the earliest history of Sheppey's collections than about any other discussed in this study.

Merton College, MS 248, a parchment codex of 225 leaves, is made up of several booklets written mostly in two columns. According to the owner's note, this is the “tercium volumen sermonum per dominum Johannem de Schepeya … pro suo tempore in vniuersitate Oxon' collectorum.”

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Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England
Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif
, pp. 26 - 30
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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  • John Sheppey (SH)
  • Siegfried Wenzel, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483394.007
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  • John Sheppey (SH)
  • Siegfried Wenzel, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483394.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • John Sheppey (SH)
  • Siegfried Wenzel, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483394.007
Available formats
×