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Mass Communication 21
after Epiphany (mostly sermons on the text Nuptiae factae sunt,
John 2: 1) that would be the principal vehicle for marriage preaching
in future centuries. Marriage is good. Christ’s presence at a
wedding refutes heretics who condemn marriage. (He mentions
Tatian and Marcion: later preachers would have the Cathars in
mind.) Genesis proves that God created man male and female,
and said that for the love of her husband a woman should leave
father and mother and be one flesh with her husband. In Matthew
Christ told the apostles that a husband must not leave his wife.
Teachings of St Paul take their turn: husband and wife must pay
the marriage ‘debt’ (make love at the other’s request). Husbands
should love their wives as Christ loved his Church. In fact Haymo
makes a good florilegium of biblical texts which are positive about
marriage—ordinary human marriage. Then he goes on to the marriage
of Christ and the Church, again presented through scriptural
authorities. This combination of literal and spiritual (i.e. symbolic)
marriage within the same framework is characteristic of the later
‘Marriage feast of Cana’ genre of sermons on the second Sunday
after Epiphany. (From here on this genre will also be called the
Nuptiae factae sunt genre, the Latin for the first words of the reading
‘There was a marriage . . .’.) The question remains, did this
kind of marriage symbolism get through to the laity via popular
preaching in the early Middle Ages? It is a hard question to answer.
That will be apparent from the oscillations in the presentation of
the data below. On balance, however, and in the current state of the
evidence, it looks as though marriage symbolism in sermons could
not have had a major impact on the laity before the thirteenth century.
The debate about early medieval popular preaching
It is much disputed whether popular preaching happened at all
in this period (defined roughly as from the late sixth to the late
twelfth century). A relatively recent article argues for a minimalist
position: hardly any preaching. That rather extreme position
seems hard to maintain in the light of work by Thomas Amos,
who seems to have shown that there was a good deal of popu-
bolism and Medieval Religious Thought’, in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson (eds.), The
Medieval World (London etc., 2003), 267–78 at 268–9.
R. E. McLaughlin, ‘The Word Eclipsed: Preaching in the Early Middle Ages’,
Traditio, 46 (1991), 77–122.