Humbertus Romanis, De Predicatione Crucis

Sedda, pp. 217–41 with a full table of contents of the most complete manuscript) offer sermons from Septuagesima Sunday (the third before Ash Wednesday) until the first Sunday after Easter. This may be understood as an attempt to expand the length (and, possibly, the depth) of religious instruction the preachers wanted to give to the laity in one continuous series of sermons. Although the editors of the anthology name ‘material history of Lenten sermonaries: copied, lent, sold and bought’ as one of the topics left unconsidered in the contributions (pp. 14–15), Mariani’s article, mentioned just above, does this job too. After summarizing the editorial history of the Quadragesimale de poenitentia, one of the first bestsellers of religious literature in print, he goes on to trace the afterlife of the volumes outside the printer’s shop, in libraries of ecclesiastical institutions and private persons, with the latter category including, for example, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. One of the niceties of many Italian scholarly journals is that they have yearly indices of (at least) names, thus making the contents of specialized studies more accessible for non-specialists. Unfortunately,Memorie Domenicane does not follow this practice, even though an index (preferably of subjects as well) would have made this rich anthology even more useful.