Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages

5. Transparent Bodies and the Redemption of Rhetoric

5 Transparent Bodies and the Redemption of Rhetoric [Nulla] mulier[,] quantumcumque docta et sancta, praedicare debet. [No woman, however learned and saintly, ought to preach.] Robert of Basevorn, Forma praedicandi 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 ofthe 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 on the theme when at the end of De doctrina christiana he recalls Esther's prayer before her attempt at wifely persuasion as a model for the preacher.1 The powerful persuasiveness of physical beauty, intimacy, and rhetoric could work to good or ill effect, and the association of these motifs opened the way for an intense investigation, in medieval hagiography, of the body's capacity to further as well as obscure a salvific message. The often feminized notion of persuasion was, as I have suggested above, a subject that many preaching theorists preferred to avoid or at least to underplay; saints' lives offer an avenue for exploring the preacher's embodied, persuasive appeals to his audience in a less threatening context. Late medieval hagiography and preaching literature demonstrate a widespread enthusiasm for certain famous women preachers coexisting with persistent denunciations of the dangers of women's public speech.2 Transparent Bodies 97 Recent scholarship on medieval hagiography has emphasized, as Theresa Coletti observes, the ways in which "hagiographic narrative and cultic practice, far from simply representing a stable, transhistorical realm of Christian values, participated in crucial ways in the production of social and political power."3 Narratives concerning women saints of the early church, particularly virgin-martyr legends, are excellent instances of this tendency. From the patristic age to the fifteenth century, retellings oftheir stories make appeal to an idealized, radical Christian past even as they explore the most topical and thorny of questions.4 This phenomenon is clearly visible in late medieval lives of saints such as Mary Magdalene and Katherine of Alexandria, which represent both the discomfort with women's public speech and the ways in which that speech could reflect and, to some extent, mitigate concerns about embodiment and its role in the preacher's work. Both favorable discussions of wifely persuasion and denunciations of women preachers link female beauty and persuasive speech; in high and late medieval lives of these outspoken saints the pairing appears in concrete form. Their legends helped to neutralize the dangerous allure of the superficial by showing how physical and verbal beauty could be united to serve, rather than threaten, the greater good ofpreaching . In Jacobus of Voragine's Legenda aurea and its immediate sources male authors use their female characters to work through how human eloquence is related to its divine subject and how the body of the speaker inflects that relationship. Feminine Persuasion, Feminine Allure Women's speech was suspect in medieval culture not, of course, because of its unimportance but because of its perceived power, for good or ill. The association of such power with sensual and even sexual appeal is visible across the spectrum of discussions of women's speech, from the most positive to the most negative. The persistent use ofthe language ofsweetness and attraction in such discourses marks the ways in which rhetoric's dangerous tendencies were emphasized when persuasion was directly associated with the feminine. It also begins to suggest how male preachers could be tainted with the sexual overtones of the language of preaching. Beginning at one end of the spectrum, we see that even positive discussions ofwomen's persuasive abilities were often couched in terms that implied their dangerous links to sexual allure. Sharon Farmer, in tracing Chapter 5 the history ofattitudes toward women's ability to persuade their husbands to Christian belief and behavior, found that late medieval commentators, particularly pastoral theologians, moved away from patristic views of women's ability to persuade through deeds to propose a more actively verbal role for Christian spouses ofunbelievers.5 Thomas ofChobham, for instance, says in his Manual for Confessors that...