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226 Documents: 1. 10
nuptiis mundi que fuerunt et sunt et erunt, incomparabiliter excedit
gaudium nuptiale in celis. Apo. 19 (7): ‘Gaudeamus et exultemus et
demus gloriam deo, quia venerunt nuptie agni’. In hiis nuptiis aqua in
vinum con vertitur [fo. 28va] dum presens miseria in eternam iocunditatem
et in eternas delicias commutatur. Ieronimus: ‘Miserie deliciis
et delicie miseriis commutantur. In nostro arbitrio est vel divitem sequi
vel Lazarum’.
1. 11. A sermon on marriage by Servasanto da Faenza
This text provides further illustration of the combination of marriage symbolism
and emphasis on the holiness of marriage on a literal and human
level. Regarding the goodness of human marriage, note the attack on contemporary
dualist heretics, the ‘Patareni’, clearly the Cathars. The Aristotelian
colouring and the formal logic are also a striking feature, untypical
of thirteenth-century sermons generally, though the misnomer ‘scholastic
preaching’ has tended to obscure the general pattern. Servasanto was a
preacher active in Florence in the later thirteenth century. The unusually
sophisticated lay audience there may have had a taste for rather intellectual
sermons (more intellectual, paradoxically, than sermons for university
audiences of the same period at Paris, where there was a genre distinction
between preaching on the one hand and scholastic teaching with ‘quaestiones’,
logic, and philosophy on the other). This Florentine milieu could
have a·ected Servasanto’s perception of a lay congregation’s horizon of
expectation, even though his sermon collection is not just intended for a
Florentine public—it belongs to the genre of model sermon collections,
containing texts meant to be preached by friars and other preachers to
congregations anywhere.
MS Troyes, Biblioth›eque Municipale 1440
Parchment manuscript, ‘In-quarto’, 372 folios, two columns, coloured
initials. The manuscript is probably Italian, because it has the distinctive
Italian superscript ‘r’ abbreviation, which looks like an ‘a’with the
convertitur] concealed by crease but supplied from sense
Jerome, Epistola 48, para. 21 (Migne, PL 22. 511).
Schneyer, Repertorium, v. 378, ‘Servasanctus de Faenza OM’, no. 32. There is
an incunable edition of this (1484), to which Carlo Delcorno and Nicole B‹eriou drew
my attention. I have examined it in the Reuttlingen, shelfmark IB. 10693, ‘sermo
xxxii’, but there is no reason to prefer it to the manuscript used here, which is a
couple of centuries earlier.
See D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Di·used from Paris
before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), 76–7, 155 n. 2, 158.
Description based on Minist›ere de l’‹education nationale, Catalogue g‹en‹eral des
manuscrits des biblioth›eques publiques des d‹epartements (7 vols.; Paris, 1849–85), ii.
Troyes (1855), 603, and on microfilm printout of the sermon.