Jacques’s most significant contribution to the history of the church comprised his
collections of sermons intended to serve as models for preachers. One collection,
Sermones dominicales (de tempore), gives three sermons for each of the Sundays of the
ecclesiastical calendar; Sermones de sanctis gives 115 sermons for saints’ days and
special feasts; Sermones communes et feriales gives twentyseven sermons for daily use;
Sermones vulgares (or ad status) gives seventy-four sermons addressing social classes
and religious groups. The first small collection of such model sermons was compiled only
the generation before by Alain de Lille, and Jacques went far beyond them with his
collections, particularly in their homiletic illustrations, or exempla, which provide a
wealth of amusing and instructive anecdotes.
Jacques also composed a biography of Marie d’Oignies (1213) that helped gain papal
approval for the béguine movement and has since become a valuable historical source for
the early days of that controversial movement. Several of his letters date from his sojourn
in Palestine (up to 1221), and his Historia Hierosolymitana abbreviata in three books
recounts not only the history of Jerusalem during the Crusades but also, and perhaps
more importantly, the new and often controversial religious movements of the day, such
as the béguines, the Humiliati, and even the Franciscans (at least in their more colorful
manifestations), as they relate to the renewal of the church and to the success of its
mission.
Although Jacques’s religious vocation took the more traditional form of an
Augustinian canon, both his sympathies for the spiritual revival of his day and his talents
as an extraordinary preacher place him firmly in the mainstream of the life of the church
in the 13th century.
Mark Zier
[See also: BÉGUINES; EXEMPLUM; MARIE D’OIGNIES]
Jacques de Vitry. The Historia occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry, ed. John F.Hinnebusch. Fribourg:
University Press, 1972.
——. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 1160/70–1240, évêque de Saint-Jean d’Acre, ed.
R.B.C.Huygens. Leiden: Brill, 1960.
——. Sermones vulgares. In Analecta nouissima spicilegii Solesmensis, altera continuatio, ed. Jean
Baptiste Pitra. 2 vols. Paris: Typis Tusculanis, 1885–88, Vol. 2.
Funk, Philipp. Jakob von Vitry: Leben und Werke. Leipzig: Teubner, 1909.
JARDIN DE PLAISANCE ET FLEUR DE
RÉTHORIQUE
.
Printed in Paris by Antoine Vérard between 1501 and 1503, the Jardin de plaisance et
fleur de réthorique is a compendium of over 630 ballades, rondeaux, and other short lyric
poems and narrative segments from the preceding two centuries.
The compiler, who identifies himself only as “L’Infortuné,” dedicates his work to
King Louis XII and prefaces the anthology proper with the Instructif de seconde
réthorique, a treatise on poetic art of some 2,000 lines. Three longer works follow this
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 922