and speaking bodies in light of the work’s origins in the preaching form known as sermones ad status, sermons to various types or classes of people. I argue that the figure of the Wife of Bath represents, in a sense, the logical outcome of trends already present in preaching and that her peculiar combination of feminine and clerical modes of speech allows Chaucer to appropriate the necessary hybridity of preachers’ discourse in creating his own poetic voice.
In all of these chapters, I have tried to let the preoccupations of the medieval texts examined here—debate literature, hagiography, canon law, poetry, and above all the artes praedicandi themselves—direct my own interests. The extraordinary care, attention, and energy devoted to preaching by the authors of these various texts suggest the importance of their subject: a mode of speech and performance that offered, in their view, not an imitation of life, but access to the life eternal. Respect for the high aims and seriousness of preaching at its best, however, should not prevent us from exploring its human—and thus at times less than ideal—qualities and characteristics. “Official” and orthodox discussions of preaching show where the theorists’ concerns lie, but if we accept these straightforwardly on their own terms, we see only half the picture. By considering theory in the light of practice, the acceptable in juxtaposition with the excluded, and above all, the productive and destructive interactions of the preacher’s human body with the authoritative message he worked to convey, this book aims to provide a fuller representation and a better understanding of the activity of preaching in the later Middle Ages.
1
The Golden Chains of Citation
Quomodo vero praedicabunt nisi mittantur?
[And how shall they preach unless they are sent?]
Rom. 10:15
IN HIS DIALOGUES, GREGORY THE GREAT recounts at one point the story of a holy abbot, Equitius, and his preaching career. Like some later preachers, Equitius ran into difficulties over his right to proclaim the Word of God. Gregory tells Peter,
A certain man called Felix … since he observed that this venerable man Equitius was not in holy orders, and that he went around to various places preaching zealously, addressed him one day with the daring of familiarity, saying, “How do you, who are not in holy orders, and have not received license to preach from the bishop of Rome under whom you live, presume to preach?” Compelled by this inquiry of his, the holy man revealed how he received the license to preach, saying, “I have myself considered these same things that you say to me. But one night a beautiful youth appeared to me in a vision, and placed on my tongue a physician’s tool, a lancet, saying, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth; go forth and preach.’ And from that day, even if I wished to, I have not been able to keep silent about God.”1
The holy man was fortunate to live in a time when, although his license to preach might be questioned, his unsupported assertion of immediate authorization from God was still likely to be accepted. Writing some eight centuries later, around 1320, Robert of Basevorn expressed what was by then a well-established distrust of such visionary justifications. His Forma praedicandi holds, “It is not sufficient for someone to say that he is sent by God, unless he manifestly demonstrates it, for heretics often make this claim.”2 By Robert’s time it was not just the occasional holy freelancer who was in question, but whole crowds of new claimants to a preaching mission, and an individual’s assertion of his or her right to preach had become not just the subject of occasional (and, Gregory implies, impudent) inquiry but the catalyst for intensive scrutiny of preaching itself.
As the example of Equitius suggests, one difficulty for late medieval theorists was the acknowledged existence of sacred precedents for inspired preaching. The need to manage the conflicting authorities that gave rise to such precedents instigated a large-scale effort to codify and clarify church law in the twelfth century and “free the church from its chains to the undifferentiated holy past.”3 The desire to “differentiate,” to create human jurisdictions that would check the proliferation of unlicensed speakers, is part of what motivates the discussions of the nature and ownership of preaching in the later Middle Ages.4 In freeing the church from its chains, the theorists in effect created a new, singular chain of authorities that excluded certain older models in order to solidify the contemporary assignment of ecclesiastical power.5
This chapter explores how changes in the conception of preachers’ authority clustered around the problem of citation, of both authoritative words and authoritative individuals, as theorists wrestled with a central question: “How shall they preach unless they are sent?” The variety of answers over time points to important developments in the understanding of the office of preacher in the later Middle Ages. The preacher established his claims by re-presenting earlier models and above all the absent exemplar, Christ. This representation was simultaneously the heart of his office and its point of greatest vulnerability because the same absence that required the preacher’s activity meant that it was exceptionally difficult to guarantee that activity or to exclude unlicensed practitioners from it. The potential for women and laymen to claim immediate authorization or sacred precedent increased the need for a scaffolding of theory and citation to support the claims of licensed, male preachers, a need that fueled the work of definition and distinction described above. If we look at the claims made for preachers who were “sent” in juxtaposition with the claims of those who were not, particularly women, the fragility of the licensed preachers’ exclusive ownership of public religious speech becomes increasingly apparent.
Medieval theorists’ troubled attempts to regulate preachers’ representations can be illuminated not only by what they say about unlicensed speakers, but also by recourse to theories of performative speech and in particular by the modern chain of citation that links Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and J. L. Austin. The points of contact between these modern auctoritates—the points where Butler draws on Derrida, which in turn mark Derrida’s productive disagreements with Austin—are, strikingly, also matters crucial to the medieval debate: the “iterability” or “citationality” of speech, the concept of ordinary versus extraordinary speech-acts, and the problem posed, for both Austin and the preaching theorists, by the “peculiarly hollow and void” speech of acting. All three issues ultimately lead to concerns over the ownership and origination of speech that plagued medieval theorists as they tried to work through the simultaneous presence and absence of Christ that made preachers’ authority so complicated.
Defining Citations
The idea that preaching is “citational” is hardly shocking; in itself it posed no threat to the preacher’s authority to acknowledge that his speech borrowed explicitly from an authoritative text, and that his activity was always a half-explicit citation of the activity and authority of the preachers who went before him. Silvana Vecchio has observed that for medieval Dominicans, “an ideal thread links the holy founder [Dominic] to the very figure of Christ” and that indeed “the chain of authorities can be even longer and run through the stages of a possible history of edification: Moses, the prophets, Christ, Gregory, Bede, Augustine, Jacques de Vitry, St. Dominic”; the Dominicans saw themselves as “the inheritors and continuers of this long tradition.”6 Her point is echoed repeatedly in medieval discussions; one of the three things Humbert of Romans, master-general of the Dominicans from 1254 to 1263, regarded as “especially powerful” in preaching was “the consideration of the methods of other preachers.”7 Robert of Basevorn takes up this suggestion, describing the methods of the persons he considers the five greatest preachers of Christian tradition: Christ, Paul, Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard. He notes, however, that Christ “included all praiseworthy methods of preaching in his own method"; as the “fount and origin of good,” Christ is the source and context of all good preaching.8
At
