Penflourish initial H and partial border for sermon for the First Sunday of Advent
Pembroke Coll. MS 32, f. 1r
Guilelmus Peraldus, Sermons on the Sunday Epistles
Bury St Edmunds?, ca 1375–1400

Image reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College

These sermon collections are usually arranged as on texts based on the epistles and gospels for Sunday and feastday Masses throughout the year. Guilelmus Peraldus, after studying at the university of Paris, entered the Dominican convent in Lyons where he became prior in 1261. Unusually, he had a position carrying out episcopal functions in the cathedral of Lyons in the 1240s and 1250s when the irregular situation existed there that the then archbishop, Philip of Savoy, was not yet in priestly orders. In the rubric of this manuscript he is called Peter of Lyons. His most famous work was a treatise for confessors, the Summa de viciis et virtutibus (written before 1249/50) and this exists in many more surviving manuscripts than his sermons. This collection of sermons on the Epistles for the Sundays of the year begins with one for the First Sunday in Advent takings its text Hora est iam nos sompno surgere from the Epistle for that day in the Dominican Missal from Romans 13. The book comes from the Benedictine Library of Bury St Edmunds Abbey and may have been produced in East Anglia but probably not at the abbey itself. The first sermon has a large penflourish initial in red and blue with a partial border. The penflourishing is characteristically English of the last quarter of the fourteenth century.