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22 Chapter 1
lar preaching. (He concentrates on the Carolingian period, but
casts an eye back to earlier preaching.) His doctoral thesis on early
medieval preaching unfortunately remains unpublished, but some
of the findings have appeared in print as articles. He has identified
‘over nine hundred sermons written or adapted by Carolingian
authors as sources of popular preaching in the period
750–950’. One collection has been properly edited in a modern
edition: I shall refer to this by the name of its editor, Mercier.
Three more are in Migne’s Patrologia Latina and easy to consult.
Other popular Carolingian homiliaries have been studied in
articles by three specialists whose work has changed our understanding
of homiliaries: Barr‹e, Bouhot, and ‹Etaix. Yet another
article argues that the homilies on the Gospels of Gregory the
Great were widely used for popular preaching in the early Middle
Ages.
Marriage symbolism in early medieval popular preaching: a
significant absence
This is not sucient to show that marriage symbolism reached the
people via the pulpit. We still need to ask how regularly marriage
symbolism appeared in these sermons, and how many ordinary
priests actually used the sermons Amos has studied. Even assuming
that a non-trivial number of priests had reasonable Latin and
a homiliary of the right level for their needs, a problem to which
we must return, how much about marriage and marriage symbolism
would it contain? My provisional verdict is that there was
relatively little preaching about marriage symbolism in the Carolingian
period. This is based mainly on a search for sermons on
the Gospel reading of the marriage feast of Cana, which would
‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Michigan State University, 1983). I have used this important thesis extensively:
it led me to most of those sermons/homiliaries discussed below which Amos
does not discuss in print.
T. L. Amos, ‘Preaching and the Sermon in the Carolingian World’, in T. L.
Amos, E. A. Green, and B. M. Kienzle (eds.), De ore Domini: Preacher and Word in
the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 1989), 41–60 at 47.
XIV hom‹elies du IXe si›ecle de l’Italie du Nord, ed. P. Mercier (Sources chr‹etiennes,
161; Paris, 1970).
Amos, ‘Preaching and the Sermon in the Carolingian World’, 57 n. 31, for
bibliography.
P. A. DeLeeuw, ‘Gregory the Great’s “Homilies on the Gospels” in the Early
Middle Ages’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 26 (1985), 855–69.