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The Blickling Homilies are a collection of eighteen Old English prose sermons by anonymous writer(s). They date from the late Tenth Century, and are one of the earliest extant collections of English vernacular homiletic writings. Some of the sermons express concern with the then-current notion that the year 1000 would mark the end of the world, and one of the sermons even cites the date 971 in its provision for Ascension Thursday (Blickling XI), which indicates composition in or around that year. The sermons take their named for the period mansion, Blickling Hall in Norfolk, in whose library they were housed when they came to the attention of the scholar Richard Morris, in 1851. He published an edition of The Blickling Homilies in three volumes in 1874, 1876 and 1880 (reprinted as one volume in 1967). This work was published by the Early English Texts Society. A recent scholarly edition and translation was published in 2003 by Richard J. Kelly with Continuum International Publishing group, London and New York.
There are eighteen homiletic texts in the MS, although several are in an incomplete or fragmentary state. Modern critical consensus is that the Blickling texts were intended for the temporale and sanctorale cycles of the liturgical year to include all the significant feasts including Lent, Easter and Rogationtide as well as major saint’s feastdays like the Assumption of the Virgin; it has also been asserted that the sermons are unified thematically rather than by function, but this interpretation has not been widely accepted. The sermons exhibit great concern for the Doomsday supposed to be coming, although they adhere to orthodoxy in their preaching against presumptuous millennialism. Historians of Anglo-Saxon literature have regarded the MS as an important predecessor of the homilies of Ælfric.
