Like a preacher’s audience, Chaucer’s readers may speculate about the speaker’s soul, but all we really see is his person, the individual whose specificity and solidity make any claim to transparency—to perfect holiness or perfect unholiness—suspect. No preacher, however virtuous, is an empty vessel through which God speaks, but to understand the beneficial as well as the destructive implications of that fact we need the Pardoner as much as we need the Parson. It is not just that the ideal that the Parson represents can only be perceived, but indeed that it can only exist alongside and interdependent with the counterideal of his troubling, but not simply unholy, colleague.106 And together they have drawn critical responses that show how we, as readers, still struggle with the problems that face any audience attempting to assess the two-faced truth of public performance.
The traditions of preaching theory that Chaucer drew on in creating his Parson and Pardoner acknowledged and attempted to come to terms with the divisive physicality of preaching, an activity in which the human body that marks the gap between heaven and earth must also become the means of bridging that gap. Persona, imagined as the guarantor of the preacher’s authorized status and his connection to God, turns out to be a performance—a performance always capable, as in the Pardoner’s case, of spectacular falsity or, more worryingly, of a deception unperceived by the audience. As a result the doubleness of persona and the necessary duplicity of the preacher have the capacity to undermine not only a particular act of preaching or a particular preacher, but the very office. In the face of tensions between visionary and institutional authority, between charismatic body and charismatic text, preaching theorists tried to hold the competing forces together in ways that required them to explore, explicate, and attempt to control the power of the preacher’s persona. Their discussions, the best available record of the pressures felt by medieval preachers, give us a certain, admittedly oblique access to the experience of constructing oneself as a person worthy to inhabit “an office more angelic than human.”107
3
A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular
Experiencia docet …
[Experience teaches …]
Proverbial
ALONGSIDE QUESTIONS OF OFFICIAL authorization and self-presentation medieval preachers, like modern ones, had to consider the purely practical aspects of how to get their message across to audiences. Fundamental among these was, of course, the question of language. Unlike modern scholars, medieval preachers seem to have had little interest in the relationship between Latin and vernacular language—or at least little direct record of their musings on this topic has survived.1 It is thus difficult to know, in most cases, in what language they would have preached, though recent scholarship has suggested that the long-standing notion that Latin sermons were always preached to the clergy and vernacular sermons to the laity, with little or no overlap, may be too simple.2 Medieval preachers’ attention, however, seems to have focused far more on their access to their audiences, an issue that in a larger sense addresses precisely the question of the place of the vernacular in preaching.
The great revival of formal interest in preaching took place before the major debates in England about the vernacular and its appropriate place in religious culture broke out in force, and in general preaching handbooks do not emphasize the question of language.3 Nevertheless, attentiveness to preachers’ discussions of their own language can illustrate how shifting and uncertain the supposed divide between Latin and vernacular really was. Preaching manuals, particularly those by mendicant authors, and discussions of narrative exempla show preachers engaged in a delicate balancing act. Standing between the church hierarchy and the laity in both the mediatory and the liminal senses of the word, preachers required access to both of those worlds in order to make them accessible to one another. The preaching handbooks, with their complex attention to the preacher’s need both to distinguish himself from and to resemble his flock, and discussions of exempla, which hovered problematically between vernacular and Latin modes, show how crucial vernacularity was in establishing a clerical identity that is often seen in opposition to it.
Vernacularity is not the same as popularity, but the Latin term most preachers used to describe the vernacular suggests that in this context the two are not unrelated. The word vernacularis, while not unheard of, appears far less often than the word vulgaris and its offshoots, meaning “common,” “popular,” “of the crowd,” and so forth.4 Thus it is sometimes impossible to tell whether a writer is referring to a story in the vernacular or merely a popular story, a vernacular saying or a common saying. This distinction, or lack thereof, is important because vernacularity in preaching has to do not simply with language but with the preacher’s ability to form a connection with his audience, to gain access to their hearts and minds. Access is often discussed in terms of exclusion—the need for access implies a prior separation. In preaching, however, access is more a matter of an effective approach, of addressing a given audience in terms appropriate to their situation. Like many of the sermons they left behind, most preachers must have been linguistic and cultural hybrids.5 Thinking about vernacularity as access helps us to understand how preachers fashioned themselves as representatives of clerical culture who maintained their links to the vernacular culture that surrounded them and that was their first linguistic home.
Talking the Talk: The Preacher’s Bridge
The kind of preaching that we think of as vernacular preaching, preaching to “the people” or the laity, was associated throughout most of Christian history with the lower clergy, as Michel Zink has noted, because it was the lower clergy—below the bishop, that is—who were able to communicate with their flocks in the native, “common” language of the region.6 It was perhaps a lack of sufficiently prepared lower clergy that led to a growing perception, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that the clerical hierarchy was not fulfilling its preaching duties; instead independent, charismatic preachers—some more orthodox than others—sprang up to fill the gap.
The situation of the Milanese Patarenes, discussed at length by Brian Stock, demonstrates the power of such popular preachers. In an account of the Patarene Landulf Cotta’s preaching, the conservative chronicler Arnulf maintains that it was “deliberately ‘arranged’ for the persuasion of the unsophisticated (concionatur in populo).” His description shows a charismatic preacher at work, using the tropes of inadequacy and unlearnedness, youth, inexperience, and so forth—claims that diminish the distance between preacher and audience. As Stock puts it, Landulf “reaches out to the people on their own level, making himself a bridge between the lettered and the unlettered”; he is described as using a kind of call-and response format and asking the audience to cross themselves: “Both oral and gestural, this revivalist give and take between preacher and audience, which the reduction of the text to Latin undoubtedly tended to suppress, has the effect of welding the two into a single unit.” Landulf uses what Stock calls “street language.… Although he is not one of the people, he speaks to them as if he were”; this identificatory move, achieved through the preacher’s self-presentation and his choice of the “common” language, is apparently essential to his success. As Arnulf sees it, Landulf and Ariald were quick to “pander … to the people’s tastes (vulgi mos),” but it was this very kind of aristocratic, antipopulist disdain that put the institutional church at such a disadvantage in the period before the preaching revival.7 In such a situation the only hope lay in the work of outstanding preachers of orthodox inclination, and records of preaching for the twelfth century present men such as Bernard of Clairvaux or Robert of Arbrissel, whose charismatic gifts were so great that it was said they could preach in an unknown language and still move their audiences. It was also noted of Bernard, in one of his vitae, that he was “lettered among the learned, simple among the simple”—in other words, that he was able to adapt to his audience and the “vulgi
