“And þerfore seythe Seneca”: The Reception of the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium in Middle English Sermons

Abstract

A practice shared by late medieval Christian preachers in their sermons was to resort to some auctoritates in order to support their arguments and provide tropological readings of the Bible. Such auctoritates were not confined to Scriptures or patristic literature but include texts from classical antiquity. Among the classical authors, Seneca was widely appreciated for his positions on ethical issues, which are exemplified in his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, and which often align with Christian beliefs. The present paper aims to investigate how Seneca’s thought was received by late medieval English preachers and adapted to the principles of Christian doctrine through the analysis of a selection of Middle English sermons preserved in two fifteenth-century manuscripts: London, British Library, Royal 18.B.xxiii and Oxford, Bodleian Library, e Musaeo 180. The authors of these collections reserve a space for Seneca’s voice in their sermons, either by quoting passages from the EM or by recounting the exempla reported by the philosopher himself in his letters to Lucilius. The analysis focuses on the modalities of reception of the principles of the Stoic philosophy by Christian preachers as well as on the stylistic strategies used to introduce passages from Seneca’s work.