Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200-1500 (review)

This collection of essays is the outcome of a British Academy International Collaboration Grant to editors Katherine Jansen and Miri Rubin that enabled them to host a colloquium and conference that brought together scholars who study Christian, Islamic, and Jewish preaching. Not unexpectedly, but regrettably, the majority of the essays are on Christian preaching. The sermon has been used by most of the major religious groups as an important form of instruction. Teaching manuals and collections of the works of effective and influential preachers were prized by religious leaders and formed a valuable part of religious libraries. Historians in the last few decades have increasingly turned to them for material to illuminate past cultures and mental landscapes.

This volume is less concerned with the specific content of the material than with evidence for the process through which the ideas were expounded and the reasons why the listeners took them to heart. The authors all consider Max Weber's definition of the word 'charisma' as relating to the divine inspiration of leadership and the belief of the followers in the leader's gifts. Weber's anthropological theory analysing the legitimization of political authority underlies the approach taken in most of the papers. The essays all therefore to a greater or lesser degree focus on the relationship between religious and political authority.

Individual essays provide diverse insights into aspects of the process of preaching in the different traditions and the different genres. Considerable attention is devoted to the physical setting in which the sermon is performed - the positioning of the pulpit, the use of open space, the creation of sacred space, and the role of public processions as well as the formal aspects of the presentation, the required movements that gave it legitimacy, the gestures, body language, and intonation that gave it authority, and the use of the vernacular. Three of the papers also examine the way in which, exceptionally, women might be involved in preaching.

The manner in which the audience responded, which is harder to demonstrate, is also the subject of investigation. Most interesting is the essay by Jonathan Berkey on the complex and ambiguous relationship between religious and political authority in Islam. Otherwise though, there is surprisingly little on the tension between the authority of the preacher and the political power of the ruler, except in Christopher Fletcher's stimulating account of the 'Good' Parliament in England.

The contributors raise many interesting individual points. They stress the variety of possible sermon forms and indeed the inclusion of public religious debate as a form of preaching. The writers on Christian sermons focus almost exclusively on the internationally known great preachers of the day, whose sermons attracted large audiences wherever they went even though interpreters were needed to translate their words into the local vernacular. Such preachers sometimes directed morality plays as part of their presentations. Gabriella Zarri provides a different insight into possible variant forms of preaching describing the entirely silent theatrical rapture that overtook Stephana Quinzani, a Poor Clare tertiary, who, losing consciousness, re-enacted the Passion in her own person (a performance which she eventually repeated before the Duke of Mantua in 1499).

Although the editors attempt, in their introduction, to draw the essays together into a connected whole, there is unfortunately little reference from one essay to another and no sustained attempt at a comparison of the ways in which preaching in the different traditions varied and what this can tell us of their cultural expectations. For example, many of the popular Jewish preachers or Maggidim at the time were not rabbis. They preached mainly morality in the vernacular using proverbs and folk tales - a comparison of these sermons with those of the Christian friars, or the preaching of the Islamic wa'iz or qass could illuminate the extent and nature of differences and similarities in...