Discovering a Preacher and his Work. First Approaches to Petrus Hispanus' Sermon Collections

The name Petrus Hispanus covers a range of authors on different topics, such as medicine or philosophy. The less studied part of the “corpus petrinicum” concerns a group of three sermon collections discovered in the 1970s by Schneyer and Cruz Pontes. This article investigates, for the first time, two of these three sermon collections, inquiring into their authorship, their environment of composition and the purpose for which they were written down. In doing so, the figure of a Dominican Preacher, active in Langue d’Oc in the third quarter of the 13th century, emerges. In the second part of the paper two sermons of each Sunday collection are compared so as to discover not only the main interests of the preacher, but also the different uses for which these collections were written. A kaleidoscopic range of possibilities comes to light, enriching the perspective in which to approach this new material.