world, to external, human communication rather than the preacher’s internal connection with God. The pairing of person and soul also suggests, without insisting on it, that the preacher’s external presentation to his human audience will reflect his relationship to God, that internal and external purity are linked. However, persona is not only divided from soul and thus put squarely into the arena of human interaction, but is also shown to include both the priest’s physical body and his self-presentation. The parallel pairings “soul and body” and “soul and person” suggest that body and persona are intimately linked and that, in Maurice’s view, the body [cors] can impair the effectiveness of the preacher’s self-presentation, make his person [persone] “ugly” before the people and thus, presumably, detract from his message. The preacher’s persona is intimately connected to but not entirely synonymous with his body.
For Maurice, it seems, the emphasis falls on the preacher’s appearance before his two audiences, God and people, and persona is imagined as prior to preaching, as part of the basis for the activity. It is also, however, subject to contamination by the preacher’s sinful body. Writing for a group whose mission to preach was not in question, parish priests, Maurice focuses his attention on the preacher’s moral qualities as the basis for his authority, reflecting to some extent the older ideal of personal dignity rather than the new attention to office.
A different emphasis appears in the work of Humbert of Romans. While Humbert, like Maurice, saw persona as related to both body and status, and as a basis for the practical exercise of the preacher’s office before a human audience, his De eruditione praedicatorum is more attentive to questions of authorization and legitimacy. It is not surprising that Humbert, as an ecclesiastical official and a member of an order of wandering preachers, shows a strong concern both with maintaining the boundaries of official authorization (boundaries that had at times been drawn against the mendicants) and with a preacher’s ability to establish authority before an audience.28 Taken together, the categories he discusses under the heading “De persona praedicatoris” demonstrate the potential capaciousness of this concept and its suspension between ideas of the physical and the social. Humbert says that, “regarding the person [of the preacher], it should be noted” that he should be of the male sex, not evidently deformed, physically strong, of appropriate age (i.e., not too young); that he should have “some prerogative over others”; and finally that he should not be a “contemptible person,” by which, Humbert clarifies, he means someone of vicious life.29 The preacher’s person, for Humbert, must both represent and uphold his preeminence over those he addresses.
The “his” in that sentence is no accident, since Humbert’s first category entirely excludes women from the practice of preaching. This exclusion is foundational: above all the preacher must be a man. Humbert justifies his ruling on a fourfold basis that recapitulates the standard arguments against women preachers.30 The first reason for women’s exclusion is deficiency of understanding, which Humbert says is more to be expected in women than in men; the second is women’s subordinate status; the third is that if a woman were to preach, her appearance might provoke men to lust; and finally, women are barred “in memory of the foolishness of the first woman, of whom Bernard said, ‘She taught once, and overthrew the whole world.’ ”31 Like the categories as a whole, this list offers a combination of body-related and status-related prohibitions, and we may note that two of Humbert’s qualifications for male preachers, strength and “some preeminence over others,” are often used to exclude women and thus would tend to reinforce his initial ban on female preachers on both physical and social grounds.
While the focus of this initial category might seem to be squarely on women, all of Humbert’s reasons for excluding women have some bearing on men, a fact that is usually made explicit in the text. The first category, lack of intelligence, is one that Humbert claims is more applicable to women than men. The way he expresses this, however, makes it clear that women’s weakness is relative (“intelligence … is not to be expected in women so much as in men”) and thus to some extent undermines it as a basis for exclusion.32 The second issue, subordinate status, implicitly recalls women’s subjection to men, but as Humbert’s more general category of “preeminence” suggests, this too can be grounds for excluding men as well as women. These categories emphasize women’s inadequacy and weakness, but since both are qualities that men can share, they act as a reminder that women are only one group of many that were barred from preaching and undermine women’s exceptionally rigid exclusion.
Humbert’s third and fourth reasons emphasize not qualities that men and women might share, but rather women’s effect on men. The anxiety about male lust and the recollection of Eve demonstrate not women’s weakness, but rather their dangerous power. And while these criteria certainly denigrate the female body as a source of sin and confusion, they implicitly concede that it is male weakness—the ability to be provoked to lust and Adam’s willingness to listen to Eve—that makes women dangerous. The depiction of women as simultaneously inadequate and threatening to the office of preacher and the ways in which that inadequacy and threat implicate men are reminiscent of clerical anxieties about the flesh.33 Such a connection is hardly surprising, given the strong medieval association of flesh and femininity. But the rather elaborate introductory insistence on women’s exclusion raises the suspicion that this approach allows Humbert to draw attention away from the frailty of the male flesh, and to establish a solid persona for the preacher, by reiterating the notion that women are particularly subject to and representative of the weakness that is in fact a characteristic of all human beings.
Despite this preemptive strike, the categories that follow, with their imbrication of status and embodiment, cannot but suggest that men, like women, are immured in physicality. Even their attempts to escape it, via the establishment of a formal, disembodied authority, depend on the physicality that men share with women and on the response to their bodies in the physical world. This is what lies behind the prohibition on evident deformity. The attributes of wholeness and masculinity are ones the preacher needs to be seen to possess in order to establish that he has a body appropriate to his office. We might think here of the Pardoner, who seems to feel a need to perform masculinity—perhaps as a way to assert both his maleness and his lack of physical deformity—as well as to proclaim his status and authorization.34 His physical qualities and his official qualifications are mutually dependent and equally suspect; they bring each other and, by extension, the office of preacher into disrepute.35
Humbert’s last three categories attend less to physical qualifications than to those of status. The preacher must be of appropriate age, since Christ did not presume to preach before the age of thirty: here again what might at first appear to be a physical requirement turns out to be linked to a question of status and, indeed, to what might be called the ultimate question of status, the preacher’s similarity to Christ. Also, the preacher must have some prerogative over others “whether in office, or in learning, or in religion, and so forth,” for which reason a layman (like a woman) is not to preach. Finally, a preacher must not be a contemptible person, lest his preaching be rejected. Here Humbert cites the standard text from Gregory the Great: “If a man’s life is despised, it is clear that his preaching will be scorned.”36 These last two requirements are presented as though divorced from embodiment, and remind us that maleness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for preaching: the preacher must also demonstrate eminence and virtue.
Like those that went before, Humbert’s final group of categories emphasizes the preacher’s relationship to his audience and the things that may cause them to scorn him or disregard his message, rather than the purely internal qualities that might be necessary for effective preaching.37 The various subheadings of persona bring together, not to say jumble, the issues of status, authority, authorization, and embodiment, showing the preacher’s right and ability to speak as a matter for complex negotiation among him, his congregation, God, and the institutional hierarchy of the church. In these negotiations persona is assumed to precede preaching in some sense and is tacitly regarded as a true reflection of the preacher’s internal state. In Humbert’s last category, however, we face the troubling prospect
