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62 Chapter 1
soul. Some of the credit goes to the quotations he chooses, but
no source is cited for the following passage: ‘In good consent he
comes: not as a lord imposing labour, not as a judge striking fear,
not as a master correcting error, not as a doctor drastically curing
a disease, but as a bridegroom arousing love.’ This passage too
may be a quotation, of course—Guibert was derivative. In this
‘model sermon’ genre it was unimportant: ecacy mattered more
than originality.
Even from the surviving Latin models one can guess that some
developments of the ‘marriage to the soul’ image could have stimulated
mental images in listeners. Pierre de Reims develops a
comparison between a soul who is betrothed to but then betrays
Christ and a poor girl betrothed to the son of a king but who
is unfaithful to him and loses everything. As he works through
the analogy, he evokes the social condition of a peasant girl. For
example: ‘if she were free and responsible for herself, after all this
she might still be able to get a living for herself from somewhere or
other; but it is not so, because she has fallen into a great bondage.’
This would be a much stronger image for listeners familiar with
the stigma of servile status in thirteenth-century France than it is
for a modern reader, unless the historian can reconstruct some of
the lost connotations.
The imagery can be very simple. Jean Halgrin talks about the
soul who, forgetful of her engagement ring, does not keep the
faith of marriage, when women as a rule keep their engagement
ring thoughout their life. An image like this would not need
to be developed: the listeners would provide their own supplementary
images. A much fuller image which could have triggered
associations precisely because it was analysed in greater depth
was that of the ideal husband, represented by G‹erard de Mailly
in the corpus analysed here and in fact quite a widespread
e.g. ibid., para. 17/7/ (the motif of the beautiful captive also used by Pierre de
Reims, paras. 19–20); and para. 18, a passage from St John Chrysostom which is
rather fine.
Ibid., para. 14.
Cf. D. L. d’Avray and M. Tausche, ‘Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections
of the Central Middle Ages’, in N. B‹eriou and D. L. d’Avray, with P. Cole, J.
Riley-Smith, and M. Tausche, Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays
on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto etc., 1994), 77–134 at 94.
D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Reims, para. 13/1/.
As I tried to do in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 61–2.
Jean Halgrin, Document 1. 9. 8.