Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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 the most part are considered ‘rural,’ ‘lesser,’ ’simple,’ ‘unlearned,’ one must speak of concrete things, ‘physicalities,’ ‘external things,’ ‘deeds,’ without using 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