Medieval preachers and their sermons WH-KON-MedPreach

According to Wikipedia in modern language sermon is "a lengthy or tedious speech delivered with great passion, by any person, to an uninterested audience". But sermons do not have to be boring. In fact they are one of the most fascinating sources giving us an insight into daily life and a way of thinking of ordinary people in the Middle Ages. It is so because they were the most widespread genre of medieva lLiterature and nearly the only link between educated latin culture and illiterate people. At the times without television, radio, Interenet and newspapers sermons became not only a source of religious knowledge and moral instruction but also of knowledge about natural world, history, geography, physics and economy. The collections of sermons became bestsellers copied and printed in houndreds of copies for many centuries. During the course we will look into different types of sermos preached to a different recipients and try to recostruct a practice of preaching during the late MIddle Ages.