page_title: Odo of Cheriton
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Odo of Cheriton / Works
caption_attribution_description: English: The only printed edition of the sermons of the English monk Odo of Cheriton, Flores Sermonum ac Evangeliorum Dominicalium - library copy with old ink stamp and annotations on title, small 4to, Josse Badius Ascensius, Paris 1520
context_page_description: Odo of Cheriton was an English preacher and fabulist who spent a considerable time studying in Paris and then lecturing in the south of France and in northern Spain.
context_section_description: Beside the 64 sermons on the Sunday Gospels, of which extracts were published under the title Flores Sermonum ac Evangeliorum Dominicalium in Paris in 1520, Odo had composed early treatises on the Lord’s Prayer and the Passion. In 1224 he compiled another collection of sermons (Sermones Dominicales in Epistolas), many of which were preached in Spain, where he was also credited with an exposition of the Song of Songs (1226/7). About the same time he compiled a further set of sermons on Feast Days (Sermones de Festis). His final religious work, written about 1235, after his return to England, was a handbook for priests on penitence.
  The work for which Odo is best known, however, was a collection of moralized fables and anecdotes, sometimes titled Parabolæ from the opening words of the prologue (Aperiam in parabolis os meum), which was evidently designed for preachers. Though partly composed of commonly known adaptations and extracts, it shows originality of interpretation and the moralisations are full of pungent denunciations of the prevalent vices of clergy and laity. The collection contains some 117 fables and variants, twenty-six of them from Aesop's Fables, others taken from the Roman writers Seneca, Ovid and Juvenal, from the Bible and from English folktales, as well as from his Mediaeval near-contemporaries Petrus Alphonsi, Jacques de Vitry and Stephen of Bourbon. It exists in numerous manuscripts and the work was published by Léopold Hervieux in 1896. A thirteenth-century French version is extant, as is a 14th-century Welsh version called Chwedlau Odo ("Odo's Tales") and an early Spanish translation. 
  The primary purpose of the Parabolæ was to provide examples of right and wrong conduct for use in sermons. Odo’s interpretations sometimes verge on the satirical and he does not spare his own kind, condemnation of the behaviour of the Cistercians being particularly pointed. On account of this it used to be speculated that he was a member of that order himself, but there is no evidence that he ever belonged to any order. Some of the parallels drawn in his work tell no story but contain the kind of lore found in Mediaeval bestiaries. One section states baldly that “A wild colt throws himself into the water or into a pit unless he is held back by a bridle”. What follows becomes a commentary on the need for discipline in order to escape the pains of Hell (fable 56). Again, the information that the eagle trains its chicks to gaze at the sun, throwing out of the nest any who cannot manage this, is made the occasion for an exhortation to aspire to heavenly contemplation (Fable 17). It has also been observed that, in contrast to Marie de France’s interest in hierarchic relations in her Ysopet, which privileges the ‘noble’ animals, there is a broader range of the humbler domestic creatures in Odo.
caption: The only printed edition of Odo's sermons, Paris 1520
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