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Chaucer and Medieval Preaching: Rhetoric for Listeners in Sermons and Poetry by Sabine Volk-Birke (review)

This is a curate's egg of a book. As the first sustained attempt to situate Chaucer's work in relation to contemporary preaching, it is set to break some new ground. Pioneering enterprises often enjoy this kind of advan­ tage. Their drawbacks are equally familiar, however, and are not entirely avoided in the work under review. Although medieval sermons have been a terra incognita for many Chaucerians, that has not prevented some from discussing them as if they were quite at home there. This is not Sabine Volk­ Birke's shortcoming; the corpus of Middle English sermons that she has familiarized herself with, while limited, is treated at length. Indeed, the inexorable taxonomies that she sets up and repeats chapter in, chapter out, though likely to exhaust all but the most dedicated of sermon readers, at least ensure a certain consistency and focus. What she is acquainted with she is evidently acquainted with through and through, and doubters of that are left with little refuge by the time they reach the end of the book. But the question remains how well prepared she was for her excursion of charting and mapping. She has taken her bearings in a largely unpublished terrain from five published texts: the curious lucky dip of a sermon anthology that is to be found in British Library manuscript Royal 18 B xxiii, the far more homoge­ neous English Wycliffite sermons, John Mirk's massively popular Festial, the versified Northern Homily Cycle, and Thomas Wimbledon's tour de force preached at Paul's Cross, London, on the theme "Redde racionem villicacionis tue." A decided advantage in this choice, above the merely pragmatic one of the ready availability of these texts, is that they are all contemporary with Chaucer, nearly contemporary, or, in the instance of the Northern Homily Cycle, already in circulation before he was born. Volk­ Birke's comparisons are therefore rendered all the more compelling from being chronologically justified. Unfortunately, though, what comparisons there are are rather severely definednecessarily, however, because she is concerned to isolate six strictly formal categories (the stylistics of the preacher's interaction with his congregation, sermon formulas, structural organization, use of narrative, syntax, and rhetorical figures) that charac­ terize, she believes, late-fourteenth-century sermon style. Her book falls very heavily into the two halves that it announces: chapters