move to evangelize the Germanic peoples of the Rhineland and Frisia, a mission that
culminated in the mid-8th-century missions led by St. Boniface.
The history of preaching takes a significant turn in the 11th century. The advent of the
eremetical movement ca. 1000, the birth and spread of the movement of regular canons in
the middle decades of the century, and the policies of the reform popes at the century’s
close all gave voice to a new spirit that sought to dissociate preaching from certain of its
old moorings and associate it with new spiritual aims. The episcopal care of the Frankish
centuries had addressed communities rather than persons. Its form and focus were
adapted accordingly, expressing them-selves in large-scale events constituted by highly
stylized acts in public liturgical settings. Bishops could be counted on to maintain the
required pomp in their preaching in the vernacular, but not so their proxies in the country
parishes. Consequently, it would seem that the preaching of the latter remained in the
Latin of the homiliaries themselves. Such a preaching, because it was literally
unintelligible, addressed the community with a verbal mystery, a fitting adumbration of
the subsequent mystery of Word-made-Flesh on the altar at the climax of the Mass.
Many of the French hermits, taking John the Baptist as their patron and model,
returned to the edges of the settled land to preach a message of repentance to individuals.
In the Frankish church, repentance had been the special concern of the monastic order,
which shouldered the burden of a constant repentance on behalf of the faithful as a whole.
In the preaching of the 11th-century itinerant preachers, however, the penitent life was
democratized and addressed to each of the faithful. As a result, the 11th and 12th
centuries can be seen as a great age of religious and lay preaching, and as an age of
immense institutional and pastoral ferment, as the church struggled to adapt to this
outburst of new needs and feelings. The earliest of these wandering preachers remain
largely nameless, but we know the names of many who came to be allied with the
movement of reform emanating from and under the auspices of the popes of Rome: Peter
the Hermit (1050–1115), Robert d’Arbrissel (1060–1115), St. Norbert of Xanten (1082–
1134), to name only a few.
From the 11th century, Benedictine houses began staffing their dependent parishes
with monks of the community. Orders of regular canons proliferated, several of which,
such as the Premonstratensians, took on pastoral care in rural churches or, like the
Victorines in northern France, the care of women religious, including the office of
preaching. Nor should one forget the extensive use made of preachers and preaching
missions by the popes of the 11th and 12th centuries. One thinks of the Cistercians
Bernard of Clairvaux and Alain de Lille commissioned to preach the Second and Third
Crusades, of religious sent to preach against heretics in southern France, of the dispirited
troop of Cistercians whom St. Dominic met and encouraged in 1206. Examples of lay
preaching and preachers are equally plentiful. In particular, one thinks of the career of
Peter Waldo.
Just as the hermits of the early 11th century had taken on a biblical exemplar in John
the Baptist, so too did lay preachers take on exemplars: the Apostles and the apostolic life
described in Matthew 10. In emulation of the Apostles, they moved about two by two,
barefoot and penniless, preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God. This flowering of
lay preaching, this apostolic movement, by its embrace of mendicancy also drew strength
from a development within the rapidly urbanizing regions of Europe: the embrace of a
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1422