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40 Chapter 1
the listeners were unlikely to care about intellectual property.
However, it would be natural for a preacher to think twice about
using for (say) fellow Franciscans a sermon which members of his
audience might have in a book of their own. Grosso modo, one
may assume that the content of model sermons tells us about the
content of preaching to the laity. We cannot tell which sentences
of any given model sermon were used on any given occasion, but
we can be fairly sure that themes and structures of thought which
recur again and again in model sermons reached large numbers
of laypeople at some time or another. Similarly, we cannot know
what any one lay listener made of a sermon, but we can make very
educated guesses about aggregate impact, or at least about whether
a given idea was likely to be familiar to large numbers of people.
Lost sermon manuscripts
The present volume is the sequel to a 2001 study seeking among
other things to demonstrate that marriage preaching belonged to a
system of mass communication. The sermons edited there would
have circulated in large numbers of manuscripts now lost (quite
apart from the fact that any written version could be preached
again and again to di·erent audiences). The number of lost manuscripts
would seem to have been unconsciously but grossly underestimated.
There are two connected theses: first, that the loss rate
of manuscripts of this genre at least was a lot higher than most
medievalists tend to suspect; and second, that not only professional
scribes, but also Franciscans and Dominicans, copied sermon
manuscripts to professional standards—so that they were available
to confr›eres and were not just personal books. Thus we have a
fact: that the number of written model sermons was greater than
the large number surviving to an extent that has not been appreciated;
and an explanation of how it was possible to put so many
manuscripts into circulation before the invention of printing.
The evidence is cumulative: recent discoveries about a massive
destruction of ‘useless’ manuscripts to provide pieces of parchment
for binders, whose business was expanding through the ceiling;
the almost total disappearance of books from Franciscan and
Academics in particular could in some circumstances think a great deal about
intellectual property: B. Smalley, EnglishFriarsandAntiquityintheEarlyFourteenth
Century (Oxford, 1960), 308.
D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons.