Robert, and their ilk are exceptional cases; not everyone who preaches to the people is a popular preacher. Faced with the need for more and better ordinary preaching, the church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries pulled itself together and began trying to train people, using in effect the kinds of methods so intelligently exploited by heterodox preachers such as Landulf Cotta. What had come naturally, or gracefully, to a Bernard or a Robert was something that had to be learned by the preachers of the thirteenth century, who needed to be trained both in Latinity (immersion in the scriptural founts of their vocation and understanding of their institutional position) and in vernacularity (the techniques that would enable them to use their knowledge for the benefit of all kinds of audiences). In learning to balance Latin and the vernacular, preachers were in effect learning to establish their own role in a community, and vernacularity was as important in this endeavor as Latinity.
Preachers’ mediatory role as “translators” of literate, Latin, clerical culture for an unlearned, lay, “vernacular” audience can certainly be seen as one that denied the laity full or independent access to Scripture and to theological material usually produced in Latin. Opposition to vernacular translation of Scripture was already an issue in this period, and the famous, or infamous, idea that the laity are to be presented with truth in simple form as infants are given milk, because they are not strong enough for solid food, is frequently featured in preaching manuals.9 Considered from the point of view of doctrine, then, the Latin-vernacular relationship in thirteenth-century preaching seems to recapitulate a hierarchy in which the laity—rudes, simplices, illiterati—were always at the bottom, accorded no independent will, power, or ability. Even within the preaching manuals, though, we are given reason to question this strict division of the vernacular and Latin and the strict association of these with laity and clergy, respectively. To understand this problem fully, it is necessary first to develop a more nuanced conception of how preachers thought of their role. The works of Thomas of Chobham and Humbert of Romans, who shared a strong interest in effective preaching but wrote for very different groups of preachers, begin to outline the issues.
Writing primarily for parish priests, Thomas was more concerned with establishing the preacher’s differences from his audience than telling him how to overcome those differences—an emphasis that no doubt reflects the state of the parish clergy, many of whom were probably hardly more educated than those they were supposed to instruct.10 Thomas’s text, which shows a careful attention to the problems of pastoral care, has little to say about the vernacular in any of its forms. His focus in this area is on the preacher’s need to maintain his position—to establish and present an appropriate persona to his congregation and to keep up the distinctions between himself and them. This is a matter of responsibility as much as privilege; the preacher owes his audience a good example and good teaching and must work to provide them. But he should also be conscious of and maintain his authority. Thomas discusses, for example, the dangers of excessive humility toward those one has wronged, which can diminish the preacher’s stature, and he warns against preaching in scruffy clothes or a “habitu laicali.”11 His attitude reflects, it seems, both the popularity of lay and itinerant preaching—in which the preacher’s status was not always markedly distinguished from that of his audience—and the beginning of a trend in parochial priesthood in the thirteenth century whereby the priest became increasingly the representative of a larger, diocesan authority, of the church as a whole rather than simply of his own local jurisdiction.12 In the context Thomas addresses, the priest would have been part of the community to which he preached. He would be known to them—perhaps all too well—and so would not have needed Thomas’s, or anyone’s, instructions on how to approach them. In this instance the preacher needs to be shown how he can establish, maintain, and display his access to the clerical world of learning and authority in order to make his role in the “popular” world, of which he is clearly a part, an effective one.
In the course of the thirteenth century new modes of preaching arose, distinct from both the charismatic and the parochial. The rise of the Franciscans and Dominicans produced a substantial group of itinerant, trained preachers who would not necessarily be acquainted with the language, customs, and style—in short, with the vernacular—of their intended audiences. It was to such preachers that Humbert of Romans primarily directed his instruction. Because preaching is ultimately a spoken form, the transition from Latin to vernacular involved not simply linguistic translation but the connection with and access to an audience without which any rhetorical exercise is severely impaired. Later complaints about “English Latin” and the mockery of preachers’ Latinate speech in works such as Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale or the morality plays show how much resentment was aroused by preachers, including friars, who failed to learn the “common touch” in their manner of speaking.13 It is that failure and resentment that the early mendicant handbooks seem designed to avoid. Their approach to the preacher’s work of translation indicates that they recognized the interdependence of lay and clerical, Latin and vernacular cultures in the spoken, interactive context of preaching—an attitude that is clearly present in Humbert’s text.
In a chapter titled “On the speech of the preacher” (De loquela praedicatoris), Humbert addresses, obliquely, the relationship of Latin and vernacular. He first notes the preacher’s need to be able to speak clearly, citing the example of Moses and Aaron. His next observation makes reference to Pentecost, and at this point we might expect specific attention to problems of translation and the move from Latin to the vernacular Humbert’s point, however, is less direct. He says that the preacher should have an “abundance” of language: “If the early preachers were given many languages for the purpose of preaching, so that they might have abundant words for everyone,” he asks, “how unbecoming is it when a preacher is lacking in words, whether on account of a lack of memory, or a lack of Latinity, or a lack of vernacular speech [or “common speech,” vulgaris loquutionis], and so forth?”14 Here Latin and the vernacular appear as equally necessary to the work of preaching; the lack of either handicaps the preacher. This brief indication that “speaking in tongues” is the job of the preacher is the only mention of linguistic issues in the passage; Humbert is interested in the preacher’s language primarily as an element of the preacher’s speech.15 Other desirable qualities he goes on to discuss, apparently equivalent to the importance of ease in various languages, include sonority of voice, a manner of speaking that is easy to follow and well-paced, a simple style, and finally, “prudence in speaking of diverse things to diverse people” (prudentiam in loquendo diversa diversis).16 While such “prudence” is often cited as the reason for speaking simply to the simple, it turns out that what Humbert has in mind is an appropriate message; the audiences he envisions are defined not as lay or clerical but as the good, the wicked, the timid, the wrathful, and so forth.17 For Humbert, that is, linguistic matters are only one, subsidiary aspect of the preacher’s need to make his speech attractive and appropriate to whatever audience he may be addressing.
While Thomas’s instructions, then, are for preachers who are already connected to their audiences by language and common experience and who may therefore need to maintain more distance in order to shore up their institutional authority, Humbert writes for those who have the advantage and authority of distance but lack the immediate connection of a parish priest to his flock.18 In neither case is the linguistic issue of the vernacular much in evidence. What is visible in both texts is an awareness of vernacularity as part of a balance between different kinds of access that are equally necessary to the preacher’s task.
The Common Ground of Exempla
The connection between preacher and audience created by vernacularity and the problems this could raise are particularly evident in the preacher’s use of exempla and similitudes.19 It is often noted in preaching manuals and collections of exempla that such “concrete” means of persuasion are particularly appropriate for laypeople. As J.-C. Schmitt says, the form and use of exempla “rest on a veritable anthropology, or at least on the sense that the clergy has of a certain specificity of‘popular’ culture. This awareness is the condition of effective preaching: to people who for
