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

3. A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular

3 A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular Experiencia docet .. . [Experience teaches ... ] Proverbial ALONGSIDE QUESTIONS OF OFFICIAL authorization and self-presentation medieval preachers, like modern ones, had to consider the purely practical aspects of how to get their message across to audiences. Fundamental among these was, of course, the question of language. Unlike modern scholars, medieval preachers seem to have had little interest in the relationship between Latin and vernacular language-or at least little direct record of their musings on this topic has survived.1 It is thus difficult to know, in most cases, in what language they would have preached, though recent scholarship has suggested that the long-standing notion that Latin sermons were always preached to the clergy and vernacular sermons to the laity, with little or no overlap, may be too simple.2 Medieval preachers' attention , however, seems to have focused far more on their access to their audiences, an issue that in a larger sense addresses precisely the question of the place of the vernacular in preaching. The great revival offormal interest in preaching took place before the major debates in England about the vernacular and its appropriate place in religious culture broke out in force, and in general preaching handbooks do not emphasize the question of language.3 Nevertheless, attentiveness to preachers' discussions oftheir own language can illustrate how shifting and uncertain the supposed divide between Latin and vernacular really was. Preaching manuals, particularly those by mendicant authors, and discussions ofnarrative exempla show preachers engaged in a delicate balancing act. Standing between the church hierarchy and the laity in both the mediatory and the liminal senses ofthe word, preachers required Chapter 3 access to both ofthose worlds in order to make them accessible to one another . The preaching handbooks, with their complex attention to the preacher's need both to distinguish himself from and to resemble his flock, and discussions ofexempla, which hovered problematically between vernacular and Latin modes, show how crucial vernacularity was in establishing a clerical identity that is often seen in opposition to it. Vernacularity is not the same as popularity, but the Latin term most preachers used to describe the vernacular suggests that in this context the two are not unrelated. The word vernacularis, while not unheard of, appears far less often than the word vulgaris and its offshoots, meaning "common," "popular," "of the crowd," and so forth.4 Thus it is sometimes impossible to tell whether a writer is referring to a story in the vernacular or merely a popular story, a vernacular saying or a common saying. This distinction, or lack thereof, is important because vernacularity in preaching has to do not simply with language but with the preacher's ability to form a connection with his audience, to gain access to their hearts and minds. Access is often discussed in terms ofexclusionthe need for access implies a prior separation. In preaching, however, access is more a matter of an effective approach, of addressing a given audience in terms appropriate to their situation. Like many ofthe sermons they left behind, most preachers must have been linguistic and cultural hybrids.5 Thinking about vernacularity as access helps us to understand how preachers fashioned themselves as representatives of clerical culture who maintained their links to the vernacular culture that surrounded them and that was their first linguistic home. Talking the Talk: The Preacher's Bridge The kind of preaching that we think of as vernacular preaching, preaching to "the people" or the laity, was associated throughout most ofChristian history with the lower clergy, as Michel Zink has noted, because it was the lower clergy-below the bishop, that is-who were able to communicate with their flocks in the native, "common" language of the region .6 It was perhaps a lack of sufficiently prepared lower clergy that led to a growing perception, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that the clerical hierarchy was not fulfilling its preaching duties; instead independent , charismatic preachers-some more orthodox than others-sprang up to fill the gap. A Manner ofSpeaking 59 The situation ofthe Milanese Patarenes, discussed at length by Brian Stock, demonstrates the power of such popular preachers. In an account ofthe Patarene LandulfCotta's preaching, the conservative chronicler Arnulfmaintains that it was "deliberately 'arranged' for the persuasion ofthe unsophisticated (concionatur in populo)." His description shows a charismatic preacher at work, using the tropes of inadequacy and unlearnedness , youth, inexperience...