Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters

      Introduction

      Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.

      [And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.]

      John 1:14

      Who has access to the divine? How is that access achieved, and how transmitted? And what responsibilities does it carry with it? The medieval preacher, whose office required him to struggle with these questions, was a bridge between divine and human, between an eternal truth and a particular audience. He was also the representative of a clerical culture whose control over textuality, authority, and religious knowledge was increasingly centralized and codified but also in many ways increasingly precarious in the later Middle Ages. Caught between these various roles, mediating between disparate groups and milieus, the preacher found himself in a hybrid position. In this he resembled, not accidentally, his ultimate model, the Word made Flesh, who first presented the essential fusion of human body and divine truth and then passed on to his successors the responsibility to imitate him and perpetuate his message. But unlike Jesus, for whom the combination of Word and Flesh was perfect and effortless, the preachers who followed him had to struggle with their role. They worked within the limits of their human embodiment, an embodiment that even after the coming of Jesus bore the mark of Adam and thus was prone to war against their best intentions and the divine message they carried.

      The appropriate interaction of life and teaching, of preaching and practice, and the significance of that interaction, is one of the main topics of the artes praedicandi, Latin handbooks for preachers that were produced and copied in considerable numbers all over Europe from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.¹ While many of the artes are primarily rhetorical manuals on the construction of a sermon, most contain some attention to other matters—from the preacher’s morality to his gestures, his subject matter, his deportment, even his clothing. In both immediate practical terms and a larger spiritual sense they are concerned with how a preacher should perform his role and fulfill the duties of his office. Their discussions focus around two related concepts: the preacher’s personal authority—his ability to manage his own sinful nature, make use of his physical body, and present himself in a way that made him a credible and appropriate speaker of divine truth; and the preacher’s institutional authorization—his status within a hierarchy and his representation of a divinely instituted lineage and its official doctrine. Authority and authorization were recognized as necessary components of effective preaching and imagined as, ideally, mutually reinforcing qualities. At the same time, though, because of the contested nature of preaching in the later Middle Ages these categories were often set against one another, and the preacher who possessed only one of them could pose a spiritual danger to himself and others.

      The central contention of this book is twofold. First, I argue that the conflicted cooperation between authority and authorization is a manifestation of the fundamentally hybrid nature of the preacher’s calling, one recognized everywhere in the handbooks. Standing between earth and heaven, between the institutional church and the faithful laity, the preacher saw his own liminality expressed most markedly in his own body, the physical vessel of a divine calling. That body’s susceptibility to the snares of the world and the flesh presented constant anxieties for theorists of preaching, but at the same time these theorists grudgingly acknowledged the essential and, indeed, potentially enriching influence of the preacher’s embodiment on his work. Exploring these contradictions as they appear in literature written by, for, and about preachers in this period provides a new way to approach questions about the relationship between body and spirit in the Middle Ages: by studying those whose professional duty was to convey the latter by means of the former. A second, and related, argument is that in pursuing the cultural implications of the officium praedicatoris, we must look at women’s preaching in the context of and as a formative influence on ideas about men’s preaching.² Women were energetically and vociferously excluded from a public teaching role, ostensibly because of the limitations of their gender.³ But as the writers of the preaching manuals were all too aware, the frailty of the body—its capacity for sin, deception, and worldliness—that medieval culture often associated particularly with the feminine was equally a threat to every preacher.⁴ Discussions of women preachers thus allowed theorists to raise and examine questions about personal authority and the body’s role in that authority without having to address those questions directly toward male preachers. Putting women’s preaching back into its full context illuminates not only the boundaries of authorized activity but also the nature of licensed preachers’ connection to the hierarchy that sent them and to the divine body they represented.

      The artes praedicandi and other works of preaching literature that explore the tensions outlined above are the foundation of this book. The aim is to offer a reading of these texts of spiritual and professional formation that is attentive to what they can tell us about the pitfalls and rewards of the activity of preaching and the demands it made upon the human beings who held this “angelic” office. The late medieval revival of interest in preaching took place, of course, in a broader landscape of religious renewal and competition, and before beginning the literary discussion that forms the majority of this argument it will be useful to sketch some of that background. Although this book by no means claims to offer a comprehensive account of the history of late medieval preaching, I have tried to situate my argument with regard to the historical specificities of the mid twelfth to late fourteenth centuries; the brief account that follows is intended to provide the reader with a context for the works and themes treated here.

      Beginning in the eleventh century the reforms fostered by Pope Gregory VII emphasized the need for the clergy to be a group set apart from the world, both independent of temporal control and contemptuous of earthly goods and desires.⁵ This focus both raised clerical status and laid the clergy open to critiques of their moral stature, critiques that others were not slow to make. Heterodox religious groups and freelance evangelists began to challenge the clerical monopoly on preaching, often using personal morality as a basis for criticism of the clergy.⁶ Brian Stock offers a highly illuminating account of one such group, the Patarenes of eleventh-century Milan, which demonstrates that the questions addressed in the preaching manuals in the late twelfth century onward were ones that had been exercising reformers for some time already; his discussion, which sees preaching as a central facet of the Patarene movement, touches on such issues as clerical status and bodiliness (particularly the debate over clerical marriage), the effect of charismatic preaching, the relationship between preacher and audience, and questions of jurisdiction and right to preach, particularly laymen’s “usurpation” of preaching—all matters that recur throughout this book.⁷ The desire of individuals and groups to speak out and instruct others reflected a new conception of a central ideal of Christian life, the vita apostolica, which had traditionally been identified with the monastic vita communis.⁸ In the later eleventh and twelfth centuries the apostolic life was reimagined as centering on poverty and preaching, on action in the world rather than a removed life of contemplation. This development reflects the tension between the institutional and the charismatic that plagued the late medieval church as the hierarchy tried to maintain its established power while remaining true to its radical roots. This tension lies at the heart of many of the debates about preaching.

      Fundamentally important among these debates was the question of authorization and jurisdiction. Those who embraced