Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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 of the despicable preacher, a figure who leads us deeper into the complexities of the preacher’s persona.
The Body Double
If a man’s life is condemned, his preaching will be scorned, Humbert asserts; similarly, as most of the artes praedicandi insist, one whose life is admirable will strengthen his preaching.38 In this context the import of the term persona is perhaps best conveyed by Leclercq’s assertion that the medieval conception of the preacher’s office “excludes … all preoccupation with self-interest [recherche personelle].”39 The preaching manuals (and the Pardoner) make it clear that the preacher’s “personal” interest in preaching could include anything from desire for adulation, to vainglory, to pure greed: sinful desires that the body could either manifest or hide, promote or suppress. At the same time a good example was a crucial part of preaching. The problem of the preacher’s personal relationship to his office had been explored extensively by Thomas of Chobham in the early thirteenth century. In a section of his Summa de arte praedicandi titled “On the doubleness of preaching”—that is, on preaching in word and in deed—Thomas moves from the ideal of the preacher as exemplar to the problem of the preacher as sinner. His discussion shows quite clearly how the preacher’s physicality is both a benefit and a detriment, an essential element of and a potential danger to his message.40
The importance of example, a crucial aspect of a sermon’s material as well as its delivery, lies in its inevitable relationship to the physical and the particular, to all the qualities that work against the idealized submergence of the person in the office seen in Chaucer’s Parson.41 It is no accident that that supremely disembodied churchman refuses to use the denigrated, embodied mode of “fables” in his sermon, refuses to speak in the exemplum form that the Pardoner elaborates on so vividly.42 Not all medieval preachers—indeed, it seems, very few—were as fastidious as the Parson in this regard; exemplary stories were regarded by most as a valuable tool, for the same reasons that made the preacher’s personal exemplarity necessary. In one of the many prologues that address the usefulness of similitudes and exempla, Étienne de Bourbon writes that it is necessary that doctrine, like Christ, be “embodied and clothed in flesh” to make it accessible to a lay audience.43 The image of embodiment and fleshliness carries us right to the idea of the preacher as exemplar; the need to make doctrine visible and palpable that Etienne cites also animates Thomas of Chobham’s insistence on the mutual necessity of the preacher’s words and deeds. “Every preacher should give a good example [bonum exemplum] in his works, and good doctrine in his words,” he says, since a good life without preaching is inefficacious.44 The insistence on preaching both in word and in deed does more, that is, than assert that word and deed must be congruent; it expresses the limitations of words alone in convincingly portraying salvific doctrine. Indeed, Robert of Basevorn seems almost to imply that embodiment is essential to preaching. Regarding God, the first preacher, he says, “He preached frequently