Mary Morrissey “Sermons in series and in fragments"

G﻿EMMS (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons) is a SSHRC-funded project to create an open-access, group-sourced, fully searchable, online bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts from the British Isles and North America.W﻿e are hosting a series of lectures that highlight the latest research on manuscript sermons and the wide range of sermon manuscripts included in GEMMS. These lectures reveal how GEMMS has been and could be used to advance early modern sermon studies, helping to overcome many of the challenges in accessing these important manuscript sources. We also hot other events related to the project, such as workshops and roundtables.

GEMMS Project

Mary Morrissey (Univ. of Reading) “Sermons in series and in fragments: GEMMS, the archive, and finding the Spital and Rehearsal sermons"

The annual Spital sermons preached in London throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pose particular challenges for archival researchers: both in recovering the sermons’ textual witnesses and in classifying the sermons in ways that aid further research and interpretation. We are used to thinking about public preaching as ‘occasionally’: a preacher delivers a single sermon on a particular date. When that date is an annual event, we might call these annual or anniversary sermons, because sermons preached on those occasions (such as the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot) share common themes. Sermon series are usually considered a connected series of orations by a single preacher on a theme or sequential texts from the Bible. The Spital sermons are, to some degree, a combination of all of these: they were ‘occasional’ in that they were delivered on particular days, but these occasions were celebrated annually: the first three days of Easter week. Sermons from different years often share themes related to Easter and the recommitment to the Christian life associated with Easter communion. But these sermons were also preached as part of a series, because the ‘Rehearsal’ sermon at Paul’s Cross repeated in summarised form the four previous sermons (the Good Friday ‘Passion’ sermons from Paul’s Cross and the three Easter sermons from the Spital). Because the Monday and Tuesday Spital sermons were preached by senior clerics, there are relatively few printed copies extent; manuscript copies can still be found. The ‘rehearsal’ sermon survives sometimes with, and sometimes without, the summaries of the three previous sermons. Very occasionally, we find collections that preserve all five sermons for one year. This paper will examine what the surviving copies of the Spital sermons can tell us about the ways in which sermons find their way into textual copies, and how databases like GEMMS can help us to find, classify, and interpret these sermons.

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Mary Morrissey “Sermons in series and in fragments"

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