HOMILIARY. - From homiliarius, homiliarius liber doctorum, properly, in origin, it indicated a collection of discourses of the holy Fathers on the Gospels for the use of concionatores: a preaching manual (in the sense and for the purpose with which in 1903 Cardinal G. Vives published the Homiliarius Breviarii Romani... in usum concionatorum et scholarum sacrae eloquentiae). A sermonary, on the other hand, was a repertory of patristic treatises or commentaries on the psalms or on other books of Holy Scripture, to serve as reading in the Divine Office. These terms, however, neither had nor have an absolute value; for the homiliary, having abandoned its primitive meaning, is given that of sermonary: « Omeliae sive tractatus beatorum Ambrosii, Augustini, Hieronymi, Fulgentii, Leonis, Maximi, Gregorii et aliorum catholicorum et venerabilium patrum legendae per totum anni circulum », one reads in a manuscript of Montpellier of the 9th century. The title of homiliaries is in general quite prolix. The title is followed by the list of the capitula, that is, the index of the subjects. The division of the homiliary into two volumes is the most frequent: the first contains the homiliae from the 1st Sunday of Advent or from Christmas to Holy Saturday, the second from Easter to the end of the year.
At the beginning, in the Night Office, readings other than Holy Scripture were with difficulty admitted (the Acta Martyrum, on their anniversary, are an exception). The New Testament, especially the Pauline epistles, had the preference. In the long run, to avoid repetitions, the reading of the commentary of the holy Fathers was added. An o. was compiled by the Arian bishop Maximinus (5th century; cf. B. Capelle, Un homiliaire de l'évêque arien Maximin, in Revue bénédictine, 34 [1922], pp. 81-108): but it is a collection for parenetic use. St. Benedict (d. 543) in the Regula (ch. IX) prescribes: "Legantur... expositiones earum quae a nominatis doctorum orthodoxis catholicis patribus factae sunt". If the text refers to a collection standing on its own, here (beginning of the 6th century) we would have the first mention of an o. Cassiodorus (d. 570) provides likewise (De instit. divin. litt., I, praef.), as does St. Gregory the Great (d. 604; Epist., XII, 24: PL 77, 1234), and it is known that his forty homilies on the Gospels spread everywhere for public reading in churches. With the growing interest in the liturgy in the 8th-9th centuries and the codification of the liturgical books, these collections multiplied. The more important churches, such as the Roman basilicas, had their own o. The Roman priest Agimundus (d. 730) compiled one for the basilica of Sts. Philip and James (today Sts. XII Apostles), as did St. Bede the Venerable (d. 735) and Alcuin (d. 804: G. Morin, L'homiliaire d'Alcuin retrouvé, in Rev. bénéd. 9 [1892], pp. 491-97). Secular churches too were provided with them (v. the so-called Ordo of John the archcantor, which in reality is a reworking of the Capitulare ecclesiasticae [!] ordinis of the 8th century, in M. Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen âge, III, Les textes, Louvain 1951, p. 177).
Two o. are of particular interest: the one that Paul the Deacon (d. 797?) composed on commission and with a preface by Charlemagne (PL 95, 1159-1566; cf. F. Wiegand, Das Homiliarium Karls des Grossen auf seine ursprüngliche Gestalt untersucht, Leipzig 1897), very widely diffused in the Middle Ages, which remained in use until the Council of Trent and was the principal source of the present o.; and the group of o. that arose at the basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican, recently studied by Fr. G. Löw, according to whom, at St. Peter's, in the 9th century a copy was made of a sermonary of archaic and purely Roman character, extant in cod. Basil. C 105, subsequently copied several times (cod. Basil. C 107 [12th century], C 106 [14th century], archive of St. Peter's), which remained in use until the 16th century. This o. is identical with the one attributed to Alan of Farfa (d. 770), written ca. the year 760 and widely circulated from the 8th century in southern Germany, and with the other of Egino of Verona (d. 802), written ca. the year 800 and in use in the Swabian abbey of Reichenau-Niederzell. In reality all three of these sermonaries (the Basil. C 103, Alan and Egino) would be nothing but copies of a single ancient and authentic Sermonary of St. Peter of the 6th century. With the insertion of the lessons into the body of the Breviarium, the o. lost their practical importance and disappeared from use. The patristic lessons are read in the II Nocturn (sermones) and in the III (homiliae) of the Divine Office, making use of the writings of the greatest Fathers and Doctors of the Church, Latin and Greek. Among the Latins St. Augustine comes first, with 363 lessons, taken mainly from the Sermones and from the Tractatus in Evangelium secundum Joannem. There follow St. Gregory the Great (220 lessons), St. Ambrose (180), St. Jerome (130), St. Leo the Great (75), St. Bede (57), St. Bernard (47), St. Hilary (36), St. Cyprian (15). Also represented are St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernardine of Siena, St. Francis de Sales, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Peter Canisius. Among the Greek Fathers the place of honor is held by St. John Chrysostom with 117 lessons, followed by St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Ephrem. The authorship of the lessons is not always certain; the acumen of the revisers of St. Pius V and Urban VIII (especially Bartolomeo Gavanti, 1638) dealt with this repeatedly and, given the times and the scholarly means available, successfully, without however managing to restore them to their true author or to expunge all the apocryphal lessons, of which the Breviary still hosts a good number (v. the list in G. Morin, Critique des sermons et homélies apocryphes du Bréviaire romain, in Anecdota Maredsolana, I, 1913, pp. 487-501, republished by Bäumer [v. bibl.], II, pp. 452-60 and by
(from Ephemerides liturgicae, 1917, p. 311)
HOMILIARY - Sermonary of Alan of Farfa: homily for the vigil of Easter - Munich, Library, ms. Clm. 14368 (cod. Emmeran. D 93 of the 9th century).
Righetti [v. bibl.], II, pp. 537-39). From the time of Pius IX, for the sermones the custom also came into use of employing official pontifical texts. As for the length of the pericopes in the revision of Pius V, the measure of the lessons of the Breviary of the Curia (14th-15th centuries) was retained, but afterward there was a tendency toward a certain prolixity.