Vernacularity is not the same as popularity, but the Latin term most preachers used to describe the vernacular suggests that in this context the two are not unrelated. The word vernacularis, while not unheard of, appears far less often than the word vulgaris and its offshoots, meaning “common,” “popular,” “of the crowd,” and so forth.4 Thus it is sometimes impossible to tell whether a writer is referring to a story in the vernacular or merely a popular story, a vernacular saying or a common saying. This distinction, or lack thereof, is important because vernacularity in preaching has to do not simply with language but with the preacher’s ability to form a connection with his audience, to gain access to their hearts and minds. Access is often discussed in terms of exclusion—the need for access implies a prior separation. In preaching, however, access is more a matter of an effective approach, of addressing a given audience in terms appropriate to their situation. Like many of the sermons they left behind, most preachers must have been linguistic and cultural hybrids.5 Thinking about vernacularity as access helps us to understand how preachers fashioned themselves as representatives of clerical culture who maintained their links to the vernacular culture that surrounded them and that was their first linguistic home.
Talking the Talk: The Preacher’s Bridge
The kind of preaching that we think of as vernacular preaching, preaching to “the people” or the laity, was associated throughout most of Christian history with the lower clergy, as Michel Zink has noted, because it was the lower clergy—below the bishop, that is—who were able to communicate with their flocks in the native, “common” language of the region.6 It was perhaps a lack of sufficiently prepared lower clergy that led to a growing perception, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that the clerical hierarchy was not fulfilling its preaching duties; instead independent, charismatic preachers—some more orthodox than others—sprang up to fill the gap.
The situation of the Milanese Patarenes, discussed at length by Brian Stock, demonstrates the power of such popular preachers. In an account of the Patarene Landulf Cotta’s preaching, the conservative chronicler Arnulf maintains that it was “deliberately ‘arranged’ for the persuasion of the unsophisticated (concionatur in populo).” His description shows a charismatic preacher at work, using the tropes of inadequacy and unlearnedness, youth, inexperience, and so forth—claims that diminish the distance between preacher and audience. As Stock puts it, Landulf “reaches out to the people on their own level, making himself a bridge between the lettered and the unlettered”; he is described as using a kind of call-and response format and asking the audience to cross themselves: “Both oral and gestural, this revivalist give and take between preacher and audience, which the reduction of the text to Latin undoubtedly tended to suppress, has the effect of welding the two into a single unit.” Landulf uses what Stock calls “street language.… Although he is not one of the people, he speaks to them as if he were”; this identificatory move, achieved through the preacher’s self-presentation and his choice of the “common” language, is apparently essential to his success. As Arnulf sees it, Landulf and Ariald were quick to “pander … to the people’s tastes (vulgi mos),” but it was this very kind of aristocratic, antipopulist disdain that put the institutional church at such a disadvantage in the period before the preaching revival.7 In such a situation the only hope lay in the work of outstanding preachers of orthodox inclination, and records of preaching for the twelfth century present men such as Bernard of Clairvaux or Robert of Arbrissel, whose charismatic gifts were so great that it was said they could preach in an unknown language and still move their audiences. It was also noted of Bernard, in one of his vitae, that he was “lettered among the learned, simple among the simple”—in other words, that he was able to adapt to his audience and the “vulgi mos” in a way that made him a gifted preacher among all kinds of listeners.8
Bernard, Robert, and their ilk are exceptional cases; not everyone who preaches to the people is a popular preacher. Faced with the need for more and better ordinary preaching, the church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries pulled itself together and began trying to train people, using in effect the kinds of methods so intelligently exploited by heterodox preachers such as Landulf Cotta. What had come naturally, or gracefully, to a Bernard or a Robert was something that had to be learned by the preachers of the thirteenth century, who needed to be trained both in Latinity (immersion in the scriptural founts of their vocation and understanding of their institutional position) and in vernacularity (the techniques that would enable them to use their knowledge for the benefit of all kinds of audiences). In learning to balance Latin and the vernacular, preachers were in effect learning to establish their own role in a community, and vernacularity was as important in this endeavor as Latinity.
Preachers’ mediatory role as “translators” of literate, Latin, clerical culture for an unlearned, lay, “vernacular” audience can certainly be seen as one that denied the laity full or independent access to Scripture and to theological material usually produced in Latin. Opposition to vernacular translation of Scripture was already an issue in this period, and the famous, or infamous, idea that the laity are to be presented with truth in simple form as infants are given milk, because they are not strong enough for solid food, is frequently featured in preaching manuals.9 Considered from the point of view of doctrine, then, the Latin-vernacular relationship in thirteenth-century preaching seems to recapitulate a hierarchy in which the laity—rudes, simplices, illiterati—were always at the bottom, accorded no independent will, power, or ability. Even within the preaching manuals, though, we are given reason to question this strict division of the vernacular and Latin and the strict association of these with laity and clergy, respectively. To understand this problem fully, it is necessary first to develop a more nuanced conception of how preachers thought of their role. The works of Thomas of Chobham and Humbert of Romans, who shared a strong interest in effective preaching but wrote for very different groups of preachers, begin to outline the issues.
Writing primarily for parish priests, Thomas was more concerned with establishing the preacher’s differences from his audience than telling him how to overcome those differences—an emphasis that no doubt reflects the state of the parish clergy, many of whom were probably hardly more educated than those they were supposed to instruct.10 Thomas’s text, which shows a careful attention to the problems of pastoral care, has little to say about the vernacular in any of its forms. His focus in this area is on the preacher’s need to maintain his position—to establish and present an appropriate persona to his congregation and to keep up the distinctions between himself and them. This is a matter of responsibility as much as privilege; the preacher owes his audience a good example and good teaching and must work to provide them. But he should also be conscious of and maintain his authority. Thomas discusses, for example, the dangers of excessive humility toward those one has wronged, which can diminish the preacher’s stature, and he warns against preaching in scruffy clothes or a “habitu laicali.”11 His attitude reflects, it seems, both the popularity of lay and itinerant preaching—in which the preacher’s status was not always markedly distinguished from that of his audience—and the beginning of a trend in parochial priesthood in the thirteenth century whereby the priest became increasingly the representative of a larger, diocesan authority, of the church as a whole rather than simply of his own local jurisdiction.12 In the context Thomas addresses, the priest would have been part of the community to which he preached. He would be known to them—perhaps all too well—and so would not have needed Thomas’s, or anyone’s, instructions on how to approach them. In this instance the preacher needs to be shown how he can establish, maintain, and display his access to the clerical world of learning and authority in order to make his role in the “popular” world, of which he is clearly a part, an effective one.
In the course of the thirteenth century new modes of preaching