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7. Sermones ad Status and Old Wives' Tales; Or, the Audience Talks Back
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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7 Sermones ad Status and Old Wives' Tales; or, The Audience Talks Back Aniles fabulas devita. [Avoid old wives' tales.] 1 Tim. 4:7 Up stirte the Pardoner, and that anon: "Now, dame," quod he, "by God and by seint John! Ye been a noble prechour in this cas." Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 3.163-65 THE PREACHER'S ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH AN authoritative voice in which he could convey Christian doctrine was always a vexed one, and nowhere is this more clear than in the late medieval genre of the sermon ad status. These sermons, which addressed audiences according to their professional or social group, threaten to erode the exceptional and unchallenged privilege of priestly speech precisely by calling attention to that speech as the attribute of one professional class among many. The admirable desire to engage with the audience brings into sharp focus the problems attendant on attempting to maintain preachers as a group set apart from the world, even as their vocation required their participation in it.1 This conflict is exploited by estates literature, which treats in satirical form the same failings addressed by ad status sermons and makes the didactic, critical priestly voice available to nonpriestly speakers while at the same time questioning that voice's claims to disinterestedness. Ultimately, the ways in which these genres bring the preacher's speech down to earth open the door to one vernacular author's creation of a poetic voice: Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath becomes, in light of the sermones ad status and their descendants, both the natural inheritor of clerical privilege and the figure who definitively upends its claims to ultimate authority. The debt 14-4- Chapter 7 of the Canterbury Tales to sermon traditions illuminates the problem of the preacher's ties to the world and offers a novel solution, allowing the poet simultaneously to exploit the power and to escape the dangers ofexercising authoritative speech. In doing so, Chaucer presents an elaborate exploration of the relationship of speech to the intransigent physicality of the body (figured here as aggressively female) that brings together in very pointed form a great many issues discussed in previous chapters: access to vernacular speech and modes as a counterpart or challenge to clerical discourse ; literary lineage and descent; the femininity ofpersuasion; and perhaps above all, the nature and fragility of the preacher's embodied authority and the ways in which it gets explored through images of women speakers. Ad status sermons, which address particular audiences according to their moral, social, or, increasingly, professional situations, began to appear in the twelfth century. These sermons reflect the desire for an ordered hierarchy with clear classifications that also characterized the Gregorian reform. At the same time the explicit desire to address the particular characteristics of varied lay audiences requires the preacher to shape his speech to his audience's needs in a way that tended to break down or weaken the boundaries between priest and laity, and the later collections contribute further to the leveling of laity and clergy by making both groups the objects of critique. Estates literature, a satirical counterpart to the sermones ad status that characterizes and critiques various social groups according to their professional qualities, profits from and extends the decentering of the clerical voice begun by the sermons. The imagined author or speaker ofthese satires-some ofwhich take the form of sermons-is no longer necessarily a priest, and the clergy are taken to task with enthusiasm. These satirical works also, not coincidentally, begin to address the problematic associations between clerics and women, one key point where the clergy's claim to unworldliness often foundered. Dyan Elliott has argued that clerical wives' "mixed, hybrid, 'impossible' status [was] ambiguous in a way that reveals the seams in classificatory categories ," thus threatening the reformers' desire for "a strict division between clergy and laity."2 Her astute discussion of this theme in texts on the priesthood is borne out by the irruption of images of women, and of literary forms associated with them, into preaching and estates satire. The recurrence of such forms shows how the association between clerical and female bodies begins to infect clerical speech. The decentering of the priestly voice that permits the emergence of [54.89.24.147] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:51 GMT) Sermones ad Status and Old Wives' Tales 14-5 lay critiques, the leveling of the priestly body with lay bodies, and the overlap offemale and clerical voices are all visible...