Sermo

This book analyses the diffusion of anti-Judaic stereotypes and topoi in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century model sermon collections. It concentrates on the sermons on Luke 19.41-48 where Jesus foretells the Destruction of Jerusalem. The preachers took the view that the Destruction of Jerusalem was divine vengeance for the Jews because they killed Jesus. Thus these sermons were a good venue for those preachers who wanted to preach against the Jews.

Model sermon collections were the closest thing to modern mass media. Consequently their role in the diffusion of anti-Judaic attitudes was significant. The anti-Judaic writings of the early Church Fathers were only read by few literate church men whereas model sermons reached the illiterate masses all over Christianity. Therefore they played a major role in diffusing anti-Judaic attitudes amongst the population at large and thus contributed to the marginalization of the Jews to various libels expulsions violence and eventually to large-scale pogroms.

This volume concentrates on how the sermon a pivotal element in mass communication aimed to shape the people of Europe. Rather than setting up the usual binary divides it highlights the linguistic complications the textual inter-relationships the confessional cross-currents and the variations between public and private sermon dissemination operating at different rates and with variable results throughout Europe. Effectively the emphasis here is on how Catholic preachers and Catholic preaching carried on in the period between the handwritten and the printed sermon a time when not only the mode of production was changing but when the very purpose and meaning of preaching itself would soon alter in a western Christian world that was becoming no longer completely Catholic. By examining case-studies chosen from countries with contrasting manuscript and printing traditions (Denmark England Finland France Germany Italy the Low Countries Romania Spain and Sweden) we aim to examine some of the main historical literary and theological factors in the development of the sermon in Latin and the vernaculars which is itself in the process of changing formats and sometimes languages at a time of religious ferment from the advent of print to the death of Martin Luther. These essays which are effectively in dialogue with each other are divided into geographical/linguistic sections organized along broadly chronological lines. They circulate from the peripheries of Europe to the centre moving from areas where evidence is now scarce to situations of thriving production.

This volume explores the sermons and activities of Christian Jewish and Muslim preachers who shaped ideas about religious and gendered identities and alterity throughout the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Preachers of all three traditions played a decisive role in defining the religious identities of their communities often in response to negative images projected onto religious others. The studies cover a broad spectrum of premodern Europe and the Mediterranean and address the ways that preaching reflects transcultural contacts as well as social intellectual and hermeneutical encounters among diverse societies and religious communities.

The essays are divided into three themes. Part One ‘Religious and Gendered Identities and Alterities’ examines how religious identity is inflected by the presence or the ‘absent presence’ of religious others and interrogates how gender informs religious identity piety and alterity. The chapters in Part Two ‘Hermeneutical Identities Alterities and Transcultural Relations in Christian and Jewish Preaching’ offer contrasting interpretations of the impact of anti-Judaism in Christian preaching and analyse Jewish responses to Christian polemic. Part Three ‘Muslim and Christian Orators and Inter-faith Encounters’ explores these encounters from the dual perspectives of Crusade and military conflict and interreligious dialogue disputation and proselytization. The volume positions itself at the intellectual crossroads between comparative medieval sermons studies and transcultural Mediterranean and European studies.

The French Dominican William Peraldus or Guillaume Peyraut (died c. 1275) well known for his long summae on the vices and virtues also produced several cycles of sermons of which two deal with the Epistle and the Gospel readings for the Sundays of the Church year. This study analyzes the latter in some detail and argues that rather than collecting sermons he had preached earlier Peraldus wrote these sermons systematically for the use of other preachers. The Epistle sermons for the first Sunday in Advent and the Gospel sermons for the third Sunday in Advent are presented in their original Latin text together with an English translation in order to demonstrate how Peraldus dealt with the biblical text as well as his moral concerns and his literary style. The selected texts are then compared with several other major cycles produced in France in Peraldus’s time. Like his summae on the vices and the virtues Peraldus’s sermons became very popular in medieval Europe as is witnessed by selective copying and citations that can be seen in a number of instances primarily from the sermon literature of later medieval England. One aspect of this popularity is the adaptation of his material into a genuine sermon as it can be found in the sermons attributed to Repingdon of which one is here examined in detail.

Preaching is a method of exhorting the practice of virtues and the performance of one’s duties. If people are not moved to act preachers become obsolete. Because of this preachers in the Middle Ages understood the importance of ensuring that their words were heeded and disseminated.

The focus of this volume is the relationship whether direct or indirect between what was preached and what was achieved. The articles in this collection present a range of studies from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and while focused on Italy also give a broad European perspective.

The volume investigates both the tools employed by preachers and the pragmatic aims and outcomes of their sermons. It does this by exploring the various oratorical and gesticular techniques employed by preachers as well as their methods of preparing themselves to deliver their message and preparing their audiences to receive it. Furthermore the volume considers both hypothetical and concrete relationships between preachers’ words and civic policies and the behaviours of groups or individual citizens as well as the question of how and when words were translated into actions.

Depuis au moins l’Antiquité tardive les relations entre prédication et société politique ont été nombreuses et variées. Dans le présent volume ont été réunies douze contributions qui en mettant en œuvre une documentation le plus souvent encore inédite étudient comment dans des contextes historiques culturels et géographiques différents ces relations complexes se sont déployées. Les contributions permettent ainsi de mieux apprécier dans quelles circonstances et selon quelles modalités plusieurs prédicateurs ont été amenés à proposer dans leurs sermons une réflexion de nature politique censée contribuer à la formation de l’opinion des puissants et des fidèles en général. Elles montrent aussi quelques-unes des voies qui permettent d’explorer un domaine de recherche qui n’a suscité jusqu’ici qu’un nombre limités de travaux mais dont la connaissance est sans aucun doute indispensable pour mieux comprendre la complexité des sociétés médiévales.

In the Middle Ages the sermon was a powerful and versatile means of bringing the Word of God to the people. In fact in the oral culture of that period it was the primary medium for Christian clergy to convey religious education to lay audiences. Moreover the sermon played an important role in the liturgy and life of the religious orders. With the growth of lay literacy the sermon collection also developed into a vernacular literary genre of its own.

Two aspects of Christian piety hopeful expectation on the one hand and fearful anticipation on the other were decisive factors for the shaping of religious life and practical pastoral care. Both these aspects were often brought to the fore in sermons on the Last Judgement as part of a recurrent argument against a life too much oriented towards the world. The preachers dwell on both the Particular Judgement occurring immediately after death and the General Judgement over the whole of creation at the end of times.

This volume brings together scholars from several European countries with the purpose to present their research on the theme of the Last Judgement in medieval sermons. The scope of scholars is broadened to incorporate not only specialists in sermon studies but also historians theologians and literary historians to encourage research along new multi-perspectival lines.

This volume explores the integral role of memory and mnemonic techniques in medieval preaching from the thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. It argues that the mendicant orders inherited from the early Middle Ages both the simple mnemonic techniques of rhetorical practice and a tradition of monastic meditation founded on memory images. In the thirteenth century Dominican and Franciscan writers drew on these basic techniques even as they re-evaluated the ancient mnemonic system of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BC). The increasing emphasis that intellectuals placed upon cognitive science ethics and on distinctions between rhetoric and logic created a climate that welcomed an image-based memory system designed for orators. The book also explores the Franciscan contribution to mnemonics which has been almost entirely neglected by scholars. As the Franciscans came to value imaginative meditation as part of their own spiritual lives their habit of meditating on mental images of the virtues and vices eventually spilled out into their sermons. As the new orators of the period Franciscans and Dominicans each inserted mnemonic images into their sermons as a way to aid the recall of both preachers and listeners. The products of such mnemonic practices in medieval sermons which included elaborate descriptions of buildings schematic renderings of the number seven and verbal images of the virtues and vices were then allegorised in moral terms and circulated on the continent in exempla collections. This book argues that verbal images and complicated schema functioned as ‘ordering devices’ for those preaching and listening to sermons whilst also provoking an affective response that enhanced listeners’ devotional and penitential experiences.

In considering the construction of medieval sermons the term ‘construction’ has many meanings. Those studied here range from questions about sermon composition with the help of artes praedicandi or model collections to a more abstract investigation of the mental construction of the concepts of sermon and preacher. Sermons from a range of European countries written both in Latin and vernaculars are subjected to a broad variety of analyses. The approach demonstrates the vitality of this sub-discipline. Most of the essays are more occupied with literary and philological problems than with the religious content of the sermons. While many focus on vernacular sermons the Latin cultural and literary background is always considered and shows how vernacular preaching was in part based on a more learned Latin culture. The collection testifies both to the increasing esteem of the study of vernacular sermons and to a revival in the study of all those things contained in a preacher’s ‘workshop’ ranging from rhetorical invention medieval library holdings and study-aids through to factors that are crucial for the successful delivery of the sermon such as the choice of language mnemonic devices and addressing the audience. The interdisciplinary approach remains ever-present not only in the diversity of the academic disciplines represented but also within individual essays. The volume is based on a conference held in Stockholm 7-9 October 2004.