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The Golden Chains of Citation

Quomodo vero praedicabunt nisi mittantur?

[And how shall they preach unless they are sent?]

Rom. 10:15

IN HIS DIALOGUES, GREGORY THE GREAT recounts at one point the story of a holy abbot, Equitius, and his preaching career. Like some later preachers, Equitius ran into difficulties over his right to proclaim the Word of God. Gregory tells Peter,

A certain man called Felix … since he observed that this venerable man Equitius was not in holy orders, and that he went around to various places preaching zealously, addressed him one day with the daring of familiarity, saying, “How do you, who are not in holy orders, and have not received license to preach from the bishop of Rome under whom you live, presume to preach?” Compelled by this inquiry of his, the holy man revealed how he received the license to preach, saying, “I have myself considered these same things that you say to me. But one night a beautiful youth appeared to me in a vision, and placed on my tongue a physician’s tool, a lancet, saying, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth; go forth and preach.’ And from that day, even if I wished to, I have not been able to keep silent about God.”¹

The holy man was fortunate to live in a time when, although his license to preach might be questioned, his unsupported assertion of immediate authorization from God was still likely to be accepted. Writing some eight centuries later, around 1320, Robert of Basevorn expressed what was by then a well-established distrust of such visionary justifications. His Forma praedicandi holds, “It is not sufficient for someone to say that he is sent by God, unless he manifestly demonstrates it, for heretics often make this claim.”² By Robert’s time it was not just the occasional holy freelancer who was in question, but whole crowds of new claimants to a preaching mission, and an individual’s assertion of his or her right to preach had become not just the subject of occasional (and, Gregory implies, impudent) inquiry but the catalyst for intensive scrutiny of preaching itself.

As the example of Equitius suggests, one difficulty for late medieval theorists was the acknowledged existence of sacred precedents for inspired preaching. The need to manage the conflicting authorities that gave rise to such precedents instigated a large-scale effort to codify and clarify church law in the twelfth century and “free the church from its chains to the undifferentiated holy past.”³ The desire to “differentiate,” to create human jurisdictions that would check the proliferation of unlicensed speakers, is part of what motivates the discussions of the nature and ownership of preaching in the later Middle Ages.⁴ In freeing the church from its chains, the theorists in effect created a new, singular chain of authorities that excluded certain older models in order to solidify the contemporary assignment of ecclesiastical power.⁵

This chapter explores how changes in the conception of preachers’ authority clustered around the problem of citation, of both authoritative words and authoritative individuals, as theorists wrestled with a central question: “How shall they preach unless they are sent?” The variety of answers over time points to important developments in the understanding of the office of preacher in the later Middle Ages. The preacher established his claims by re-presenting earlier models and above all the absent exemplar, Christ. This representation was simultaneously the heart of his office and its point of greatest vulnerability because the same absence that required the preacher’s activity meant that it was exceptionally difficult to guarantee that activity or to exclude unlicensed practitioners from it. The potential for women and laymen to claim immediate authorization or sacred precedent increased the need for a scaffolding of theory and citation to support the claims of licensed, male preachers, a need that fueled the work of definition and distinction described above. If we look at the claims made for preachers who were “sent” in juxtaposition with the claims of those who were not, particularly women, the fragility of the licensed preachers’ exclusive ownership of public religious speech becomes increasingly apparent.

Medieval theorists’ troubled attempts to regulate preachers’ representations can be illuminated not only by what they say about unlicensed speakers, but also by recourse to theories of performative speech and in particular by the modern chain of citation that links Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and J. L. Austin. The points of contact between these modern auctoritates—the points where Butler draws on Derrida, which in turn mark Derrida’s productive disagreements with Austin—are, strikingly, also matters crucial to the medieval debate: the “iterability” or “citationality” of speech, the concept of ordinary versus extraordinary speech-acts, and the problem posed, for both Austin and the preaching theorists, by the “peculiarly hollow and void” speech of acting. All three issues ultimately lead to concerns over the ownership and origination of speech that plagued medieval theorists as they tried to work through the simultaneous presence and absence of Christ that made preachers’ authority so complicated.

Defining Citations

The idea that preaching is “citational” is hardly shocking; in itself it posed no threat to the preacher’s authority to acknowledge that his speech borrowed explicitly from an authoritative text, and that his activity was always a half-explicit citation of the activity and authority of the preachers who went before him. Silvana Vecchio has observed that for medieval Dominicans, “an ideal thread links the holy founder [Dominic] to the very figure of Christ” and that indeed “the chain of authorities can be even longer and run through the stages of a possible history of edification: Moses, the prophets, Christ, Gregory, Bede, Augustine, Jacques de Vitry, St. Dominic”; the Dominicans saw themselves as “the inheritors and continuers of this long tradition.”⁶ Her point is echoed repeatedly in medieval discussions; one of the three things Humbert of Romans, master-general of the Dominicans from 1254 to 1263, regarded as “especially powerful” in preaching was “the consideration of the methods of other preachers.”⁷ Robert of Basevorn takes up this suggestion, describing the methods of the persons he considers the five greatest preachers of Christian tradition: Christ, Paul, Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard. He notes, however, that Christ “included all praiseworthy methods of preaching in his own method"; as the “fount and origin of good,” Christ is the source and context of all good preaching.⁸

At the same time the potential for citation by unlicensed speakers created considerable anxiety about maintaining the purity of this chain of authorities. Canon law decretals and scholastic disputations drew on and reinforced a textual and institutional tradition that was consistently opposed to unauthorized preaching, and they brought together potentially conflicting authorities to give that tradition a single voice.⁹ The repeated attempts to define preaching in the twelfth century and onward were part of a “general movement to codify knowledge”; texts such as the great summas of the thirteenth century built on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and its commentaries to create definitive solutions to all kinds of theological problems.¹⁰ While scholastic disputation, by its very nature, required the admission of varying points of view, and while the answer provided might be quite nuanced and was even capable of leaving some room for doubt, the goal of the exercise was to resolve issues, and this was how its solutions tended to be used in later borrowings.¹¹ In preaching manuals, for instance, pronouncements against women preachers that derived from quodlibets and the decretals took on an absolute quality: contexts and caveats were stripped away, leaving a new and incontrovertible declaration that subsumed all earlier authoritative discourse on the subject. Throughout the period the chain of citations that excluded unlicensed preachers was imaginatively reinforced and legalistically solidified, strengthening the official position of authorized preachers and making it ever more inaccessible to outsiders.

If we examine the process by which preaching worked out its own boundaries, however, the definitional solidity claimed for the activity comes to seem somewhat illusory. Definition always involves interpretation; it can be as much a polemical tool as an objective description, as Beverly Kienzle and Pamela Walker observe with regard to women’s preaching: “The name preaching has been withheld to deny legitimacy or pronounced to issue condemnation.”¹² And as Simon Forde points out, modern scholars have been perhaps too ready to accept a “narrow, orthodox definition” of preaching that reflects clerical biases rather than the “range of acts that form part of the transmission of the faith and the living of the gospel” in medieval religious life.¹³ His argument is supported by the fact that medieval texts may refer to such activities as disputation, prophecy, exhortation, and teaching, whether performed by men or women, as preaching, and definitions of preaching often seem to describe activities that in other contexts are permitted to women and laymen.¹⁴

When explicitly faced with the possibility of unlicensed preaching, however, theorists took care to regulate and define the activity so as to exclude those who were not part of the church hierarchy. The Benedictine Ranulph Higden’s fourteenth-century manual asserts that “preaching is the public persuasion of many people, for the promoting of salvation, at an appropriate time and place.”¹⁵ Although he does not belabor the point, this definition implicitly excludes those who were not permitted to speak publicly and retains control over the definition of preaching by its mention of “appropriate time and place.” It is clear, of course, that preaching could occur in many forms, places, and times; but there were also times, places, subjects, and certainly persons that were considered to disqualify an act from the characterization “preaching.” Perhaps the best way to formulate this problem would be to say that there is a strict set of criteria that define what might be called, by analogy to J. L. Austin’s concept of “explicit performatives,” “explicit preaching.” Though preaching almost never verbally declares itself as such (“I preach to you”), a properly authorized man standing in a pulpit, at the appropriate point in a Mass, dressed in clerical garb and speaking on the right sort of topic in the right manner could hardly be regarded as doing anything other than preaching.¹⁶ It might be fair to say that preaching theorists would have wished to exclude from consideration as preaching any speech-act that could not properly have taken place in those circumstances (at Mass, from the pulpit)—a criterion that would obviously, and from their point of view desirably, exclude female and lay preaching altogether.¹⁷ This is indeed the view promulgated by the popular fourteenth-century work Speculum Christiani: “A grete differens es be-twene prechynge and techynge. Prechynge es in a place where es clepynge to-gedyr or foluynge of pepyl in holy dayes in chyrches or other certeyn places and tymes ordeyned therto. And it longeth to hem that been ordeynede ther-to, the whych haue iurediccion and auctorite, and to noon othyr. Techynge es that eche body may enforme and teche hys brothyr in euery place and in conable tyme, os he seeth that it be spedful.”¹⁸ Here the notion of “iurediccion and auctorite” is specifically linked to the issues of time and place, and each is used to reinforce the other in a definition of preaching that strictly limits what kind of speech may bear that label.

Despite these attempts at definition, however, it is clear that there must have been innumerable instances when any one or a number of the ideal characteristics of licensed preaching—the appropriate time, place, type of sermon, even an officially authorized person—were lacking without that speech-act ceasing to count as preaching, and this fluidity at the definitional boundaries of preaching opened the door for persons other than priests and bishops to preach.¹⁹ We can gain a more specific sense of how and why preaching needed to be regulated by looking at three categories frequently seen together in such texts as the artes praedicandi, disputations, and canon law: prophecy, preaching, and priesthood. The juxtaposition of these categories, particularly as they relate to women, helps to suggest what qualities and problems were felt to be essential to the activity of preaching, by contrast with its near neighbors.²⁰

Crucial to the link between preaching and priesthood was the sense of lineage and mission referred to in Rom. 10:15. Because Christ had chosen only male disciples, only men were “sent”; they derived authorization from that original mission, rooted in the will of Christ and preserved in the ultimate textual authority of the Bible. The mission Christ gave his Apostles came to be seen as an office and one that could only be conferred by a person who already held that office.²¹ This created a lineage of male priests and preachers whose words derived from the words of Christ, who were supposed to follow and imitate him, and who were authorized both by that point of origin and by the ongoing tradition of priestly office in which they stood. Compounding the importance of priestly lineage in the later Middle Ages was the reformist concept of the priesthood as “a human condition quite distinct from laity,” which made it even more difficult for laymen and persistently impossible for women to take on priestly functions.²²

Since prophets, on the other hand, were sent directly by God without human mediation, they could to some degree avoid the issue of lineage, and the role of prophet was thus open to women, as biblical example confirmed.²³ At the same time there was a consistent effort to emphasize the charismatic, noninstitutional nature of prophecy and thus to prevent women prophets from becoming models for a tradition of female public speech.²⁴ There was also an insistence that such charismatic authority be regulated, either by direct miracle or, more likely, by clerical approval.

If priesthood and prophecy seem fairly clear in their willingness or lack thereof to accommodate unofficial speakers, particularly women, preaching is a gray area lying between the institutional and the charismatic and thus more difficult to assess. Insofar as it partakes of the qualities of priesthood, there is a tendency to emphasize institutional authorization and thus to exclude women, among others.²⁵ But insofar as preaching is assimilated to prophecy, it claims a charismatic, personal authority for the speaker that is much more difficult to regulate. The negotiation between these two aspects, both of which were essential to the preacher’s role, takes place largely in terms of the preacher’s relationships to clerical lineage and to language, particularly the scriptural text.

The medieval concern with these matters can be illuminated by reference to similar problems in the works of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, focusing on the ownership of speech and on citation as a source of meaning. In her discussion of the performance of (gender) identity Butler raises the important question of who is to be imagined as the “author” of that performance.²⁶ She argues that a performed identity has a history that exceeds any individual performer: “The act that one performs … is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene … much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but … requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”²⁷ While the performance of preaching, like the performance of gender, has no explicit script, it draws on both Scripture and an authoritative lineage of performance, and those origins structured late medieval theorists’ attempts to create and defend the boundaries of preaching.

Butler’s concept of performance as repeated acts derives from the Derridean notion of “iterability,” which “implies that every act is itself a recitation, the citing of a prior chain of acts which are implied in a present act.”²⁸ For Derrida, it is precisely repetition, or rather the possibility of repetition, that makes meaning possible.²⁹ His concept of iterability also implies that all language is citational, that “every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring (ancrage).”³⁰ The notion of a sign system “without any center or absolute anchoring” would have been anathema to medieval preaching theorists; in fact, it seems to have been precisely a fear of unanchored contexts that led them to regulate preaching so energetically.³¹ The attempts to prevent unauthorized speakers from entering into the chain of citations described at the beginning of this section helped to give preaching its authoritative form in the later Middle Ages. Ultimately both Butler’s and Derrida’s theoretical approaches raise the question of authorship or ownership of language, which proves to be central to how preaching’s purity of lineage was controlled. An examination of texts that address women’s relationships to the offices of priest, preacher, and prophet leads to an understanding of the importance of ownership and lineage as foundational categories for male preachers.

Lineage and Ownership

In 1210 Pope Innocent III issued a bull, Nova quaedam nuper, in which he expressed his surprise and disapproval at the news that certain abbesses had recently been known to “bless their nuns, hear their confessions of sins, and, reading the gospel, presume to preach publicly”; he ordered the relevant bishops to put a stop to this nonsense, noting that “although the blessed virgin Mary was worthier and more excellent than all the apostles, still the Lord commended the keys of the kingdom of heaven not to her, but to them.”³² The association of the abbesses’ activities, including preaching, with the “power of the keys” conferred by ordination, the power to hear confessions and give absolution, indicates that for Innocent these two roles were closely related.³³ His reference to Mary underlines his explicit denial to women of any historical claim to priestly power and concomitantly forbids them the right to preach. Pope Gregory IX reaffirmed Innocent’s ruling and reasserted women’s exclusion from the ability to cite Scripture publicly in 1234 when he “took from abbesses their right of public preaching and reading of the Gospel.”³⁴

A text written shortly after Innocent’s bull similarly addresses the relationship between reading in the church and women’s proper role in ecclesiastical matters.³⁵ Thomas of Chobham, an early thirteenth-century pastoral theologian with a strongly pragmatic bent, permits public reading of religious texts by women, apparently on the grounds that the speaker makes no intelligent contribution of her own to what is said. Abbesses may instruct and reprehend their nuns, he says, but they may not “expound sacred Scripture by preaching”; and they may read publicly from the Epistles of Saint Paul, the legends of the saints, and the gospel at matins—this is the office of deaconesses, Thomas says—but may not put on priestly vestments or read from the Epistles or the gospel at mass.³⁶ Thomas’s approach is more tolerant than that of Innocent III, but it still denies women access to the most characteristic marks of the clerical hierarchy (priestly vestments, participation in the Mass) and particularly, it may be noted, prohibits women from originating speech: only the “greater ones” (maiores) in the church may expound Scripture to the people, may offer their interpretations and make use of their own intelligence.³⁷ Women, and laymen, may re-cite Scripture or preaching from a text or from memory but may not, so to speak, cite it in their own right, as the production of their own independent knowledge.

As Franco Morenzoni notes, in drawing the line against unlicensed speech at public exposition of Scripture, Thomas is reflecting “a distinction apparently already well established at the beginning of the thirteenth century … that preaching is not permitted to the laity unless the word praedicare is used as a synonym for exhortation to good, while it is formally forbidden them when it is taken in its proper sense, that is, the public explication of the sacred text.”³⁸ Similarly, Innocent III permitted the laymen of the Humiliati to offer moral exhortation in their gatherings but forbade them to discuss “the articles of the faith and the sacraments of the church”—that is, doctrinal and hierarchical matters.³⁹ It is important to recognize, however, that preaching “proper” is not as stable in medieval preaching texts as Morenzoni, among others, seems to suggest. The issue of whether textual exposition is the ultimate definition of preaching is called into question, for instance, by Thomas’s remark, “Although many simple priests may not know the profound mysteries of sacred Scripture, but only know how to rebuke vices and build up faith and good morals, at least in simple words, we do not believe that they are to be condemned. For thus did John the Baptist preach … thus the apostles preached.”⁴⁰ In other words, such activity—which, as Thomas notes immediately afterward, may be practiced by laypersons in private (and he later gives examples of women saints and male hermits “preaching” this way in public)—functions as preaching in a pastoral context, suggesting that here as elsewhere the more limited definition was used not so much to characterize “true” preaching as to exclude unauthorized preachers.⁴¹

Reading aloud and expounding Scripture thus formed one aspect of what it meant to be a priest and accordingly one axis of the argument regarding unlicensed preachers. Considerations of the nature and scope of women’s charismatic authority offer another angle on the problem. Discussions of women preachers frequently take women’s ability to prophesy as a counterargument to their fundamental position that women may not preach. Henry of Ghent’s thirteenth-century disputation on female preachers, for instance, says, “To prophesy is no less [an act] of grace than to teach; rather it is the work of prophets to teach publicly those things that are revealed to them,” and he concedes that women have been prophets.⁴² However, since his final decision, like that of all his colleagues, is that women may not preach after all, this argument must be opposed. Henry does this by saying that “prophecy is given to women not for public instruction, but for private, and if they teach men by it, this is on account of special grace, which does not respect sexual difference.”⁴³ The argument from “special grace” was a favorite since it removed prophecy, and thus women’s speech, from the realm of official, replicable authority. Thomas Aquinas, on whom Henry of Ghent drew for his own argument, declared that “prophecy is not a sacrament, but a gift of God” and placed it outside the human hierarchy of the church, saying that “the prophet is a medium between God and the priest, as the priest is between God and the people.”⁴⁴ The “office” of prophet that could not be denied to women, then, is defined in such a way as to make it irrelevant to issues of women’s preaching or ordination.

In another instance of the desire to prevent women from citing an authoritative lineage, the preaching of certain women saints such as Mary Magdalene and Katherine of Alexandria may be acknowledged, but care is taken that they remain very much non imitanda sed veneranda (to be venerated rather than imitated).⁴⁵ Eustache of Arras does eventually decide that these two women are worthy of the preacher’s aureole, but the contention of, for example, Robert of Basevorn that a preacher must preach repeatedly and with authorization to merit the aureole would certainly exclude most women from the strict title of preacher, even if they managed once or on occasion to perform some version of that role.⁴⁶ Thus, although preaching manuals occasionally admit that women have been known to preach, they prefer to regard this as a product of extraordinary circumstances that does not authorize imitation.⁴⁷

The dichotomy between the ordinary and the extraordinary used to short-circuit the development of a female lineage of preachers appears, not surprisingly, to be related to the issue of ordination. A disputation by Jean de Pouilly, for instance, discusses battles over jurisdiction between mendicants who have the office of preacher “only by commission or privilege (ex commissione seu privilegio), that is to say, by virtue of an extraordinary right (jure extraordinario)”; parish curates, by contrast, are authorized to preach by “ordinary right.”⁴⁸ Jean notes that parish priests have this authority because it was conferred on them (in the person of the seventy-two disciples) “immediately” by Christ.⁴⁹ “Ordinary” authority to preach thus derives from a direct mandate from Christ, a mandate not given to laymen nor, especially, to women. And since the “immediate” conferral of ordination by Christ effectively took place through a human intermediary, it turned out that the mediation of a human lineage of priests and the institutional tradition conferred a more stable authority than the truly immediate inspiration of the prophet. Anyone, that is, including a woman, could attain an authorization from God that was equally or more immediate and direct than that of a priestly preacher, but she could attain it only in an extraordinary and thus noncitable sense.⁵⁰

Limiting women to the noncitable role of prophet or—what amounts to the same thing—to “extraordinary” and nonlineal acts of preaching was thus one way of defining women’s preaching out of existence. As Alcuin Blamires points out, quoting Hugh of St. Cher, “While prophetesses might give precedent for foretelling the future or uttering praise, they do not give precedent for ‘expounding Scripture in preaching’ (a distinction, in fact, between praedicere and praedicare).”⁵¹ Problems arise, however, if we look at the meaning of prophecy in other contexts, since it seems that neither prophecy as such nor its exercise by women was as clear-cut as Hugh’s pronouncement or Aquinas’s appeal to the “gift of grace” might suggest.⁵² Thomas of Chobham says that “preaching is also sometimes called prophecy.… To prophesy is to explain to the people those things which are said.”⁵³ Most of the female prophets of the Bible, like their male counterparts, prophesied in this sense and thus functioned as preachers in Thomas’s definition. Similarly a commentary wrongly attributed to Thomas Aquinas treats the biblical prophets as preachers who “employed a ‘mode of preaching’ appropriate to the people’s capacities” in its simplicity and use of parables.⁵⁴ And William of St.-Amour, arguing a point of preaching jurisdiction that has nothing to do with women, says in the beginning of his antifraternal tirade, “Prophets in holy scripture are called seers.… Thus in making the scriptures available by expounding them they can justly be called seers, since in those same writings they are called prophets. Eph. 4: ‘And he gave to some of them apostles, to others prophets;’ the Gloss [adds], ‘Prophets, that is, interpreters of scripture.’ ”⁵⁵ Here the distinction between apostles and prophets, which could certainly have been used in other contexts as a justification for excluding prophetic speech from the realm of preaching, is set aside in favor of an interpretation that defines prophecy explicitly as textual interpretation, “making the scriptures available by expounding them.”

To go back to a foundational example, it may be noted that Moses, God’s prophet, conveyed the messages he received to his brother Aaron, who had the gift of eloquence; it would thus seem that Aaron is the preacher to Moses’ prophet, acting as the mediator Aquinas envisioned between prophet and people.⁵⁶ At another point, however, God says to Moses, “I have made you a God to Pharaoh; your brother Aaron will be your prophet,” which suggests that the distinction between prophet and preacher was not a particularly solid one and moreover that a “prophet” could directly address an audience.⁵⁷ In his early thirteenth-century preaching manual Alexander of Ashby further demonstrates the fluidity of roles when he refers to Moses as interchangeably preacher and prophet, and to Aaron simply as priest.⁵⁸ When unlicensed preachers were not directly in question, in other words, the boundaries of prophecy and preaching could be somewhat fluid. When the object was to control access to ecclesiastical power, however, prophecy consistently took on its limited meaning of direct revelation or future-telling, a meaning that had the effect of excluding female and lay male prophets from a clerical lineage of preachers.⁵⁹

The definition of the woman prophet’s role as extralineal, then, was designed to cope with one of the difficulties raised by women who addressed the church: that of what precedent they might set. There remained, however, the question of the origin of the prophet’s speech, a concern akin to the question of “expounding” in preaching. When God instructed the fourteenth-century prophet Birgitta of Sweden to go and rebuke the king of Sweden, Birgitta pleaded ignorance of what to say and was told, “When you arrive, open your mouth; and I will fill it”; when she arrived, “divine words were at once poured into her.”⁶⁰ This formulation accords with Birgitta’s image of herself as a “channel” for God’s Word, a pure conduit for the message she carried. Two centuries earlier Bernard of Clairvaux had rejected this image of a male preacher, saying that he should be a vessel, not a channel, taking in the message and incorporating it before pouring it out by teaching. To attempt to teach others without being filled oneself constituted a spiritual danger.⁶¹ For a woman preacher, however, any activity or image that emphasized the role of her own mind or body in the transmission of her message could be risky and distracting.

A male preacher’s ownership of his words seems at first glance to be more clear-cut than is that of the woman prophet. Preaching, unlike scripted, sacramental speech, always has an individual, personal component; as one thirteenth-century author notes, “no one speaks of ‘my baptizing’ as he does of ‘my evangelizing’ or ‘my preaching.’ ”⁶² This is one of the things that differentiate preaching from a sacrament, which, if performed with technical correctness, always has the same effect, regardless of the quality of the individual priest who performs it.⁶³ The preacher is thus involved in the work of preaching and cannot expect “his” preaching to be handed to him on a silver platter; as the preaching manuals make clear, the Lord helps those who help themselves, and eloquence in preaching is an acquired habit as well as a gift of grace.⁶⁴ Yet Birgitta’s delicate balance between God’s words and her own, though more fraught, is in some ways not so different from that of a male preacher. A thirteenth-century treatise on preaching says that “the preacher should not say his own words, but the words of the Lord and those things the Lord supplies to him.”⁶⁵ And the reassurance given to Birgitta that her speech comes from God echoes numerous biblical verses that apply to male prophets and preachers, most notably, perhaps, Matt. 10:18–20, from the chapter on the sending of the Apostles, when Christ tells them, “You will be led before governors and kings for my sake.… But when they deliver you up, do not think of how or what you will speak: for it will be given to you in that same hour what you will speak. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.”⁶⁶ The prophet is an instrument, God’s mouthpiece—but so is the preacher. Indeed the preacher should “efface himself,” as Jean Leclercq says, thinking only of the glory of God and the edification of his neighbor.⁶⁷ In this regard, the difference between a woman prophet and a male preacher was perhaps as much one of emphasis as of substance.

A discussion by Thomas Aquinas both reinforces this impression and suggests how strong—and complex—was the association between ownership of speech and lineal ordination that excluded unauthorized speakers. He takes the concern with ownership back to its foundations as he analyzes Jesus’ words in John 7:16: “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.” Aquinas explains that there would be no difficulty if Jesus had said, “The doctrine that I speak is not mine,” but his words suggest that his doctrine both is and is not his. Aquinas solves this by saying that “the spiritual origin of doctrine is from God,” and thus Jesus’ doctrine is his insofar as the Son is one with the Father but is not his insofar as he is a “created soul.” In other words, Jesus’ doctrine is not his insofar as he is human. Moreover, Aquinas adds, it is because Jesus’ doctrine is not his own that it is true doctrine. This is the explanation of John 7:18: “He who speaks from himself, seeks his own glory, but he who seeks the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.” God is the sole locus of truth; the validity of the preacher’s doctrine derives from its origin in God rather than in himself.⁶⁸

As Alexander of Ashby puts it, “If someone speaks, let him speak as it were not his own words, but the words of Christ, attributing nothing of what is well said to himself but all to him from whom comes all good.”⁶⁹ Aquinas adds that “it is unrighteousness when a man usurps what is foreign [alienum] to him” and insists that anyone who seeks his own glory, rather than God’s, is unrighteous—a stricture that the preaching manuals repeat many times.⁷⁰

Although Aquinas’s argument particularly considers Jesus, his extension of the point to unworthy preachers makes it clear that his observations have wider application. The insistence that a teacher’s words are valid only insofar as they mark his connection to God requires the speaker’s displacement of himself. A similar move, of course, helped to make prophecy a valid option for women: it downplayed the speaker’s body and offered a guarantee that a woman’s doctrine was not her own. But the insistence on “the doctrine of him that sent me” recalls the need for institutional sanction, for the preacher’s participation in a masculine lineage founded by Christ. Thus the alienation of speech Aquinas insists on (loqui non a se) justifies the preacher’s position in a lineage even as it puts demands on him. Provided he is not speaking “of himself” he does not “usurp” that which is another’s; his disowned speech marks the preacher’s personal authority and righteousness and also his claim to be “him whom God has sent,” his official and lineal authorization by the church. Women’s exclusion from priestly lineage, however, meant that even if their doctrine was God’s, their speech, if made public, was always in some sense a usurpation of another’s privilege; unlike male preachers, they could not comfortably make reference to “him that sent me.”

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.

The Absence of Absolutes

The increasing appearance of solidity in the office of preacher that characterizes the thirteenth century, then, was a response to a crucial weakness, as are many displays of strength. The multiple citations required in preaching, with their concomitant questions about ownership of speech and clerical lineage, emphasized the preacher’s body because they foregrounded the physical absence of his (or her) ultimate model. The preacher re-presents God or Christ precisely because neither is bodily present. As Gillian Evans puts it, paraphrasing the words of Gregory the Great, “God himself works so closely with preachers that when he was on earth and visible to us the words of preachers were withdrawn … but now that he is not present in the flesh they must speak for him.”⁷² Both the preacher’s need and his ability to “cite” Christ derive from this relative absence, an absence that makes it difficult or impossible to guarantee the authenticity of the citation.⁷³ If preaching were simply a matter of citing the words and actions of Christ—in effect, of acting the “script” of preaching—there would clearly be nothing to prevent any virtuous and learned speaker from preaching. Such proliferation, however, was unacceptable. As a late preaching manual puts it, “All preaching is sent from God, without mediation or by the mediation of angels or men, and it always bears the power of God and represents his person.”⁷⁴ Preaching by unauthorized speakers, especially women, disrupts a chain of citations—textual, personal, and institutional—whose ultimate and immediate referent is the person of God, and this lineage of authority is intended to constitute the very basis of preaching. That the final guarantor of that lineage is both present, in the form of his representative, and also absent, and thus unable immediately to guarantee that representative’s appropriateness, is the kernel of the problem, and it is this nexus of absence and presence that returns us to modern speech-act and performance theory.⁷⁵

The usefulness of the categories developed by Austin, Derrida, and Butler for looking at medieval preaching theory, so far from them in time and worldview, is no accident, I would argue, as we can see by following the modern chain of citations. Butler builds on Derrida’s work to develop her theory of performance as unauthored citation; Derrida’s concepts of iterability and citation grow in turn out of his disagreements with Austin’s speech-act theory, particularly the latter’s rejection of the idea of actors’ language as “hollow and void.” Austin’s notion of performative speech is a reflection on the workings of “ordinary language” that draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations, which generates that theory, with a quotation from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, bringing us full circle to the father of Christian preaching theory. The idea of “ordinary language,” of course, which lies at the center of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, returns us to one of the key terms of the preaching debate. In effect, it was Augustine’s concern with the nature of language, its workings in a human context, and its role in the connection between human and divine that produced both De doctrina Christiana (the first sustained theoretical approach to Christian preaching) and the passage of the Confessions that drew Wittgenstein’s attention. Derrida and Butler examine human communication and the establishment of authority in the context of an absolute absence—that is, from an atheistic perspective—while the medieval theorists begin from an assumption that there exists an absolute presence, but both groups come up against many of the same problems and questions.⁷⁶ In each case the theorists must struggle with how spoken human communication replicates or refuses to replicate the notion of an absolute presence or absence lying behind it.

We can see this most clearly by turning to the point at which Derrida takes up Austin’s arguments. Somewhat like medieval theorists’ definitions of preaching, with their constitutive exclusions of prophecy, Austin’s theory of speech-acts requires the exclusion of the imitated, delegated, citational speech of actors. He characterizes this as “non-ordinary” and thus denies it a place in his consideration of performative speech, claiming that “a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage.… Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in many ways parasitic upon its normal use.… Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances.”⁷⁷ Derrida, whose discussion of citationality begins precisely from this collapse (as he sees it) in Austin’s argument, contends that since any speech-act’s ability to function depends on its participation in a chain of citation, such “non-ordinary” speech actually shares its defining characteristic as citation with any other speech-act and thus cannot be bracketed out. Similarly, as has been suggested above, attempts to depict prophecy as an entirely distinct and extraordinary category with no bearing on the preacher’s authority are in the end unsustainable, and the theorists’ repeated attempts at definition suggest that they were uncomfortably aware of this instability.

Citation may seem to be a red herring, since for Austin citation is what excludes a speech-act from ordinary consideration while for the medieval theorists citation is precisely what makes the preacher’s speech-act ordinary. The conflict is only apparent, however; indeed, the ultimate instance of Austin’s “true” performative speech might be said to be the priestly, sacramental speech that both authorizes and contrasts with the preacher’s speech: “I absolve you"; “I baptize you”; “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” In the end both Austin’s “infelicitous” utterances and the kinds of speech excluded from the category of preaching are rejected because they are “inappropriate” in that the speaker is in some essential sense not the “owner” of that speech, or perhaps we might more correctly say because it does not “belong” to him or her.

Both Austin and the preaching theorists wish to establish a claim that we can determine who has a right to certain kinds of speech.⁷⁸ Here again, however, we encounter the problem of absence, the absence of any absolute and fully expressed meaning, figured by Derrida as the impossibility of “saturating” the context of any communication. For Derrida the kind of plenitude imagined and desired by preaching theorists (and to a lesser extent by Austin) is unavailable: “Given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content.… In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least have to be totally present and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context.”⁷⁹ In view of the bodily absence of God, whose “conscious intention” they would presumably have regarded as “totally present and immediately transparent to itself,” if not invariably to others, preaching theorists recognized the need for a representative. However, because of human limitations—whether these are regarded as the result of original sin or of an unruly unconscious—the human representative, unlike the one he represents, is not capable of a “conscious intention” that is “totally present.” Given the preacher’s human shortcomings, the context of preaching, like any other human context, could never be “saturable” in Derrida’s terms or, it might be said, controllable.⁸⁰

Ultimately, Christian preaching theory was hoist with its own petard in regard to the issue of divine and human contexts. Unwilling to allow any inspired person the title of preacher, and the possibility of generating imitators, theorists of preaching explicitly displaced preaching from full participation in the realm of plenitudinous, divine communication. Their concepts of extraordinary and ordinary authority relegated prophecy to a different sphere and denied women and laymen access to preaching.⁸¹ Since women were regarded as equal in soul to men, the justification for preventing them from preaching could only be that this activity takes place in the human world and thus requires a certain “privilege over others,” as Humbert of Romans put it; hence women, being subject to men in human society, may not preach.⁸² This is also the substance of Thomas Aquinas’s argument against public instruction by women, which relies not on theological underpinnings, as his discussion of women and ordination does, but on social norms; he cites the ubiquitous Epistle to Timothy.⁸³ Such justifications situate preaching firmly in the context of human hierarchies and limitations. They exclude women and also tend to diminish the male preacher’s ability to claim direct access to the divine in his preaching. The preacher, whether female or male, thus becomes subject to questions about social status, personal morality, and interactive performance; the exclusion of unauthorized speakers by appeal to the human context inescapably entangles the preacher in the demands of that context. Suspended between authorization and inspiration, between citation and ownership, the preacher had to assert a claim on his language and office that, in order to function, could only ever be provisional.