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A collection of sermons by Peter Comestor, the Paris master. Migne’s text opens with a note quoting the seventeenth-century editor Pierre de Goussainville, who explains that these sermons had been printed by Busaeus under the name of Peter of Blois from a single manuscript titled Sermones M. Petri, but that several manuscripts attribute them to Peter Manducator, that is, Comestor. The sermons follow the church year from Advent through Christmas, the Purification, Ash Wednesday, and later feasts, and several are marked as delivered in the schools or to cloistered religious.
The rubrics indicating different audiences, students in the schools, regular canons, and monks, make the collection valuable for the history of preaching in twelfth-century Paris, where academic and pastoral teaching met. The sermons show Comestor’s scholastic habits of division and subdivision, as in his analysis of the bonds of vanity and of truth. The note on authorship illustrates how easily collections of sermons by masters with the same name were confused in the early printed tradition.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 198, Parisiis 1855), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.