Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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were by no means always heretical in their beliefs, but their desire to exercise the apostolic office of preaching led inevitably to clashes with orthodoxy. The monastic withdrawal from the world and laxity among the secular clergy had left a vacuum of religious instruction and exhortation, which devout laypeople were only too glad to fill—a task they often, it seems, performed with great skill and effectiveness, but one which made them a potential threat.9 Herbert Grundmann describes an edict issued by Lucius III in 1184 that named heretical groups to be suppressed (including Cathars, Waldenses, and Patarenes) and then provided a list of heretical characteristics: “First on the list was unlicensed preaching.”10 The performance of religious instruction was thus at the heart of the battle for religious control, whether as a heretical activity, a focus of lay spirituality, an official response to challenges against orthodoxy, or a pastoral attempt to rescue straying sheep. In many ways the development of preaching theory was a defensive reaction: claims on public speech by excluded groups such as heretics, laypeople, and women influenced the formation of official conceptions of preaching.11
The clerical hierarchy, not surprisingly, fought to maintain its prerogatives against the incursions of nonclerics. While some of its efforts were punitive, others attempted to harness the fervor and effectiveness of marginal groups and use them to benefit the church as a whole. Some itinerant preachers were granted license to preach and encouraged to found settled orders.12 For most of the twelfth century, however, the church’s efforts to reconcile splinter groups to itself were half-hearted and ineffective. It was not until the accession in 1198 of Innocent III, the great proponent of inclusion, that the movement to bring heterodox groups back into the fold began to build steam. Innocent’s willingness to reabsorb suitably chastened lay groups led him to issue a limited preaching license to the Italian Humiliati at the beginning of the thirteenth century and to attempt similar reconciliations with others.13 As with the wandering preachers, stability seems to have been of great importance: provided such associations were willing to recognize the validity of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and organize themselves into some kind of settled structure, they could be assimilated into orthodoxy.14
As the twelfth century drew to a close, then, the clerical hierarchy finally began to respond to the need for improved interaction between itself and the laity.15 In the early thirteenth century two events took place that were to have an enormous impact on the development of that interaction and particularly on the practice of preaching. The first was the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which codified the demand for pastoral care. The requirement that every individual make a yearly confession of sins to a priest, perhaps the most famous of the council’s statutes, meant that the laity needed increased instruction in the tenets of the Christian faith so that they could make a full and valid confession, and thus that the clergy needed to be prepared to provide that instruction. The council, recognizing that bishops were no longer able to do all the preaching required and anxious to combat the spread of unlicensed preachers, also ordered that bishops appoint “appropriate” substitutes to preach in their dioceses.16
The second event of the early thirteenth century with special relevance for preaching was the formation of the mendicant orders. The Dominicans originated as an antiheretical movement; the Franciscans’ particular focus was on perfect poverty. Both groups practiced itinerant preaching and thus looked similar, at first glance, to various heterodox associations, for whom they were sometimes mistaken.17 They demonstrated from the beginning, however, a willingness to be part of the hierarchical church; in return, the church (in the person of Innocent III) permitted them to continue the practices of poverty and preaching central to their spiritual vocation.18 As the Dominican and Franciscan orders developed they maintained their preaching activities, becoming important parts of the church’s defense against both heresy and internal decay. But as wandering evangelists they still threatened the jurisdiction of the secular clergy, leading to ongoing battles over their right to preach.19
Over the course of the thirteenth century the mendicant orders solidified into enormous and enormously influential networks. Their development and the concomitant growth of the universities gave rise to the more rigorous scholastic explication of many of the ideas that originated in the apostolic reform movements. Explorations of sacramental theology and the nature of the church continued the attempt to define and control the exercise of religious authority, upholding the rights of the centralized church of which the mendicants were now a part. The scholastic interest in classification led to an outpouring of technical works such as the artes praedicandi (a significant number of which were written by friars) and disputation literature that often tried to define and delimit preaching in order to exclude unwanted or unauthorized groups.
Alongside this centralization of authority lay movements continued to develop. The growth of extra-liturgical forms of devotion, and of attention to the human Christ, offered possibilities for lay piety that ultimately built on the reforming zeal of earlier centuries.20 For women especially, the new modes of piety could provide opportunities for religious expression since they tended to emphasize personal authority and morality, rather than orthodox institutional authorization, as the bases for public speech. The developments in women’s religious experience have been extensively studied; they affected women of all social and religious classes, from beguines and nuns, to anchoresses, to devout laywomen of all ranks.21
Women’s participation in the religious trends of the later Middle Ages both reflected and shaped those trends. The reforming temper that characterized much of the period, for example, can be seen in the activities and writings of extraordinary women as far apart in time and earthly status as the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the fourteenth-century Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena. Catherine and her older contemporary Birgitta of Sweden, on the other hand, both benefited from the new emphasis on Christ’s human accessibility by using their personal connections to God as an authorization of their speech. But it was not only such famous figures whose lives and activities were affected by the upheavals and controversies of the late Middle Ages; other less known and surely many unknown women were part of the expanding idea of what it meant to lead a religious life. The frequent complaints that heretics, particularly Waldensians, permitted women to preach are only one marker of this increase in the scope of women’s activities.22 The intense reactions, both positive and negative, to women’s role in heterodox, lay, and visionary spirituality suggest that to their contemporaries these women could function as a sign of all that was both vital and threatening in these new expressions of piety.23
This brief historical account suggests, I hope, how many cultural concerns swirled around preaching in the later Middle Ages and why a consideration of the literature of preaching is fruitful for an understanding of the period as a whole. Faced with the threats of heresy and lay disaffection, and thus with a demand for both more and better preaching, late medieval clerics responded with innumerable aids for preachers, including collections of hagiography, collections of exempla, florilegia, model sermons, and above all artes praedicandi. Such texts can provide an appreciation of how medieval clerics viewed this crucially important task and how they tried to reconcile the unworldly truth of preaching with the earthly body through which the preacher expressed it. As M.-D. Chenu observes of the transformations of the twelfth century, “The dialectic between the gospel and the world … evoked a dual response from the individual Christian as he both returned to the gospel and remained in the world. A dual response and not two responses, for history shows it was the Christian’s return to the gospel which guaranteed his presence in the world and that it was this presence in the world which secured the efficacy of the gospel.”24 The preaching that participated in this “dual response” both benefited from and struggled with the interaction of its elements in ways that reflect the efforts of the church as a whole to come to terms with the competing demands of charisma and hierarchy, spiritual authority and earthly power. Preaching offers a way to see the medieval church in the process of understanding and constructing itself, through the bodies of the men who represented it and the women who tested its boundaries.
While there is, not surprisingly, no single work offering a complete history of medieval preaching, there are many places to begin the study of sacred eloquence in the Middle Ages.25 Most, however, tend to treat the issue of women’s preaching separately