Aelred, abbot of the Yorkshire Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147 to 1167, wrote six spiritual treatises, seven historical treatises, and 182 liturgical sermons, many of which he delivered as chapter talks to his monks. Translations of the first twenty-eight of these sermons appeared in CF 58 in 2001, translated by Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil Pennington, and sermons twenty-nine through forty-six appeared in CF 77 in 2015, translated by Marie Anne Mayeski. The current volume contains thirty-eight sermons for feasts from Advent through the Nativity of Mary, taken from the Durham and Lincoln collections, edited by Gaetano Raciti in CCCM 2B.
Ann W. Astell is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. The author of six books on medieval literature and spirituality, she has published recently on Aelred of Rievaulx in Cistercian Studies Quarterly. She and Joseph Wawrykow directed the Catena Scholarium in its translation and annotation of the five sermons in the Lincoln Collection included in this volume.
Lewis White has been a teacher and translator at the Language Center of the Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca, Mexico, since 2009. He was a member of Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, from 2002-2009..
Kathryn Krug has an MA in medieval studies from the University of Chicago. Her translations of medieval and renaissance writings are published in works including Angela of Foligno (Paulist Press), Music in the Castle (University of Chicago Press), and The Earliest Franciscans (Paulist Press).