The Rogationtide Homily In vigilia Ascensionis in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 303: An Eschatological Hodgepodge for Post-Conquest England

In vigilia Ascensionis is an anonymous Rogationtide sermon uniquely attested in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 303, a twelfth-century sizeable collection of Ælfrician temporale and sanctorale items, interspersed with miscellaneous and anonymous pieces. Presumably not much earlier than the manuscript itself, our sermon draws rather freely on both scriptural and apocryphal literature and features various eschatological motifs widely attested within the Old English anonymous homiletic corpus. The result makes up a veritable, if eclectic, compendium of the eschatology and cosmology of pre-Conquest England, probably concocted from memory by an author who, admittedly, can’t have been either very scrupulous or very learned. In vigilia Ascensionis can be taken as an exemplary case study of the modes of textual transmission and (re-)composition of late Old English homilies, and can contribute some insights into the still largely elusive rationale of twelfth-century manuscripts, with their dialectic of tradition and innovation, as well as into the eschatological obsessions, doctrinal issues, and devotional preoccupations of contemporary compilers and their audiences.