English Preaching in the Middle Ages

This interdisciplinary study of English sermons written in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries focuses on material recorded in English and relates the surviving texts to their historical and cultural background. H. Leith Spencer shows how the use of the vernacular to explore ideas hitherto expressed in Latin anticipated the better-known developments of the sixteenth century. His detailed and original study, drawing on the most up-to-date research, uncovers the pluralism of the medieval English church that anti-heretical legislation and Reformed propaganda sought to deny.