the subtleties of speculative language.”20 This audience is usually distinguished with clerical loftiness from a more learned audience to whom one may speak directly of higher things.
Many modern readings of the cultural role of exempla strongly emphasize the depth of the divide that the use of example supposedly illustrates. Larry Scanlon has argued that the exemplum was “a narrative enactment of cultural authority” and that, in the context of a sermon to a lay audience, “there is virtually no social permeability between exemplarist and audience. There are simply two distinct groups, the clerical, (scientes, erudites) on one side, and the lay (rudes, simplices) on the other.”21 Schmitt seems to agree: “The exemplum introduces into the sermon the realistic and agreeable note of a story that in all respects breaks up the general mode of expression in the sermon and seems to establish a furtive complicity between the preacher and his audience. But let there be no mistake: far from being isolated, [the exemplum] is linked to all the other arguments, and the momentary rupture that it introduces reinforces again the ideological function of the sermon, the speech of authority.”22 In both these instances the admission of connection between preacher and audience is subordinated to an assertion of difference that echoes the “rudes, simplices” rhetoric of exempla collections and sermon manuals.
Other scholarly readings, however, remind us that the repeated references in preaching texts to the simple, the unlearned, or the rustic—terms that emphasize the divide between the clergy and their audiences—ignore the fact that exempla, like vernacularity more generally, did reflect a certain connection between the supposedly learned preacher and his supposedly unlearned flock.23 Schmitt notes that the medieval preacher “finds himself constrained in a sense by the necessities of his ‘exemplary’ pedagogy to involve himself in the multiple networks of oral narrativity,” and David d’Avray points out that the use of “extended comparisons or analogies … is one of the mental habits or customs which most influenced the directions which the thinking of preachers followed in the thirteenth century and after.”24 Thus to suggest, as Schmitt does, that the medieval preacher was “constrained” by the need to use exempla is to overlook the ways in which such techniques were at least as much a way to cross the divide between simplices and clerici, between Latin and vernacular, as a way to maintain it.25 This is reflected in the fact that preachers, who were of necessity clerics, are certainly not above using concrete instances to make their points; both Thomas’s and Humbert’s texts are filled with such comparisons. It is worth remembering in this context that not all the clergy were equally learned and that many of them no doubt shared their audiences’ cultural interests. Indeed, Caesarius of Heisterbach’s famous anecdote about the preacher who woke his drowsing flock with the teaser “There was a certain king, called Arthur” is told of a monastic audience (the monks of Heisterbach).26 Here the ultimate symbol of roman—a worldly genre named for the worldly language in which it was created—is shown to appeal to the “learned” just as he might to the “simple.” While the clergy were eloquent on the subject of the laity’s reliance on externalities and historiae, they themselves were by no means always above such a taste.
If the clergy’s use and appreciation of exempla could suggest one important area of convergence between them and the laity, the need for verisimilitude in exempla suggests a further connection. While, on the one hand, the preacher’s ability to guarantee his story merely by telling it was a sign of his authoritative status, the story also had to have verisimilitude, a recognizable relation to experience. As Humbert of Romans puts it, “care should be taken that exempla be of sufficient authority [competentis auctoritatis], lest they be scorned, and realistic [verisimilia], so that they will be believed, and that they contain something instructive [aliquam aedificationem], lest they be put forth in vain”; the ultimate requirement for exempla is spiritual usefulness, but authority and verisimilitude are seen as essential to their functioning.27 As does the preacher, these tales owe a dual allegiance: to the authority that validates them but also to the experience that makes them acceptably “realistic” examples. The former demonstrates the preacher’s participation in the learned culture of books and tradition; the latter demonstrates his participation in the vernacular culture he shares with his audience.
Nor is experience at issue only in the content of exempla; it also shapes the preacher’s use of them. Jacques de Vitry observes approvingly that some preachers “knew by experience how much benefit the laity and simple people derive from such narrative examples, not only as edification but as relaxation.”28 Jacques’s appeal to “experiencia” is not an uncommon move in preaching manuals, where the phrase “experiencia docet” is frequently invoked, particularly in the context of audience-preacher interaction. The observation of the Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis that “familiarity breeds contempt, as experience teaches” neatly combines received wisdom with the claims of personal knowledge.29 There were certainly plenty of authoritative accounts of how preachers should deal with their flocks, but it appears that in considering the fine points of personal interaction, and the preacher’s need to negotiate his status with an audience rather than assuming it, experience was felt to be an equally important teacher. As Siegfried Wenzel has pointed out, “experience” and “authority” as categories of argument in medieval sermons are not in opposition but rather are mutually reinforcing.30 The authority of experience is not divorced from the world of learning any more than the authority of learning is divorced from the world of experience. The preacher is the medium for both, personifying for his congregation the institutional knowledge and authority that must work through an individual, and through a vernacular.
In addition to the theoretical issues raised by exempla, there was the simple issue of performance. The preacher, unlike most of his congregation, had access to exempla in their “abstracted,” usually Latin, form—that is, as elements of collections without any context.31 It was he who made the transition from the universal to the particular and from Latin to the vernacular. Scanlon notes that the flexibility of exempla as presented in collections, so that they could be used on various occasions, “sets the preacher apart from his audience even as he establishes common ground with them,” since it marks his association with a culture that they can only reach through him.32 But this transition from the general to the specific inevitably involved the preacher in both sides of the equation and demanded his participation in “networks of oral narrativity,” his ability not merely to convey doctrine but to make that doctrine live.33 For an exemplum to be effective, various authors assert, it must be put across well. As Jacques de Vitry says, “proverbs, similitudes and everyday examples [vulgaria exempla] … cannot be expressed in writing as they can by gesture and word and the manner of speaking, nor do they move or rouse the audience in the mouth of one person as they do in the mouth of another.”34 And Humbert, in De habundancia exemplorum, notes that exempla require a style all their own and politely hints that not every preacher is equally good at presenting them: those who “may perhaps not have a pleasing narrative style,” he says, “should not give up a means [of teaching] in which they are gifted for one in which they are not.”35 More than some other forms of instruction, the exemplum was a kind of dead letter until the preacher brought it to life.36 Despite his access to the “abstracted” exemplum, he participated fully and crucially in its transformation into a concrete, embodied form of instruction, and that transformation, if successfully enacted, demonstrated his ability to assimilate to his audience in some way, to speak to them with verisimilitude; like his exempla, he must appear “real.”37
Thus, although the “rupture” that the exemplum represents in a sermon may ultimately serve to reinforce the ideological import of the rest of the sermon, it exacts a price for doing so. By marking a point of “complicity,” as Schmitt puts it, a moment of identification between preacher and audience, the use of exempla implicitly addresses the preacher’s relationship to his authority and raises the question of how, and indeed whether, he is set apart from his audience. The same is true of vernacularity more generally: the preacher’s ability to address his congregation in the “common language” meant not only his ability to
