The PASSIM project studied the medieval reception of the Latin sermons preached by the Early Church Fathers during the so-called golden age of preaching (c. 350-750AD). Its object of study includes both the very famous Fathers of the Church such as Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, Leo the Great, the Venerable Bede etc., and their less famous and anonymous contemporaries. There are thousands of such Latin sermons from late Antiquity preserved, preserved for us in medieval manuscripts, written down and copied many centuries after they were first spoken aloud.
This medieval tradition was substantial and vibrant, with thousands of manuscripts and innumerable variations in their composition and in the texts themselves. Patristic sermon collections traveled the medieval world, not just as relics of early-Christian authorities, but as integral parts of medieval religious life.
Medieval collections of patristic sermons offer unique insights into medieval attitudes toward authority, techniques of appropriation, Church organisation, monastic networks and knowledge exchange. The dynamic tradition of reorganising and rewriting the patristic heritage is largely overlooked by scholars of medieval religious practices, who concentrate on medieval preachers, and by scholars of Early Christianity, whose focus is the reconstruction of the patristic context.
The PASSIM project had two main objectives.
First, we aimed to document, present, and interpret the medieval reception of Latin patristic sermons and give patristic sermons - both authentic and misattributed - their rightful place as part of the corpus of texts that tell us about medieval religious experiences and developments.
Second, we wanted to contextualise medieval manuscripts as witnesses to the medieval interpretation, rather than seeing them as stepping stones toward the reconstruction of the patristic original. We did this in a way that allows us to trace, visualise and interpret transmission patterns on a much larger scale than has been possible thus far.
The project developed a digital dataset of metadata on Latin patristic sermons as authority files and the medieval manuscripts that transmit them. With this dataset and its customised interface as an anchor, the project team pursued three lines of inquiry:
- What does the customising of standard liturgical collections tell us about reception patterns and selection processes for patristic sermons in the medieval context?
- How does the transmission of sermons as part of antique and medieval collections affect their popularity, their textual integrity and evolution, their interpretation?
- How can we access and operationalise the huge corpus of pseudo-epigraphic sermons as revelatory of medieval perceptions of the Church Fathers?
Developing an interdisciplinary methodology with a wide applicability in the study of intellectual history, this project is introducing patristic preaching as a vibrant strand in the tapestry of the medieval religious tradition.
