Frater Petrus, Collationes de tempore (Fourteenth Century)

A new collection of medieval Mendicant sermons. The preacher’s handling of themes drawn from the liturgical readings, Advent to Easter, achieves a competent fusion of exegetical traditions and preaching innovation.

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The sermons here published for the first time are attributed to an otherwise unknown friar referred to simply as Frater Petrus. The collection provides evidence of actual preaching in a normal setting from fourteenth-century Germany, between the beginnings of the Franciscan order and the Observant reform movement, not by a major light of the order, but a regular member who may have held status as an intermediate-level teacher, to judge by the care with which the manuscripts were prepared. Theologically competent and gracefully presented in the conventional sermon style of the period, the collection, edited and translated by Daniel Nodes, offers scholars and students a reliable new resource in an area of sermon studies that is still in short supply.