Untitled

Mass Communication 37
tably few from the twelfth century. The homily on the marriage
feast of Cana Gospel reading by Bruno of Segni (d. 1123) does
not contain a great deal of marriage symbolism, but concentrates
mainly on the symbolism of the water jars that figure in the Cana
reading.
To recapitulate: in the early medieval centuries and up until
c.1200, there was no mass communication of marriage symbolism,
or at least, no significant evidence of anything like that has come to
light so far. With the thirteenth century everything changes, even
before mendicant preachers made their mark.
(c) Mass Communication in the Age of the Friars
Model sermons and oral preaching
Any given model sermon could be preached ‘live’ again and again
to di·erent audiences, so that the model sermons written on parchment
are the tip of an ‘oral’ iceberg: this is one half of the proposition
that preaching was a form of mass communication, the less controversial
half. The more controversial half is that surviving sermon
manuscripts are the tip of an iceberg of lost codices and quires.
This chapter is in a sense a remote sequel to a 1985 study which
tried among other things to show how model sermons worked.
Synthesizing and reinforcing a scholarly consensus, it argued that
The audience and ‘setting in life’ of Bruno’s homilies have been cautiously
characterized by his historian: ‘Les morceaux qui ne se trouvent pas dans les commentaires
sont de la main de Bruno, semble-t-il. Cet ensemble o·re donc un certain
int‹er^et: il prouve qu’un commentaire ex‹eg‹etique ‹etait jug‹e apte›a une utilisation
pastorale, bien qu’il soit tr›es probable que cet hom‹eliaire de Bruno n’‹etait pas destin‹e
›a une c‹el‹ebration liturgique, mais plut^ot ›a une lecture publique ou priv‹ee’ (R.
Gr‹egoire, Bruno de Segni, ex‹eg›ete m‹edi‹evale et th‹eologien monastique (Centro Italiano
di Studi sull’alto medioevo, 3; Spoleto, 1965), 87; and de Reu, La Parole, 228).
‘S. Brunonis Episcopi Signiensis Homilia xviii, Dominica II post Epiphaniam’,
in Migne, PL 165. 767 and 461–6.
D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Di·used from Paris before
1300 (Oxford, 1985), chs. 2 and 3, and passim.
A particularly important influence on the field in general was L.-J. Bataillon,
‘Approaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 11
(1980), 19–35, repr. in id., La Pr‹edication au XIIIe si›ecle en France et Italie: ‹etudes et
documents (Aldershot, 1993), no. i (most of the other articles in the same collection
of reprints are relevant in one way or another). See now N. B‹eriou, ‘Les sermons
latins apr›es 1200’, in B. M. Kienzle (ed.), The Sermon (Typologie des sources du
Moyen ^Age Occidental, 81–3; Turnhout, 2000), 363–447, esp. 405–9. The same
author’s magisterial L’Av›enement des ma^§tres de la Parole: la pr‹edication ›a Paris au
XIIIe si›ecle (2 vols.; Collection des ‹Etudes Augustiniennes, S‹erie Moyen ^Age et