By ca. 1300, a new framework of pastoral institutions had been worked out. The locus
of pastoral care had been lowered from the cathedral church to the parish church,
supplemented in urban areas by the oratories of the religious. The “order of preachers”
had been expanded to include parish and religious clergy. Indeed, that old Gregorian term
had come to rest upon one order of religious in particular, the Dominican Order of Friars
Preachers.
These transformations led to the exclusion of certain possibilities. From the mid-13th
century, lay preaching came to be proscribed. Even those lay functions given papal
sanction by Innocent III, profession and defense of the faith, came to be viewed with
suspicion. The orders founded by Innocent’s policy of reconciliation had ceased to be by
the end of the century. Nevertheless, a long and uninterrupted tradition of monastic
preaching continued with little change. Within the monastery, religious superiors, male
and female, preached to their subordinates so as to form them to their religious callings.
In France, sermons of the Mistress of Paris’s Grand Béguinage are preserved in
manuscripts B.N. lat. 16481 and 16482.
Literary witnesses to medieval preaching abound. Although they bear a problematic
relationship to actual preaching, they do provide some sense of the rhetorical modes that
held sway at different periods of medieval history. In general, a patristic mode of
preaching predominated in both monastery and public preaching until the close of the
12th century. This mode, the homily (tractatus, omelia), represented a more or less
continuous commentary on the biblical readings chosen for exposition, whereby the
preacher exposited his text by associating it with other biblical passages that shared a
significant word or concept. This mode of preaching continued in monastic circles even
after it began to give way to other modes outside of monastery walls.
Word-associative approaches to the biblical text crystallized in the course of the 12th
century into a set form, the biblical distinction, under the influence of the cathedral
schools. The use of biblical distinctions to provide an architectonic for sermons is clearly
visible in the sermon collections of late 12th-century bishops like Maurice de Sully. This
represents a first step away from the homily tradition and toward a new mode of
preaching, the “thematic sermon.”
The thematic sermon proper emerges at the dawn of the 13th century and continues to
be developed well into the 14th. Here, attention has come to focus upon a single, small
passage of the Mass readings. This “theme” is then divided into a number of “parts,”
usually between two and four. These divisions serve subsequently as occasions for
doctrinal, mystical, or moral instruction. Instruction or correction occurs via the process
of expansion or dilation by which the meaning of each part is articulated, with or without
subdivision, and confirmed by means of “authorities,” “arguments,” or “examples.” The
latter category often meant a narrative vignette drawn from a common stock of colorful
stories. It could also mean a parallel moment from the nonhuman world, a similitude that
drew its power from the assumption of the human microcosm. The more educated the
context, the more preachers would be expected to confirm their divisions and
subdivisions by recourse to arguments and authorities. When preaching to the ordinary
faithful, however, one was expected to use examples and similitudes. The Sermones
vulgares of Jacques de Vitry show how effectively the thematic sermon could be adapted
to the needs of popular preaching.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1424