Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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reach all of his audience.
The use of vernacular, then, can bring out similarities between clergy and laity as well as marking their differences. And if some writers seem to concede the use of exempla, the vernacular, or other means of connection as a regrettable necessity, there are other descriptions that actively valorize such connection. One of these is the repeated story of the unlearned preacher whose similitudes or exempla are persuasive where the words of a learned preacher were not. Christoph Maier relates one version of this exemplum, about the preaching of the crusade in a village: A papal legate, unsuccessful in persuading the populace, eventually called on the unlearned village priest (sacerdos simplicissimus scripture et litterature), who reluctantly agreed to take his place and proceeded to convince almost everyone without use of scriptural authority, “with simplicity by showing a good example” (simplicitate boni exempli ostencio). The preacher used the familiar image of threshing and winnowing chaff from grain to tell, as it were, an exemplum involving himself and the other clerics present: the papal legate, he said, had threshed the crowd like grain and prepared them, and it was now his own job to winnow them and find who was chaff and who would go on crusade.47 As the story shows, the anonymous preacher did a masterful job of including himself and his parishioners in a framework of recognizable experience that was also a manifestation of doctrinal truth (a tactic identical to that used by Stephen Langton with his audience of priests). The papal legate in Maier’s exemplum may have been using the vernacular, but clearly he was not speaking the audience’s language.48 The tale also reflects the desire for holy simplicity that is a persistent thread in medieval Christianity and that mitigates the negative aspects of referring to an audience as “simplices.”49
Conceptions of a preacher’s contact with “the people,” then, involve style and genre as much as language—the preacher’s need not just to speak in the vernacular but to talk the talk with his audience. Other advice offered to preachers extends this need to understand, use, and respect vernacular or “common” modes of communication to the preacher’s behavior in the world, his ability to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. In these contexts, as in those that address language and genre, nonclerical culture and nonclerical people are understood to be shrewd and deserving of respect: they may be simplices, but they’re not stupid.50 A preacher’s good behavior reflects well on the church and maintains his institutional position, but it also gains him the personal respect of his audience, without which all the institutional backing in the world is useless.
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