What a contrast this makes to the Pardoner, whose physicality is so foregrounded, simultaneously excessive and elusive, that it may well dominate our sense of him and certainly interferes with his preaching in ways that preaching theorists would have strongly disapproved.17 First, there is the doubt about his sexuality: “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare,” the narrator says, expressing an uncertainty that has implications not only for his acceptance among the other pilgrims but for his very ability to occupy the office of preacher.18 Second, there is the theatrical gesticulation about which he boasts in his prologue: “Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke, / And est and west upon the peple I bekke, / As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne. / Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne / That it is joye to se my bisynesse.”19 This kind of physical display is uniformly condemned in preaching handbooks and contrasts sharply with the Parson’s approach: here, it is clear, the preacher’s office serves his body rather than vice versa.20 Finally, of course, the Pardoner’s greed, the cupidity that both fuels his preaching and provides its subject, marks the unworthy self-interest that motivates his supposedly spiritual work.21 If the Parson exemplifies personal authority attained through perfect submission to an institutional structure and ideal, and thus powerfully reinforcing that structure and ideal, the Pardoner emblematizes the capacity of the physical body to destroy both personal authority and institutional authorization.
Alastair Minnis has recently discussed the theoretical and theological aspects of the potential gap between the body as locus of authority and the body as locus of a fallible individual.22 The aim here is to raise similar questions about the practical performance of preaching. Attempts by the authors of artes praedicandi to manage the potentially competing meanings of the preacher’s body are all the more informative because they deal with a figure who was not, like a king, in a removed position of divine right nor, like an author, at a distance from his audience, but one who had constantly to perform both his virtue and his authority for a present, and possibly resistant, audience. In establishing the preacher’s claim implicitly to represent the church’s dignity and authority, preaching theorists often contrast the authorized representative with those excluded from or inappropriate to the office of preaching, such as heretics, laymen, women, and immoral preachers. References to such denigrated categories of persons can help us to understand the importance of the preacher’s persona and the vulnerability of an authorization that had to depend upon it.
In the practice of preaching, the bodily effacement implied in Chaucer’s textual portrait of the Parson was simply impossible: preaching is a physical performance, and thus the problems raised by the preacher’s body had to be addressed. Medieval discussions of the complex concept of persona demonstrate the doubleness inherent in the very activity of preaching, a doubleness that was both essential and potentially devastating to the preacher’s activity and role. In their yearning for holy simplicity, for an idealized congruence between the preacher’s words and his deeds, his message and his persona, the preaching theorists inadvertently highlighted the preacher’s hybridity and his inevitable participation in a world of partialness, appearances, and duplicity.23
Persona and Authority
The primary meaning of persona according to J. F. Niermeyer’s Lexicon is “individual, human being,” and this seems to be the sense underlying the varied uses of the term in the artes praedicandi.24 The importance both of particularity and of the power and frailty of humanness arises again and again in discussions of the preacher’s persona. However, the first definition given by Charles du Cange, “dignitas,” is more in line with meanings noted later in Niermeyer, such as “competence, qualification,” “someone of a certain standing,” “official,” and even “parson.”25 The connotations of status and authority suggest that the term persona could encompass the possibly conflicting demands of the individual and of his office. Preaching manuals draw on this range of meanings, but their use of the term relates it especially to the human side of the preacher’s activity: his interaction with an audience, his status, his body, his actions in the world.
An address to priests by the late twelfth-century bishop and preacher Maurice of Sully begins to illustrate in a practical way the divisions inherent in the concept of persona. Maurice says that the priest’s three main responsibilities are a holy life, knowledge, and preaching.26 He goes on to note that “holy life” means that the priest must cleanse himself “from all bodily and spiritual uncleanness” (de tote l’ordure de son cors e de s’ame) by which “his soul might appear ugly and ill-kempt before God, and his person before the world” (s’ame puet estre malmise e enlaidie devant Deu e sa persone devant le siecle).27 The two pairings here are “body and soul” and “person and soul,” an imperfect repetition that reflects the multiple meanings of persona. “Person” is, first of all, set off against the “soul” that only God sees, and it is imagined as that which the priest, as a prerequisite for preaching, presents to the world. Maurice implies that the two kinds of uncleanness (of soul and body) and the two kinds of presentation (to God and the people) are equivalent, but this of course elides the imperfection of human perception as compared to that of God. God will know how true the preacher’s presentation is, but a human audience may not. A key characteristic of persona, then, is that it refers to the preacher’s activities and appearance in the world, to external, human communication rather than the preacher’s internal connection with God. The pairing of person and soul also suggests, without insisting on it, that the preacher’s external presentation to his human audience will reflect his relationship to God, that internal and external purity are linked. However, persona is not only divided from soul and thus put squarely into the arena of human interaction, but is also shown to include both the priest’s physical body and his self-presentation. The parallel pairings “soul and body” and “soul and person” suggest that body and persona are intimately linked and that, in Maurice’s view, the body [cors] can impair the effectiveness of the preacher’s self-presentation, make his person [persone] “ugly” before the people and thus, presumably, detract from his message. The preacher’s persona is intimately connected to but not entirely synonymous with his body.
For Maurice, it seems, the emphasis falls on the preacher’s appearance before his two audiences, God and people, and persona is imagined as prior to preaching, as part of the basis for the activity. It is also, however, subject to contamination by the preacher’s sinful body. Writing for a group whose mission to preach was not in question, parish priests, Maurice focuses his attention on the preacher’s moral qualities as the basis for his authority, reflecting to some extent the older ideal of personal dignity rather than the new attention to office.
A different emphasis appears in the work of Humbert of Romans. While Humbert, like Maurice, saw persona as related to both body and status, and as a basis for the practical exercise of the preacher’s office before a human audience, his De eruditione praedicatorum is more attentive to questions of authorization and legitimacy. It is not surprising that Humbert, as an ecclesiastical official and a member of an order of wandering preachers, shows a strong concern both with maintaining the boundaries of official authorization (boundaries that had at times been drawn against the mendicants) and with a preacher’s ability to establish authority before an audience.28 Taken together, the categories he discusses under the heading “De persona praedicatoris” demonstrate the potential capaciousness of this concept and its suspension between ideas of the physical and the social. Humbert says that, “regarding the person [of the preacher], it should be noted” that he should be of the male sex, not evidently deformed, physically strong, of appropriate age (i.e., not too young); that he should have “some prerogative over others”; and finally that he should not be a “contemptible person,” by which, Humbert clarifies, he means someone of vicious life.29 The preacher’s person, for Humbert, must both represent and uphold his preeminence over those he addresses.
The “his” in that sentence is no accident, since Humbert’s first category entirely excludes women from the