On 9 December 1996 a meeting was held at the Freie Universität in Berlin with the purpose of discussing the production of a Repertorium of Unprinted Medieval Vernacular Sermons. The meeting was organised by Professor Volker Mertens and Dr Hans-Jochen Schiewer. Delegates (from the Czech Republic, England, Finland, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden) were invited to attend, of which eleven were invited to give presentations on the state of sermon studies in their area. As a result of this meeting it was decided that a project (SERMO) on the lines of the German model would be established; that the individual language co-ordinators would consider how best to carry out the research in their particular areas, and that they would apply for finance from their own national funding bodies.
The English project, which was generously funded by a Large Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a four-year period, began on 1 January 2003, with Dr Veronica O'Mara (University of Hull) as Project Director and Dr Suzanne Paul (University of Hull) as Research Assistant. An international Advisory Board of representatives from medieval Dutch: Prof. Thom Mertens (Antwerp); English: Prof. Anne Hudson (Oxford), Dr Oliver Pickering (Leeds), and Dr Sue Powell (Salford); German: Prof. Hans-Jochen Schiewer (Freiburg), History: Prof. David d'Avray (London), and Latin: Dr Stephan Borgehammar (Lund), as well as a computing consultant: Dianne Skinner (Hull), and a library consultant: Helen Roberts (Hull) was set up to guide the enterprise.
The results of the English project (published by Brepols in 2007) cover some 1450 sermons, in over 160 manuscripts. Some samples from the project, all taken from Cambridge repositories, occur in the Sample Sermons section of this website.
A Quotations Search facility, an ongoing research project that does not appear in the published volumes, may also be found.
This website, and accompanying conference on the European Medieval Vernacular Sermon, held at the University of Hull from 9 to 12 November 2006, were funded by another grant from the AHRC under its Supplementary Pilot Research Dissemination scheme.
