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36 Chapter 1
It is worth listing the possibilities in ascending order of improbability.
That some Latin sermons written for popular preaching
were actually preached from monasteries or pre-parish pastoral
centres is almost certain. That such texts were available in most
pre-parish centres is much less certain. That there was a critical
mass of Latin educated priests in most pre-parish centres is about
equally unlikely, though not impossible. That most pre-parish pastoral
centres had both a critical mass of Latin educated priests and
model popular sermons in Latin for them to use is less likely still.
That they prepared sermons from these Latin texts every Sunday
and took them out to the surrounding villages is even less likely, and
we may note that the Sunday on which the marriage feast of Cana
reading occurred was not a major feast. Add to this accumulation
of improbabilities the earlier finding, that little of the surviving
corpus of popular early medieval sermons is about marriage symbolism,
and the probability of such symbolism being preached to
large numbers of laypeople in the early medieval centuries looks
remote.
‘Maximalists’ about pastoral care and preaching in the early
Middle Ages should not regard this as an attack on their position.
The point at issue is the impact of one particular theme, marriage
symbolism. It may very well be that many quasi-monastic centres
reached out to large areas of the countryside surrounding them,
and evangelized energetically.
The England of ªlfric apart, however, it is far from clear that
there was much marriage preaching accessible to laypeople until the
end of the twefth century. That century is a great age of preaching,
but it was predominantly directed towards clerics, notably monks
and canons. No doubt a careful search for popular sermons such
as Amos conducted for the Carolingian era would yield a significant
number of Latin texts designed to serve as models for popular
preaching. Whether many of them would contain a lot of marriage
symbolism is much more doubtful. The natural place to look for
such symbolism is preaching on the text ‘There was a marriage in
Cana of Galilee’: Nuptiae factae sunt in Chana Galileae. Migne’s
Patrologia Latina contains relatively few sermons on this text, no-
In a personal communication John Blair has raised the possibility of lively
‘charismatic’ vernacular preaching, not too much tied to Latin sources, in pre-Viking
England.
M. de Reu, La Parole du Seigneur: moines et chanoines m‹edi‹evaux pr^echant
l’Ascension et le Royaume des Cieux (Brussels etc., 1996), 228–9.