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58 Chapter 1
library books too were vulnerable to the great book massacre of
c.1500. Each of these innumerable model sermons on parchment
could have been used repeatedly for vernacular ‘live’ preaching
(the ‘multiplier e·ect’). While we cannot even guess at the impact
of an individual sermon on an individual, the cumulative impact
of sermon topoi on the the sermon-going public cannot have been
slight. These considerations entitle us to regard mendicant preaching
as a social force in the same kind of sense as a modern mass
medium. It remains to examine the content of the message where
marriage and marriage symbolism are concerned.
(d) The Message about Marriage
Marriage symbolism
Anyone who skims through the sermons edited and translated in
Medieval Marriage Sermons, or through the complementary corpus
of sermons in the ‘Documents’ section corresponding to this
chapter, will realize that marriage symbolism is prominent and
perhaps usually predominant. (The following analyses will be
based on these two dossiers, but one could carry out a similar exercise
with late medieval sermons.) As a symbol, marriage is as
a rule overwhelmingly positive in preaching, but it can stand for
an intense commitment of any kind, including commitment to sin
or the Devil. The sinful soul is ‘the daughter and bride of the
Devil’. The three stages that lead up to the finalization of a
marriage—initiation (engagement), ratification (present consent),
and consummation—stages which we shall meet again and again
and which are normally full of positive significance, can stand for
the three stages that finalize a sin. Thought or pleasure is initiation,
consent is ratification, deed is consummation.
A detail of language should be noted. Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t
The sermons did not have to take the approach they did, for they normally
start from the Gospel reading about the marriage feast of Cana, and instead of
exalting marriage on the literal and symbolic levels, the path they actually took,
they might have concentrated on an influential apocryphal story according to which
the bridegroom of Cana was St John the Evangelist, who opted for celibacy between
wedding and consummation: see A. Volfing, John the Evangelist and Medieval
German Writing: Imitating the Inimitable (Oxford, 2001), 29–31.
D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 4/2/;
G‹erard de Mailly paras. 3–7; Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 8.
Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 8.
D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 4.