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The Golden Chains of Citation
Quomodo vero praedicabunt nisi mittantur?
[And how shall they preach unless they are sent?]
Rom. 10:15
IN HIS DIALOGUES, GREGORY THE GREAT recounts at one point the story of a holy abbot, Equitius, and his preaching career. Like some later preachers, Equitius ran into difficulties over his right to proclaim the Word of God. Gregory tells Peter,
A certain man called Felix … since he observed that this venerable man Equitius was not in holy orders, and that he went around to various places preaching zealously, addressed him one day with the daring of familiarity, saying, “How do you, who are not in holy orders, and have not received license to preach from the bishop of Rome under whom you live, presume to preach?” Compelled by this inquiry of his, the holy man revealed how he received the license to preach, saying, “I have myself considered these same things that you say to me. But one night a beautiful youth appeared to me in a vision, and placed on my tongue a physician’s tool, a lancet, saying, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth; go forth and preach.’ And from that day, even if I wished to, I have not been able to keep silent about God.”1
The holy man was fortunate to live in a time when, although his license to preach might be questioned, his unsupported assertion of immediate authorization from God was still likely to be accepted. Writing some eight centuries later, around 1320, Robert of Basevorn expressed what was by then a well-established distrust of such visionary justifications. His Forma praedicandi holds, “It is not sufficient for someone to say that he is sent by God, unless he manifestly demonstrates it, for heretics often make this claim.”2 By Robert’s time it was not just the occasional holy freelancer who was in question, but whole crowds of new claimants to a preaching mission, and an individual’s assertion of his or her right to preach had become not just the subject of occasional (and, Gregory implies, impudent) inquiry but the catalyst for intensive scrutiny of preaching itself.
As the example of Equitius suggests, one difficulty for late medieval theorists was the acknowledged existence of sacred precedents for inspired preaching. The need to manage the conflicting authorities that gave rise to such precedents instigated a large-scale effort to codify and clarify church law in the twelfth century and “free the church from its chains to the undifferentiated holy past.”3 The desire to “differentiate,” to create human jurisdictions that would check the proliferation of unlicensed speakers, is part of what motivates the discussions of the nature and ownership of preaching in the later Middle Ages.4 In freeing the church from its chains, the theorists in effect created a new, singular chain of authorities that excluded certain older models in order to solidify the contemporary assignment of ecclesiastical power.5
This chapter explores how changes in the conception of preachers’ authority clustered around the problem of citation, of both authoritative words and authoritative individuals, as theorists wrestled with a central question: “How shall they preach unless they are sent?” The variety of answers over time points to important developments in the understanding of the office of preacher in the later Middle Ages. The preacher established his claims by re-presenting earlier models and above all the absent exemplar, Christ. This representation was simultaneously the heart of his office and its point of greatest vulnerability because the same absence that required the preacher’s activity meant that it was exceptionally difficult to guarantee that activity or to exclude unlicensed practitioners from it. The potential for women and laymen to claim immediate authorization or sacred precedent increased the need for a scaffolding of theory and citation to support the claims of licensed, male preachers, a need that fueled the work of definition and distinction described above. If we look at the claims made for preachers who were “sent” in juxtaposition with the claims of those who were not, particularly women, the fragility of the licensed preachers’ exclusive ownership of public religious speech becomes increasingly apparent.
Medieval theorists’ troubled attempts to regulate preachers’ representations can be illuminated not only by what they say about unlicensed speakers, but also by recourse to theories of performative speech and in particular by the modern chain of citation that links Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and J. L. Austin. The points of contact between these modern auctoritates—the points where Butler draws on Derrida, which in turn mark Derrida’s productive disagreements with Austin—are, strikingly, also matters crucial to the medieval debate: the “iterability” or “citationality” of speech, the concept of ordinary versus extraordinary speech-acts, and the problem posed, for both Austin and the preaching theorists, by the “peculiarly hollow and void” speech of acting. All three issues ultimately lead to concerns over the ownership and origination of speech that plagued medieval theorists as they tried to work through the simultaneous presence and absence of Christ that made preachers’ authority so complicated.
Defining Citations
The idea that preaching is “citational” is hardly shocking; in itself it posed no threat to the preacher’s authority to acknowledge that his speech borrowed explicitly from an authoritative text, and that his activity was always a half-explicit citation of the activity and authority of the preachers who went before him. Silvana Vecchio has observed that for medieval Dominicans, “an ideal thread links the holy founder [Dominic] to the very figure of Christ” and that indeed “the chain of authorities can be even longer and run through the stages of a possible history of edification: Moses, the prophets, Christ, Gregory, Bede, Augustine, Jacques de Vitry, St. Dominic”; the Dominicans saw themselves as “the inheritors and continuers of this long tradition.”6 Her point is echoed repeatedly in medieval discussions; one of the three things Humbert of Romans, master-general of the Dominicans from 1254 to 1263, regarded as “especially powerful” in preaching was “the consideration of the methods of other preachers.”7 Robert of Basevorn takes up this suggestion, describing the methods of the persons he considers the five greatest preachers of Christian tradition: Christ, Paul, Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard. He notes, however, that Christ “included all praiseworthy methods of preaching in his own method"; as the “fount and origin of good,” Christ is the source and context of all good preaching.8
At the same time the potential for citation by unlicensed speakers created considerable anxiety about maintaining the purity of this chain of authorities. Canon law decretals and scholastic disputations drew on and reinforced a textual and institutional tradition that was consistently opposed to unauthorized preaching, and they brought together potentially conflicting authorities to give that tradition a single voice.9 The repeated attempts to define preaching in the twelfth century and onward were part of a “general movement to codify knowledge”; texts such as the great summas of the thirteenth century built on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and its commentaries to create definitive solutions to all kinds of theological problems.10 While scholastic disputation, by its very nature, required the admission of varying points of view, and while the answer provided might be quite nuanced and was even capable of leaving some room for doubt, the goal of the exercise was to resolve issues, and this was how its solutions tended to be used in later borrowings.11 In preaching manuals, for instance, pronouncements against women preachers that derived from quodlibets and the decretals took on an absolute quality: contexts and caveats were stripped away, leaving a new and incontrovertible declaration that subsumed all earlier authoritative discourse on the subject. Throughout the period the chain of citations that excluded unlicensed preachers was imaginatively reinforced and legalistically solidified, strengthening the official position of authorized preachers and making it ever more inaccessible to outsiders.
If we examine the process by which preaching worked out its own boundaries, however, the definitional solidity claimed for the activity comes to seem somewhat illusory. Definition always involves interpretation; it can be as much a polemical tool as an objective description, as Beverly Kienzle and Pamela Walker observe with regard to women’s preaching: “The name