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...

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...

The preacher’s abstract ability to form part of a clerical lineage was only one part of his task; once established in his role he still needed to demonstrate his ability to perform that role convincingly. The problem is neatly encapsulated in the contrasting preachers of the Canterbury Tales.¹ Chaucer’s description of the Parson in the General Prologue is as much a depiction of the ideal priest as the Pardoner’s Prologue, later in the same text, is a compendium of a preacher’s faults.² The two figures differ in al most every possible respect relevant to a preacher—intention, authorization, use of...

Alongside questions of official authorization and self-presentation medieval preachers, like modern ones, had to consider the purely practical aspects of how to get their message across to audiences. Fundamental among these was, of course, the question of language. Unlike modern scholars, medieval preachers seem to have had little interest in the relationship between Latin and vernacular language—or at least little direct record of their musings on this topic has survived.¹ It is thus difficult to know, in most cases, in what language they would have preached, though recent scholarship has suggested that the long-standing notion that Latin sermons were...

The deep-seated Christian mistrust of language posed a significant problem for medieval preachers. how could “mere words,” human eloquence, rightly express a divine message, given rhetoric’s involvement in the worldly snares of spectacle and seduction? The anxiety over the “seductive power of spoken rhetoric” transferred the concern with the preacher’s embodied performance even to the realm of his language, focusing attention on those elements of rhetoric that recalled physical allure or spectacle: elocutio, or style, particularly as it relates to the decorative aspects of language; and delivery (pronuntiatio or actio), the physical presentation of a speech or sermon.¹ As Jody...

In many contexts the image of the woman preacher was used primarily as a limit case for acceptable activity, and considerations of female preachers often seem to function mainly to justify exclusion, as we have seen. A major strand in this justification was the idea of the female body’s capacity for dangerous allure, an allure already associated with decoration of all kinds, including rhetorical excess and display. At the same time, however, women’s persuasiveness—often depicted in terms similar to those used to characterize rhetoric—was acknowledged to have considerable power. Examples abound in the Bible, and Augustine picks up...

If discussions of many aspects of preaching—authority, performance, style, even language—express their concerns about the preacher’s humanness through images of fictional or hypothetical women, how did actual women ever manage to address the church? Strikingly, the debate about women’s claim to authoritative speech formulates itself in many cases around highly specific notions of place. This can be seen in the reception of the passage from Timothy noted above. “A woman should not presume to teach,” says Gratian’s Decretum, and the Gloss by Huguccio adds, “publicly, namely in the church, by ascending the pulpit and making a sermon to...

The preacher’s attempt to establish an authoritative voice in which he could convey Christian doctrine was always a vexed one, and nowhere is this more clear than in the late medieval genre of the sermon ad status. These sermons, which addressed audiences according to their professional or social group, threaten to erode the exceptional and unchallenged privilege of priestly speech precisely by calling attention to that speech as the attribute of one professional class among many. The admirable desire to engage with the audience brings into sharp focus the problems attendant on attempting to maintain preachers as a group set...