Angels and Earthly Creatures
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Texts by, for, and about preachers from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries reveal an intense interest in the preacher's human nature and its intersection with his «angelic» role. Far from simply denigrating embodiment or excluding it from consideration, these works recognize its centrality to the office of preacher and the ways in which preachers, like Christ, needed humanness to make their performance of doctrine effective for their audiences. At the same time, the texts warned of the preacher's susceptibility to the fleshly failings of lust, vainglory, deception, and greed. Preaching's problematic juxtaposition of the earthly and the spiritual made images of women preachers, real and fictional, key to understanding and exploiting the power, as well as the dangers, of the feminized flesh. Addressing the underexamined bodies of the clergy in light of both medieval and modern discussions of female authority and the body of Christ in medieval culture, Angels and Earthly Creatures reinserts women into the history of preaching and brings together discourses that would have been intertwined in the Middle Ages but are often treated separately by scholars. The examination of handbooks for preachers as literary texts also demonstrates their extensive interaction with secular literary traditions, explored here with particular reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . Through a close and insightful reading of a wide variety of texts and figures, including Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, Waters offers an original examination of the preacher's unique role as an intermediary—standing between heaven and earth, between God and people, participating in and responsible to both sides of that divide.
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Angels and Earthly Creatures
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
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The male preacher’s nonownership of his speech, then, both linked him to and distinguished him from a woman prophet because his depersonalized speech, unlike hers, paradoxically gave him ownership of his status as preacher. From this position, though his doctrine might be God’s, he could still refer to “my preaching” and claim both his own speech and its scriptural origins in a way that a woman—limited, at best, to reading, reciting, or exhorting—never could. Moreover, institutional sanction and descent from Christ made it possible for the male preacher’s body to disappear, in a sense, into that which it represented. The female body, much more marked as bodily in medieval culture, could not stage such a disappearance, and this cultural visibility made it extremely difficult for women to preach in the Middle Ages.71 It also helps to make medieval attitudes visible now, to access the problems with the human male bodies that late medieval theorists often obscured by assimilating those bodies into an idealized image of the preacher that emphasized office over person.
This, then, is what Aquinas’s discussion does not address: the great equalizer between male and female preachers, their humanness. He prefers simply to ignore or condemn the possibility of a human preacher’s mixed motives or his inadequacy to his role, and this precludes any serious consideration of the preacher’s self (se). Such complex questions, however, are precisely the strength of the preaching manuals. As these texts demonstrate, concerns such as ownership of speech, the place of the physical body in the act of preaching, and the preacher’s relationship to both an ultimate source of authority in God and the earthly authorization provided by the institutional church arose not just in relation to women but as fundamentally important matters for all preachers. The attempts at definition, like Aquinas’s exegesis, show the fragility of the preacher’s claim on the doctrine he conveyed and the fragility of the boundaries of preaching. Lying between the purely charismatic speech of prophecy (the ultimate expression of personal authority) and the purely sacramental speech of priesthood (the ultimate form of official authorization), preaching was a hybrid form. The preacher’s speech, and ownership of it, are at issue in ways that the prophet’s and the priest’s are not, and those questions of ownership make the speaking body peculiarly important.
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