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Reviewed by:
  • Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages
  • Carolyn A. Muessig
Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages. By Claire M. Waters . (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 282. $55.00.)

Claire Waters identifies two central points of her book. First, the medieval preacher embraces an ideal of the perfect cleric who presents a divine message through his preaching. Yet, he is like any other man who errs and sins. Once this point is grasped, medieval literature can reveal cultural perceptions of how to rectify the struggle between these two aspects of the preacher's tendency toward sin and his responsibility to relay divine messages. Water's second point is that while the authorized preacher of the Middle Ages was usually a male cleric, there existed female preachers, or more commonly, debates about the appropriateness of women preachers. The discussion of women in these polemical sources emphasized women's capacity to sin, thus indicating them as ineffective preachers. Waters demonstrates that these polemical tracts allowed theorists to discuss issues of "personal authority and the body's role in that authority" (p. 2) while never having to address these occupational tensions directly to the male preacher nor cite them as a male problem. Waters identifies the artes praedicandi—handbooks for preachers—as her main source to investigate the implications of these two central points.

In the first four chapters, the office of the preacher is examined. Chapter 1 discusses the boundaries of the preaching. The place of the authorized preacher whose voice is based on canonical texts is contrasted with the role of the prohet or prophetess whose charismatic speech is based on personal authority. These two voices represent extreme types of preaching—the authorized, priestly form supported by an institutional power base, the Church, and the charismatic form which is based on the personality of an individual, often times a woman.

In Chapter 2 Waters alights on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. She examines the tales of the Parson and the Pardoner to extract Chaucer's attitude toward preaching. She concludes that the Pardoner is the embodiment of a corrupt preacher while the Parson is a virtuous one, but then adds that the reader is left in some doubt as there is always a suspicion that the public face of the preacher does not necessarily reveal the true nature of his soul. Chapter 3 discusses [End Page 776] the use of Latin and vernacular in sermons. Chapter 4 examines the content and style of pastoral language.

Waters considers the female preacher in the last three chapters. Chapter 5 looks at the question of rhetoric and the role of the female preacher. Waters concludes that female preaching represents physical beauty which metaphorically stands for the beauty and danger of rhetoric. Chapter 6 analyzes how Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, and Birgitta of Sweden carefully tread into the realm of preaching while artfully appearing to do otherwise. The final chapter looks at the Wife of Bath. Waters suggests that the Wife of Bath mirrors "the clerical tendency to tell stories... and generally use clerical speech for personal ends" (p. 167).

While each chapter elucidates the art of medieval preaching, the overall integrity of the book is obscure. For example, the 'Introduction' indicates a slightly different book from what the reader is presented with. The book does investigate the artes praedicandi and the role of the preacher and the tensions in his position as a man of God and as a man of Adam. It also considers how the discussion of female preaching allowed for a greater discussion of the pitfalls of male preaching. But the book also provides a Chaucerian reading of preaching and gender while relying on a variety of sources, and not primarily on the artes praedicandi, to consider these points. Furthermore, the book lacks a 'Conclusion' which would have tied the themes of each chapter together enabling the reader to digest more easily the author's astute observations.

Regardless of these criticisms, the contribution of Waters' study is significant in that it crosses boundaries between Chaucerian scholarship, gender studies, and sermon studies. Students...

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