Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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surprise and disapproval at the news that certain abbesses had recently been known to “bless their nuns, hear their confessions of sins, and, reading the gospel, presume to preach publicly”; he ordered the relevant bishops to put a stop to this nonsense, noting that “although the blessed virgin Mary was worthier and more excellent than all the apostles, still the Lord commended the keys of the kingdom of heaven not to her, but to them.”32 The association of the abbesses’ activities, including preaching, with the “power of the keys” conferred by ordination, the power to hear confessions and give absolution, indicates that for Innocent these two roles were closely related.33 His reference to Mary underlines his explicit denial to women of any historical claim to priestly power and concomitantly forbids them the right to preach. Pope Gregory IX reaffirmed Innocent’s ruling and reasserted women’s exclusion from the ability to cite Scripture publicly in 1234 when he “took from abbesses their right of public preaching and reading of the Gospel.”34
A text written shortly after Innocent’s bull similarly addresses the relationship between reading in the church and women’s proper role in ecclesiastical matters.35 Thomas of Chobham, an early thirteenth-century pastoral theologian with a strongly pragmatic bent, permits public reading of religious texts by women, apparently on the grounds that the speaker makes no intelligent contribution of her own to what is said. Abbesses may instruct and reprehend their nuns, he says, but they may not “expound sacred Scripture by preaching”; and they may read publicly from the Epistles of Saint Paul, the legends of the saints, and the gospel at matins—this is the office of deaconesses, Thomas says—but may not put on priestly vestments or read from the Epistles or the gospel at mass.36 Thomas’s approach is more tolerant than that of Innocent III, but it still denies women access to the most characteristic marks of the clerical hierarchy (priestly vestments, participation in the Mass) and particularly, it may be noted, prohibits women from originating speech: only the “greater ones” (maiores) in the church may expound Scripture to the people, may offer their interpretations and make use of their own intelligence.37 Women, and laymen, may re-cite Scripture or preaching from a text or from memory but may not, so to speak, cite it in their own right, as the production of their own independent knowledge.
As Franco Morenzoni notes, in drawing the line against unlicensed speech at public exposition of Scripture, Thomas is reflecting “a distinction apparently already well established at the beginning of the thirteenth century … that preaching is not permitted to the laity unless the word praedicare is used as a synonym for exhortation to good, while it is formally forbidden them when it is taken in its proper sense, that is, the public explication of the sacred text.”38 Similarly, Innocent III permitted the laymen of the Humiliati to offer moral exhortation in their gatherings but forbade them to discuss “the articles of the faith and the sacraments of the church”—that is, doctrinal and hierarchical matters.39 It is important to recognize, however, that preaching “proper” is not as stable in medieval preaching texts as Morenzoni, among others, seems to suggest. The issue of whether textual exposition is the ultimate definition of preaching is called into question, for instance, by Thomas’s remark, “Although many simple priests may not know the profound mysteries of sacred Scripture, but only know how to rebuke vices and build up faith and good morals, at least in simple words, we do not believe that they are to be condemned. For thus did John the Baptist preach … thus the apostles preached.”40 In other words, such activity—which, as Thomas notes immediately afterward, may be practiced by laypersons in private (and he later gives examples of women saints and male hermits “preaching” this way in public)—functions as preaching in a pastoral context, suggesting that here as elsewhere the more limited definition was used not so much to characterize “true” preaching as to exclude unauthorized preachers.41
Reading aloud and expounding Scripture thus formed one aspect of what it meant to be a priest and accordingly one axis of the argument regarding unlicensed preachers. Considerations of the nature and scope of women’s charismatic authority offer another angle on the problem. Discussions of women preachers frequently take women’s ability to prophesy as a counterargument to their fundamental position that women may not preach. Henry of Ghent’s thirteenth-century disputation on female preachers, for instance, says, “To prophesy is no less [an act] of grace than to teach; rather it is the work of prophets to teach publicly those things that are revealed to them,” and he concedes that women have been prophets.42 However, since his final decision, like that of all his colleagues, is that women may not preach after all, this argument must be opposed. Henry does this by saying that “prophecy is given to women not for public instruction, but for private, and if they teach men by it, this is on account of special grace, which does not respect sexual difference.”43 The argument from “special grace” was a favorite since it removed prophecy, and thus women’s speech, from the realm of official, replicable authority. Thomas Aquinas, on whom Henry of Ghent drew for his own argument, declared that “prophecy is not a sacrament, but a gift of God” and placed it outside the human hierarchy of the church, saying that “the prophet is a medium between God and the priest, as the priest is between God and the people.”44 The “office” of prophet that could not be denied to women, then, is defined in such a way as to make it irrelevant to issues of women’s preaching or ordination.
In another instance of the desire to prevent women from citing an authoritative lineage, the preaching of certain women saints such as Mary Magdalene and Katherine of Alexandria may be acknowledged, but care is taken that they remain very much non imitanda sed veneranda (to be venerated rather than imitated).45 Eustache of Arras does eventually decide that these two women are worthy of the preacher’s aureole, but the contention of, for example, Robert of Basevorn that a preacher must preach repeatedly and with authorization to merit the aureole would certainly exclude most women from the strict title of preacher, even if they managed once or on occasion to perform some version of that role.46 Thus, although preaching manuals occasionally admit that women have been known to preach, they prefer to regard this as a product of extraordinary circumstances that does not authorize imitation.47
The dichotomy between the ordinary and the extraordinary used to short-circuit the development of a female lineage of preachers appears, not surprisingly, to be related to the issue of ordination. A disputation by Jean de Pouilly, for instance, discusses battles over jurisdiction between mendicants who have the office of preacher “only by commission or privilege (ex commissione seu privilegio), that is to say, by virtue of an extraordinary right (jure extraordinario)”; parish curates, by contrast, are authorized to preach by “ordinary right.”48 Jean notes that parish priests have this authority because it was conferred on them (in the person of the seventy-two disciples) “immediately” by Christ.49 “Ordinary” authority to preach thus derives from a direct mandate from Christ, a mandate not given to laymen nor, especially, to women. And since the “immediate” conferral of ordination by Christ effectively took place through a human intermediary, it turned out that the mediation of a human lineage of priests and the institutional tradition conferred a more stable authority than the truly immediate inspiration of the prophet. Anyone, that is, including a woman, could attain an authorization from God that was equally or more immediate and direct than that of a priestly preacher, but she could attain it only in an extraordinary and thus noncitable sense.50
Limiting women to the noncitable role of prophet or—what amounts to the same thing—to “extraordinary” and nonlineal acts of preaching was thus one way of defining women’s preaching out of existence. As Alcuin Blamires points out, quoting Hugh of St. Cher, “While prophetesses might give precedent for foretelling the future or uttering praise, they do not give precedent for ‘expounding Scripture in preaching’ (a distinction, in fact, between praedicere and praedicare).”51 Problems arise, however, if we look at the meaning of prophecy in other contexts, since it seems that neither prophecy as such nor its exercise by women was as clear-cut as Hugh’s pronouncement or Aquinas’s appeal to the “gift of grace” might suggest.52 Thomas of Chobham says that “preaching is also sometimes called prophecy.… To prophesy is to explain to the people those things which are said.”53 Most of the female prophets of the Bible, like their male counterparts,