Later instances of the Parson’s speech reinforce the hints of his individual character in the General Prologue. The epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale depicts the Parson’s objection to Harry Bailly’s swearing, which draws Harry’s jocular claim to “smelle a Lollere in the wynd.”100 The Parson’s rebuke—itself slightly jocular, reproving without being harsh, as the General Prologue had promised—increases our sense of him as an individual, and Harry’s mock-accusation points to the specificity of the Parson’s response, the way it makes him a potential participant in a recognizable political and religious debate.101 The Parson may or may not have heretical secrets, but Harry’s ability to imagine such a thing, based on the Parson’s conversation, is enough to remove the latter from his abstract portrait frame and put him into a world of human interactions. Both Harry and the modern critics who try to break down the Parson’s appearance of perfection could be accused of misreading, but in fact their suspicions are an entirely foreseeable response to the presentation of an idealized performer. By making that performer’s humanness clear through his individual voice, Chaucer makes it inevitable that such questions will be asked about the Parson, whatever their answers may be.
The Parson’s involvement in, and awareness of, a human context can also be seen in his self-presentation in the prologue to his tale. Usually it is his strictures against exempla and alliteration, his rejection of embodied forms, that draw attention here. Less noticed is his initial address to the pilgrims, which demonstrates a sensitivity to his audience:
Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest,
Whan I may sowen whete, if that me lest?
For which I seye, if that yow list to heere
Moralitee and vertuous mateere,
And thanne that ye wol yeve me audience,
I wol ful fayn, at Cristes reverence,
Do yow plesaunce leefful, as I kan.102
He begins with an image that personalizes a biblical injunction, the rhetorical question and first-person form making it almost conversational.103 The last five lines of this passage alternate between concern for the audience and concern for the text. The first and third lines address the audience’s willingness to hear; the second and fourth offer what the speaker can provide (virtuous doctrine, a good will, and reverence for Christ). The final line combines these areas into “plesaunce leefful,” the linking of what will please the audience with what will benefit them. The address as a whole is nothing other than a captatio benevolentiae, an astute rhetorical move that shows that the Parson is well aware of his need, as Alan of Lille put it, to “capture the good will of his audience by his own person through humility, and by the usefulness of the material he presents.”104 Without questioning the “truth” of his performance of virtue, we may acknowledge that it is inevitably a performance. By creating the Parson as an embodied character, however sketchily, and by giving him a voice of his own, Chaucer shows that though he makes very different choices, he is involved in and aware of the same network of audience and performance that the Pardoner manipulates so skillfully.
What Chaucer’s preachers seem at first to present, then, is a study in holy simplicity versus unholy duplicity, a black-and-white dichotomy, and on a certain abstract level it remains true that the Pardoner represents an immoral preacher, the Parson a virtuous one. The context of preaching theory suggests further possibilities: not just the holy duplicity that Chaucer’s General Prologue portrait of the Parson so insistently foregrounds, but unholy simplicity—the Pardoner’s single-minded pursuit of gain, so single that he seems at times to consist only of that quality.105 Ultimately, however, this opposition also proves too simple; the juxtaposition and the embodiment of polarized abstractions, and the frame in which they are set, help to show why such dichotomies are unsustainable. In giving his characters voices of their own, Chaucer disallows our reliance on the voice of the all-knowing creator, on any immediate or transparent access to the truth about any other person, however fictional. Like a preacher’s audience, Chaucer’s readers may speculate about the speaker’s soul, but all we really see is his person, the individual whose specificity and solidity make any claim to transparency—to perfect holiness or perfect unholiness—suspect. No preacher, however virtuous, is an empty vessel through which God speaks, but to understand the beneficial as well as the destructive implications of that fact we need the Pardoner as much as we need the Parson. It is not just that the ideal that the Parson represents can only be perceived, but indeed that it can only exist alongside and interdependent with the counterideal of his troubling, but not simply unholy, colleague.106 And together they have drawn critical responses that show how we, as readers, still struggle with the problems that face any audience attempting to assess the two-faced truth of public performance.
The traditions of preaching theory that Chaucer drew on in creating his Parson and Pardoner acknowledged and attempted to come to terms with the divisive physicality of preaching, an activity in which the human body that marks the gap between heaven and earth must also become the means of bridging that gap. Persona, imagined as the guarantor of the preacher’s authorized status and his connection to God, turns out to be a performance—a performance always capable, as in the Pardoner’s case, of spectacular falsity or, more worryingly, of a deception unperceived by the audience. As a result the doubleness of persona and the necessary duplicity of the preacher have the capacity to undermine not only a particular act of preaching or a particular preacher, but the very office. In the face of tensions between visionary and institutional authority, between charismatic body and charismatic text, preaching theorists tried to hold the competing forces together in ways that required them to explore, explicate, and attempt to control the power of the preacher’s persona. Their discussions, the best available record of the pressures felt by medieval preachers, give us a certain, admittedly oblique access to the experience of constructing oneself as a person worthy to inhabit “an office more angelic than human.”107
3
A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular
Experiencia docet …
[Experience teaches …]
Proverbial
ALONGSIDE QUESTIONS OF OFFICIAL authorization and self-presentation medieval preachers, like modern ones, had to consider the purely practical aspects of how to get their message across to audiences. Fundamental among these was, of course, the question of language. Unlike modern scholars, medieval preachers seem to have had little interest in the relationship between Latin and vernacular language—or at least little direct record of their musings on this topic has survived.1 It is thus difficult to know, in most cases, in what language they would have preached, though recent scholarship has suggested that the long-standing notion that Latin sermons were always preached to the clergy and vernacular sermons to the laity, with little or no overlap, may be too simple.2 Medieval preachers’ attention, however, seems to have focused far more on their access to their audiences, an issue that in a larger sense addresses precisely the question of the place of the vernacular in preaching.
The great revival of formal interest in preaching took place before the major debates in England about the vernacular and its appropriate place in religious culture broke out in force, and in general preaching handbooks do not emphasize the question of language.3 Nevertheless, attentiveness to preachers’ discussions of their own language can illustrate how shifting and uncertain the supposed divide between Latin and vernacular really was. Preaching manuals, particularly those