for later theorists of preaching, but they came to be used in a spiritual and institutional climate very different from that in which the sixth-century pope had developed them. The reforms instigated by the other famous Pope Gregory in the eleventh century gave rise to new pressures on the body of the preacher. The desire to return to a vision of the apostolic life as one of poverty and preaching, the focus on the clergy as a group set apart, and above all the need to recapture for the church as a whole a radical sense of sancta simplicitas all put increased demands on the clergy to possess, and to display in their words and actions, an impeccable personal morality.10 To fulfill their office and to reinforce the church’s power, preachers required both spiritual excellence and unquestioned authorization, qualities displayed above all in the preacher’s person.
That “person,” however, was a problematic and increasingly divided concept. As the authors of scholastic and disputation literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries moved away from the patristic tendency to focus on personal dignity, they began, as Jean Leclercq says, “to distinguish the person from the function, and they did so in order to emphasize the dignity of the function and the obligation of the person to conform himself to it.”11 The personal virtue that had been the primary repository of the preacher’s authority suddenly had to coexist with, and in many cases take second place to, the impersonal and hierarchical power of his official authorization.12 This shift is linked to the one that Stephen Jaeger sees in this same period, from charismatic body to charismatic text.13 Such a transition is never a smooth one, as Jaeger notes, and the growing focus on authorization worked against the continuing demand for holy simplicity and, more importantly, against the fact that preachers were, inevitably, charismatic bodies. Discussions aimed at preachers on the relationship of their persons to their task display with particular clarity what Ernst Kantorowicz, discussing another kind of dual body, calls the “eager[ness] to reconcile the duality of this world and the other, of things temporal and eternal, secular and spiritual.”14 Attempts to reconcile these dualities, however, often only reinforced the depth of the gap between them.
A comparison of the textual bodies of Parson and Pardoner begins to outline some possible relationships between the preacher’s person and his office. All we know of the Parson’s physical presence is that despite the breadth of his parish he visits his parishioners faithfully, in rain and snow and gloom of night, “upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.”15 The depiction suggests a body whose sole meaning derives from its service to a larger task; indeed, there is so little sense of particular embodiment here that, as R. N. Swanson puts it, “It is virtually impossible to bring him to mind as a person … any attempt to conjure up a physical presence falls completely flat.”16 The feet perhaps recall the image of preachers as the feet of the church, and the staff in his hand reminds us of his role as shepherd: the Parson’s body functions as an abstract reflection of his office.
What a contrast this makes to the Pardoner, whose physicality is so foregrounded, simultaneously excessive and elusive, that it may well dominate our sense of him and certainly interferes with his preaching in ways that preaching theorists would have strongly disapproved.17 First, there is the doubt about his sexuality: “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare,” the narrator says, expressing an uncertainty that has implications not only for his acceptance among the other pilgrims but for his very ability to occupy the office of preacher.18 Second, there is the theatrical gesticulation about which he boasts in his prologue: “Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke, / And est and west upon the peple I bekke, / As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne. / Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne / That it is joye to se my bisynesse.”19 This kind of physical display is uniformly condemned in preaching handbooks and contrasts sharply with the Parson’s approach: here, it is clear, the preacher’s office serves his body rather than vice versa.20 Finally, of course, the Pardoner’s greed, the cupidity that both fuels his preaching and provides its subject, marks the unworthy self-interest that motivates his supposedly spiritual work.21 If the Parson exemplifies personal authority attained through perfect submission to an institutional structure and ideal, and thus powerfully reinforcing that structure and ideal, the Pardoner emblematizes the capacity of the physical body to destroy both personal authority and institutional authorization.
Alastair Minnis has recently discussed the theoretical and theological aspects of the potential gap between the body as locus of authority and the body as locus of a fallible individual.22 The aim here is to raise similar questions about the practical performance of preaching. Attempts by the authors of artes praedicandi to manage the potentially competing meanings of the preacher’s body are all the more informative because they deal with a figure who was not, like a king, in a removed position of divine right nor, like an author, at a distance from his audience, but one who had constantly to perform both his virtue and his authority for a present, and possibly resistant, audience. In establishing the preacher’s claim implicitly to represent the church’s dignity and authority, preaching theorists often contrast the authorized representative with those excluded from or inappropriate to the office of preaching, such as heretics, laymen, women, and immoral preachers. References to such denigrated categories of persons can help us to understand the importance of the preacher’s persona and the vulnerability of an authorization that had to depend upon it.
In the practice of preaching, the bodily effacement implied in Chaucer’s textual portrait of the Parson was simply impossible: preaching is a physical performance, and thus the problems raised by the preacher’s body had to be addressed. Medieval discussions of the complex concept of persona demonstrate the doubleness inherent in the very activity of preaching, a doubleness that was both essential and potentially devastating to the preacher’s activity and role. In their yearning for holy simplicity, for an idealized congruence between the preacher’s words and his deeds, his message and his persona, the preaching theorists inadvertently highlighted the preacher’s hybridity and his inevitable participation in a world of partialness, appearances, and duplicity.23
Persona and Authority
The primary meaning of persona according to J. F. Niermeyer’s Lexicon is “individual, human being,” and this seems to be the sense underlying the varied uses of the term in the artes praedicandi.24 The importance both of particularity and of the power and frailty of humanness arises again and again in discussions of the preacher’s persona. However, the first definition given by Charles du Cange, “dignitas,” is more in line with meanings noted later in Niermeyer, such as “competence, qualification,” “someone of a certain standing,” “official,” and even “parson.”25 The connotations of status and authority suggest that the term persona could encompass the possibly conflicting demands of the individual and of his office. Preaching manuals draw on this range of meanings, but their use of the term relates it especially to the human side of the preacher’s activity: his interaction with an audience, his status, his body, his actions in the world.
An address to priests by the late twelfth-century bishop and preacher Maurice of Sully begins to illustrate in a practical way the divisions inherent in the concept of persona. Maurice says that the priest’s three main responsibilities are a holy life, knowledge, and preaching.26 He goes on to note that “holy life” means that the priest must cleanse himself “from all bodily and spiritual uncleanness” (de tote l’ordure de son cors e de s’ame) by which “his soul might appear ugly and ill-kempt before God, and his person before the world” (s’ame puet estre malmise e enlaidie devant Deu e sa persone devant le siecle).27 The two pairings here are “body and soul” and “person and soul,” an imperfect repetition that reflects the multiple meanings of persona. “Person” is, first of all, set off against the “soul” that only God sees, and it is imagined as that which the priest, as a prerequisite for preaching, presents to the world. Maurice implies that the two kinds of uncleanness (of soul and body) and the two kinds of presentation (to God and the people) are equivalent, but this of course elides the imperfection of human perception as compared to that of God. God will know how true the preacher’s presentation
