Nor is experience at issue only in the content of exempla; it also shapes the preacher’s use of them. Jacques de Vitry observes approvingly that some preachers “knew by experience how much benefit the laity and simple people derive from such narrative examples, not only as edification but as relaxation.”28 Jacques’s appeal to “experiencia” is not an uncommon move in preaching manuals, where the phrase “experiencia docet” is frequently invoked, particularly in the context of audience-preacher interaction. The observation of the Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis that “familiarity breeds contempt, as experience teaches” neatly combines received wisdom with the claims of personal knowledge.29 There were certainly plenty of authoritative accounts of how preachers should deal with their flocks, but it appears that in considering the fine points of personal interaction, and the preacher’s need to negotiate his status with an audience rather than assuming it, experience was felt to be an equally important teacher. As Siegfried Wenzel has pointed out, “experience” and “authority” as categories of argument in medieval sermons are not in opposition but rather are mutually reinforcing.30 The authority of experience is not divorced from the world of learning any more than the authority of learning is divorced from the world of experience. The preacher is the medium for both, personifying for his congregation the institutional knowledge and authority that must work through an individual, and through a vernacular.
In addition to the theoretical issues raised by exempla, there was the simple issue of performance. The preacher, unlike most of his congregation, had access to exempla in their “abstracted,” usually Latin, form—that is, as elements of collections without any context.31 It was he who made the transition from the universal to the particular and from Latin to the vernacular. Scanlon notes that the flexibility of exempla as presented in collections, so that they could be used on various occasions, “sets the preacher apart from his audience even as he establishes common ground with them,” since it marks his association with a culture that they can only reach through him.32 But this transition from the general to the specific inevitably involved the preacher in both sides of the equation and demanded his participation in “networks of oral narrativity,” his ability not merely to convey doctrine but to make that doctrine live.33 For an exemplum to be effective, various authors assert, it must be put across well. As Jacques de Vitry says, “proverbs, similitudes and everyday examples [vulgaria exempla] … cannot be expressed in writing as they can by gesture and word and the manner of speaking, nor do they move or rouse the audience in the mouth of one person as they do in the mouth of another.”34 And Humbert, in De habundancia exemplorum, notes that exempla require a style all their own and politely hints that not every preacher is equally good at presenting them: those who “may perhaps not have a pleasing narrative style,” he says, “should not give up a means [of teaching] in which they are gifted for one in which they are not.”35 More than some other forms of instruction, the exemplum was a kind of dead letter until the preacher brought it to life.36 Despite his access to the “abstracted” exemplum, he participated fully and crucially in its transformation into a concrete, embodied form of instruction, and that transformation, if successfully enacted, demonstrated his ability to assimilate to his audience in some way, to speak to them with verisimilitude; like his exempla, he must appear “real.”37
Thus, although the “rupture” that the exemplum represents in a sermon may ultimately serve to reinforce the ideological import of the rest of the sermon, it exacts a price for doing so. By marking a point of “complicity,” as Schmitt puts it, a moment of identification between preacher and audience, the use of exempla implicitly addresses the preacher’s relationship to his authority and raises the question of how, and indeed whether, he is set apart from his audience. The same is true of vernacularity more generally: the preacher’s ability to address his congregation in the “common language” meant not only his ability to speak French, Italian, or English but also his ability to use exempla, proverbs, and other “common speech” to get his message across. To form a connection the preacher had, to a certain extent, to make himself like his audience—or rather, to acknowledge and exploit his existing likeness to them.
Walking the Walk: The Preacher as Common Man
The ambiguous relationship of the preacher’s two allegiances can be seen also in Humbert’s De eruditione, in a section not on formal preaching but on how to make “private conversation” edifying. In the previous chapter “Against preachers who, in familiar conversation, say useless things [vana], as worldly people do,” Humbert has been holding forth on the wickedness of “worldly speech” (linguam mundi).38 It is clear that “worldly” here does not equate with the vernacular. While one of Humbert’s arguments against worldly speech is that if schoolboys who lapse out of Latin into the vernacular are punished, preachers who lapse into useless speech should be still more severely chastised, another notes that just as preachers “should not abandon heavenly language for earthly [linguam caelestem propter linguam mundi], so a Frenchman, wherever he may go, does not easily abandon his own language for another, on account of the nobility of his language and his fatherland.”39 Vernacular speech, then, can be either earthly or heavenly, just as Latin can.40 The schoolboy example, moreover, implies that worldly speech is the “vernacular” of the clergy, who must be trained into the practice of heavenly speech—a perhaps unintentional equation that acknowledges both the preacher’s human fallibility and the constructed, learned quality of his role as preacher.41
Although Humbert criticizes “worldly speech,” he recognizes that it can be useful at times. His chapter on private conversation emphasizes again the need to consider what, when, to whom, and how one speaks, and it admits that “sometimes one should speak holy words, sometimes tell good exempla, and sometimes even use some secular words.”42 Later he clarifies this need, saying that secular words may sometimes be used “for the purpose of a certain conformity” (propter quamdam … conformitatem) with the people addressed.43 If even secular speech is occasionally permitted for good ends, surely the “conformity” with an audience marked by the vernacular—like the “furtive complicity” created by exempla—is one of the preacher’s strengths and ultimately one of the things that in turn promotes the audience’s imitation of him, their adoption of the preacher’s “forma.”44
This is not to deny that a strong distinction remained, and was promoted, between clergy and laity, Latin and vernacular, learned and unlearned in many cases, or that there was a cultural investment in regarding the laity as simple and unlearned by comparison with the clergy. But even when those seemingly opposed categories were used, they could be deployed in ways that demonstrate the complexity of their relationship. We see this in a sermon delivered by Stephen Langton near the beginning of the preaching revival. The sermon takes as its theme “Attendite uobis et uniuerso gregi” (drawing on Acts 20:28) and instructs its clerical audience on the responsibilities of their office.45 Partway through the sermon, after an extended discussion of Cain and Abel that gives a biblical rationale for the preacher’s responsibility to his flock, Langton changes his approach:
Let me also speak in an everyday manner [uulgariter] for those who are more simple [simpliciores]: notice with what great veneration simple and unlearned laypeople [simplices laici et ydiote] prepare for Easter, with what punishments they afflict their bodies, what fasts, prayers, and vigils; they are ornamented as it were with heavenly pearls, so that they might participate in the Lord’s Supper. What Easter is to them, almost any day is to you, and therefore consider carefully by their example what you ought to do, lest what befalls a lying people should befall you.46
While this passage clearly makes a distinction between clergy and laity, Langton’s use of “simpliciores” and “simplices” in the same sentence seems to imagine clerics who are not so far from their flocks and indeed teaches those clerics with the kind of method—appeal to everyday experience—that was often advocated for laypeople. Moreover he encourages the audience to attend to the admirable example of pious preparation offered by the laity, reversing the more usual injunctions to laypeople that they should imitate the clergy. Langton is sensitive to the diversity of his clerical audience throughout, ending his discourse