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Introduction

Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.

[And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.]

John 1:14

Who has access to the divine? How is that access achieved, and how transmitted? And what responsibilities does it carry with it? The medieval preacher, whose office required him to struggle with these questions, was a bridge between divine and human, between an eternal truth and a particular audience. He was also the representative of a clerical culture whose control over textuality, authority, and religious knowledge was increasingly centralized and codified but also in many ways increasingly precarious in the later Middle Ages. Caught between these various roles, mediating between disparate groups and milieus, the preacher found himself in a hybrid position. In this he resembled, not accidentally, his ultimate model, the Word made Flesh, who first presented the essential fusion of human body and divine truth and then passed on to his successors the responsibility to imitate him and perpetuate his message. But unlike Jesus, for whom the combination of Word and Flesh was perfect and effortless, the preachers who followed him had to struggle with their role. They worked within the limits of their human embodiment, an embodiment that even after the coming of Jesus bore the mark of Adam and thus was prone to war against their best intentions and the divine message they carried.

The appropriate interaction of life and teaching, of preaching and practice, and the significance of that interaction, is one of the main topics of the artes praedicandi, Latin handbooks for preachers that were produced and copied in considerable numbers all over Europe from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.¹ While many of the artes are primarily rhetorical manuals on the construction of a sermon, most contain some attention to other matters—from the preacher’s morality to his gestures, his subject matter, his deportment, even his clothing. In both immediate practical terms and a larger spiritual sense they are concerned with how a preacher should perform his role and fulfill the duties of his office. Their discussions focus around two related concepts: the preacher’s personal authority—his ability to manage his own sinful nature, make use of his physical body, and present himself in a way that made him a credible and appropriate speaker of divine truth; and the preacher’s institutional authorization—his status within a hierarchy and his representation of a divinely instituted lineage and its official doctrine. Authority and authorization were recognized as necessary components of effective preaching and imagined as, ideally, mutually reinforcing qualities. At the same time, though, because of the contested nature of preaching in the later Middle Ages these categories were often set against one another, and the preacher who possessed only one of them could pose a spiritual danger to himself and others.

The central contention of this book is twofold. First, I argue that the conflicted cooperation between authority and authorization is a manifestation of the fundamentally hybrid nature of the preacher’s calling, one recognized everywhere in the handbooks. Standing between earth and heaven, between the institutional church and the faithful laity, the preacher saw his own liminality expressed most markedly in his own body, the physical vessel of a divine calling. That body’s susceptibility to the snares of the world and the flesh presented constant anxieties for theorists of preaching, but at the same time these theorists grudgingly acknowledged the essential and, indeed, potentially enriching influence of the preacher’s embodiment on his work. Exploring these contradictions as they appear in literature written by, for, and about preachers in this period provides a new way to approach questions about the relationship between body and spirit in the Middle Ages: by studying those whose professional duty was to convey the latter by means of the former. A second, and related, argument is that in pursuing the cultural implications of the officium praedicatoris, we must look at women’s preaching in the context of and as a formative influence on ideas about men’s preaching.² Women were energetically and vociferously excluded from a public teaching role, ostensibly because of the limitations of their gender.³ But as the writers of the preaching manuals were all too aware, the frailty of the body—its capacity for sin, deception, and worldliness—that medieval culture often associated particularly with the feminine was equally a threat to every preacher.⁴ Discussions of women preachers thus allowed theorists to raise and examine questions about personal authority and the body’s role in that authority without having to address those questions directly toward male preachers. Putting women’s preaching back into its full context illuminates not only the boundaries of authorized activity but also the nature of licensed preachers’ connection to the hierarchy that sent them and to the divine body they represented.

The artes praedicandi and other works of preaching literature that explore the tensions outlined above are the foundation of this book. The aim is to offer a reading of these texts of spiritual and professional formation that is attentive to what they can tell us about the pitfalls and rewards of the activity of preaching and the demands it made upon the human beings who held this “angelic” office. The late medieval revival of interest in preaching took place, of course, in a broader landscape of religious renewal and competition, and before beginning the literary discussion that forms the majority of this argument it will be useful to sketch some of that background. Although this book by no means claims to offer a comprehensive account of the history of late medieval preaching, I have tried to situate my argument with regard to the historical specificities of the mid twelfth to late fourteenth centuries; the brief account that follows is intended to provide the reader with a context for the works and themes treated here.

Beginning in the eleventh century the reforms fostered by Pope Gregory VII emphasized the need for the clergy to be a group set apart from the world, both independent of temporal control and contemptuous of earthly goods and desires.⁵ This focus both raised clerical status and laid the clergy open to critiques of their moral stature, critiques that others were not slow to make. Heterodox religious groups and freelance evangelists began to challenge the clerical monopoly on preaching, often using personal morality as a basis for criticism of the clergy.⁶ Brian Stock offers a highly illuminating account of one such group, the Patarenes of eleventh-century Milan, which demonstrates that the questions addressed in the preaching manuals in the late twelfth century onward were ones that had been exercising reformers for some time already; his discussion, which sees preaching as a central facet of the Patarene movement, touches on such issues as clerical status and bodiliness (particularly the debate over clerical marriage), the effect of charismatic preaching, the relationship between preacher and audience, and questions of jurisdiction and right to preach, particularly laymen’s “usurpation” of preaching—all matters that recur throughout this book.⁷ The desire of individuals and groups to speak out and instruct others reflected a new conception of a central ideal of Christian life, the vita apostolica, which had traditionally been identified with the monastic vita communis.⁸ In the later eleventh and twelfth centuries the apostolic life was reimagined as centering on poverty and preaching, on action in the world rather than a removed life of contemplation. This development reflects the tension between the institutional and the charismatic that plagued the late medieval church as the hierarchy tried to maintain its established power while remaining true to its radical roots. This tension lies at the heart of many of the debates about preaching.

Fundamentally important among these debates was the question of authorization and jurisdiction. Those who embraced the new understanding of the vita apostolica were by no means always heretical in their beliefs, but their desire to exercise the apostolic office of preaching led inevitably to clashes with orthodoxy. The monastic withdrawal from the world and laxity among the secular clergy had left a vacuum of religious instruction and exhortation, which devout laypeople were only too glad to fill—a task they often, it seems, performed with great skill and effectiveness, but one which made them a potential threat.⁹ Herbert Grundmann describes an edict issued by Lucius III in 1184 that named heretical groups to be suppressed (including Cathars, Waldenses, and Patarenes) and then provided a list of heretical characteristics: “First on the list was unlicensed preaching.”¹⁰ The performance of religious instruction was thus at the heart of the battle for religious control, whether as a heretical activity, a focus of lay spirituality, an official response to challenges against orthodoxy, or a pastoral attempt to rescue straying sheep. In many ways the development of preaching theory was a defensive reaction: claims on public speech by excluded groups such as heretics, laypeople, and women influenced the formation of official conceptions of preaching.¹¹

The clerical hierarchy, not surprisingly, fought to maintain its prerogatives against the incursions of nonclerics. While some of its efforts were punitive, others attempted to harness the fervor and effectiveness of marginal groups and use them to benefit the church as a whole. Some itinerant preachers were granted license to preach and encouraged to found settled orders.¹² For most of the twelfth century, however, the church’s efforts to reconcile splinter groups to itself were half-hearted and ineffective. It was not until the accession in 1198 of Innocent III, the great proponent of inclusion, that the movement to bring heterodox groups back into the fold began to build steam. Innocent’s willingness to reabsorb suitably chastened lay groups led him to issue a limited preaching license to the Italian Humiliati at the beginning of the thirteenth century and to attempt similar reconciliations with others.¹³ As with the wandering preachers, stability seems to have been of great importance: provided such associations were willing to recognize the validity of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and organize themselves into some kind of settled structure, they could be assimilated into orthodoxy.¹⁴

As the twelfth century drew to a close, then, the clerical hierarchy finally began to respond to the need for improved interaction between itself and the laity.¹⁵ In the early thirteenth century two events took place that were to have an enormous impact on the development of that interaction and particularly on the practice of preaching. The first was the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which codified the demand for pastoral care. The requirement that every individual make a yearly confession of sins to a priest, perhaps the most famous of the council’s statutes, meant that the laity needed increased instruction in the tenets of the Christian faith so that they could make a full and valid confession, and thus that the clergy needed to be prepared to provide that instruction. The council, recognizing that bishops were no longer able to do all the preaching required and anxious to combat the spread of unlicensed preachers, also ordered that bishops appoint “appropriate” substitutes to preach in their dioceses.¹⁶

The second event of the early thirteenth century with special relevance for preaching was the formation of the mendicant orders. The Dominicans originated as an antiheretical movement; the Franciscans’ particular focus was on perfect poverty. Both groups practiced itinerant preaching and thus looked similar, at first glance, to various heterodox associations, for whom they were sometimes mistaken.¹⁷ They demonstrated from the beginning, however, a willingness to be part of the hierarchical church; in return, the church (in the person of Innocent III) permitted them to continue the practices of poverty and preaching central to their spiritual vocation.¹⁸ As the Dominican and Franciscan orders developed they maintained their preaching activities, becoming important parts of the church’s defense against both heresy and internal decay. But as wandering evangelists they still threatened the jurisdiction of the secular clergy, leading to ongoing battles over their right to preach.¹⁹

Over the course of the thirteenth century the mendicant orders solidified into enormous and enormously influential networks. Their development and the concomitant growth of the universities gave rise to the more rigorous scholastic explication of many of the ideas that originated in the apostolic reform movements. Explorations of sacramental theology and the nature of the church continued the attempt to define and control the exercise of religious authority, upholding the rights of the centralized church of which the mendicants were now a part. The scholastic interest in classification led to an outpouring of technical works such as the artes praedicandi (a significant number of which were written by friars) and disputation literature that often tried to define and delimit preaching in order to exclude unwanted or unauthorized groups.

Alongside this centralization of authority lay movements continued to develop. The growth of extra-liturgical forms of devotion, and of attention to the human Christ, offered possibilities for lay piety that ultimately built on the reforming zeal of earlier centuries.²⁰ For women especially, the new modes of piety could provide opportunities for religious expression since they tended to emphasize personal authority and morality, rather than orthodox institutional authorization, as the bases for public speech. The developments in women’s religious experience have been extensively studied; they affected women of all social and religious classes, from beguines and nuns, to anchoresses, to devout laywomen of all ranks.²¹

Women’s participation in the religious trends of the later Middle Ages both reflected and shaped those trends. The reforming temper that characterized much of the period, for example, can be seen in the activities and writings of extraordinary women as far apart in time and earthly status as the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the fourteenth-century Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena. Catherine and her older contemporary Birgitta of Sweden, on the other hand, both benefited from the new emphasis on Christ’s human accessibility by using their personal connections to God as an authorization of their speech. But it was not only such famous figures whose lives and activities were affected by the upheavals and controversies of the late Middle Ages; other less known and surely many unknown women were part of the expanding idea of what it meant to lead a religious life. The frequent complaints that heretics, particularly Waldensians, permitted women to preach are only one marker of this increase in the scope of women’s activities.²² The intense reactions, both positive and negative, to women’s role in heterodox, lay, and visionary spirituality suggest that to their contemporaries these women could function as a sign of all that was both vital and threatening in these new expressions of piety.²³

This brief historical account suggests, I hope, how many cultural concerns swirled around preaching in the later Middle Ages and why a consideration of the literature of preaching is fruitful for an understanding of the period as a whole. Faced with the threats of heresy and lay disaffection, and thus with a demand for both more and better preaching, late medieval clerics responded with innumerable aids for preachers, including collections of hagiography, collections of exempla, florilegia, model sermons, and above all artes praedicandi. Such texts can provide an appreciation of how medieval clerics viewed this crucially important task and how they tried to reconcile the unworldly truth of preaching with the earthly body through which the preacher expressed it. As M.-D. Chenu observes of the transformations of the twelfth century, “The dialectic between the gospel and the world … evoked a dual response from the individual Christian as he both returned to the gospel and remained in the world. A dual response and not two responses, for history shows it was the Christian’s return to the gospel which guaranteed his presence in the world and that it was this presence in the world which secured the efficacy of the gospel.”²⁴ The preaching that participated in this “dual response” both benefited from and struggled with the interaction of its elements in ways that reflect the efforts of the church as a whole to come to terms with the competing demands of charisma and hierarchy, spiritual authority and earthly power. Preaching offers a way to see the medieval church in the process of understanding and constructing itself, through the bodies of the men who represented it and the women who tested its boundaries.

While there is, not surprisingly, no single work offering a complete history of medieval preaching, there are many places to begin the study of sacred eloquence in the Middle Ages.²⁵ Most, however, tend to treat the issue of women’s preaching separately from men’s preaching. Drawing on the medieval handbooks written by and for preachers, this book aims to reintegrate these two traditions, which illuminate each other and clarify our understanding of what it meant to medieval preachers to be the mouth of God, to hold an angelic office in human form.²⁶ In so doing, it builds on and helps to connect recent areas of lively inquiry in medieval studies. While the place of the female body in religious practice, for instance, in both its negative and positive valences, has been subtly and intensively investigated in recent scholarship, the male body is only beginning to receive such attention. Several recent essay collections on medieval masculinity and book-length studies such as Dyan Elliott’s work on clerical bodies and their potential for sin show the growing interest in this area; the preaching manuals can complement such work by considering the pitfalls of masculine self-presentation, the dangers offered by the male flesh in performance, and the implications of masculine embodiment for the institutional hierarchy of the church.²⁷

From another angle, Christ’s body, especially in its relationship to the Eucharist and to affective devotion, has been the topic of much excellent and influential work in the last few years.²⁸ A study of preachers, who were encouraged to model themselves explicitly on the physical presence and activity of Christ, enhances our sense of how the Middle Ages understood the ultimately important body and how that understanding reflected on the bodies of those who represented him. The study of works by preachers thus offers a “historically contingent version of Christ’s humanity” that can supplement what David Aers, following Sarah Beckwith, calls the “commonplace” of “the humanity of Christ” as the suffering, bleeding body of Passion meditations and other late medieval devotional works. The version of Christ’s humanity imagined in the preaching manuals tends to be closer to the one that Aers calls “the Gospels’ Jesus … [m]obile, articulate, teaching, healing.”²⁹

Finally, the hybridity inherent in preaching can help us to understand certain competing trends of the later Middle Ages, for which the body of the preacher was in some sense a staging ground. These trends are represented by two important strands in recent medieval scholarship: the study of women’s religious experience and devotion, exemplified by the work of Caroline Walker Bynum; and the literary examination of scholastic and canon-law texts, such as the work of Alastair Minnis. These fields, while not in competition, have remained more separate in modern scholarship than their subjects would have been in their original medieval context. But they have much to say to one another, and this book benefits from and will, I hope, contribute to their productive cross-fertilization. Stephen Jaeger has recently explored the relationship between bodily and textual authority in the school culture of the high Middle Ages, arguing that the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a shift from charismatic body to charismatic text.³⁰ In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a similar intensification of focus on the dignity of the office of preaching and its textual mandate, rather than on the person of the preacher, warred with the ongoing awareness of the physical side of the preacher’s activity. Discussions of the office of preacher enable an examination of widespread late medieval concerns with embodiment and authority in a particular context and can offer a new window onto the medieval perception, and (attempted) resolution, of such competing ideas.

The effort to manage the physical aspect of preaching in relation to its textual foundations is a crucial undertaking of the preaching manuals. For this reason the artes praedicandi most closely examined here are the ones that give extensive attention to matters, such as the preacher’s relationship to his office or his self-presentation, beyond the purely technical aspects of sermon construction.³¹ Since appropriate transmission of the Word of God was essential to the spiritual health of the faithful laity and the institutional health of the orthodox church, the preacher’s body had an importance far beyond its own boundaries—boundaries that could be unstable, as recent work suggests.³² A study of the preacher’s vulnerable humanity and his hybrid status can help us to understand the “necessary interrelationship and ultimate interdependence” of the varied and sometimes competing discourses (those of heterodoxy, canon law, pastoral care, and affective spirituality, among others) that made up the world of medieval Christianity.³³ The negotiations between textuality and embodiment, between authorization and authority, that underlie many of these conflicts are a fundamental concern of the preaching theorists and the subject of this book.

The chapters that follow explore in more detail the need both to establish and to cross boundaries that characterized medieval preaching. The first four chapters address the building blocks of the preacher’s role: his authorization, his persona, and his language. “The Golden Chains of Citation” looks at the concern with definitions and boundaries that characterized late medieval discussions of the preacher’s institutional authorization and draws on modern performance theory to examine the implications of their attempt to create an unbreakable and impermeable lineage of preachers. In “Holy Duplicity: The Preacher’s Two Faces” I turn to the problem of the preacher’s “person,” both as a physical body and as a persona presented to the world; this chapter also introduces Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into the discussion, focusing particularly on the Parson and the Pardoner. Chaucer’s role here and later is not merely decorative. It is clear from the Tales that Chaucer, as G. G. Sedgewick long ago noted, “got himself steeped in all the dyes of traditional preaching before he set about creating the Canterbury Tales and several of the pilgrims in it,” an apt metaphor given how naturally preaching concerns seem woven into the fabric of various tales.³⁴ While many medieval literary texts respond to and are shaped by preaching traditions, it is my contention that Chaucer’s poem, with its intense emphasis on speech, embodiment, and authority, illuminates some central issues in preaching theory by presenting them in concentrated (and personified) form.³⁵ The third chapter, “A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular,” considers the preacher not only as a translator in a linguistic sense, but also as a mediator between cultures who needed both to form a connection with and to maintain his distinctness from his audience. “ ‘Mere Words’: Gendered Eloquence and Christian Preaching” explores the long-standing association between rhetoric and femininity and the implications of using a worldly, morally neutral form to convey a spiritual message.

The final three chapters turn from the first section’s primary focus on male preachers—in which women, nonetheless, often play an important part—to look at women preachers, fictional and real, more directly. “Transparent Bodies and the Redemption of Rhetoric” examines how the legendary preaching of certain women saints helped to address the anxieties raised by the allure of rhetoric and by the preacher’s physicality. “The Alibi of Female Authority” considers the efforts of three historical women, Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, to rework the clerical conceptions of preacherly speech and authorization that excluded them and to provide themselves with a place from which they could proclaim their message to the church. Finally, “Sermones ad Status and Old Wives’ Tales; or, The Audience Talks Back” looks at the preoccupation of the Canterbury Tales with competing voices and speaking bodies in light of the work’s origins in the preaching form known as sermones ad status, sermons to various types or classes of people. I argue that the figure of the Wife of Bath represents, in a sense, the logical outcome of trends already present in preaching and that her peculiar combination of feminine and clerical modes of speech allows Chaucer to appropriate the necessary hybridity of preachers’ discourse in creating his own poetic voice.

In all of these chapters, I have tried to let the preoccupations of the medieval texts examined here—debate literature, hagiography, canon law, poetry, and above all the artes praedicandi themselves—direct my own interests. The extraordinary care, attention, and energy devoted to preaching by the authors of these various texts suggest the importance of their subject: a mode of speech and performance that offered, in their view, not an imitation of life, but access to the life eternal. Respect for the high aims and seriousness of preaching at its best, however, should not prevent us from exploring its human—and thus at times less than ideal—qualities and characteristics. “Official” and orthodox discussions of preaching show where the theorists’ concerns lie, but if we accept these straightforwardly on their own terms, we see only half the picture. By considering theory in the light of practice, the acceptable in juxtaposition with the excluded, and above all, the productive and destructive interactions of the preacher’s human body with the authoritative message he worked to convey, this book aims to provide a fuller representation and a better understanding of the activity of preaching in the later Middle Ages.