Preaching and New Worlds

Sermons as Mirrors of Realms Near and Far

Timothy Johnson, Katherine Shelby, John Young, Timothy J Johnson, Katherine Wrisley Shelby, John D Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351658591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays examines the polyvalent concept of "New Worlds" in the context of medieval and early modern sermon studies. While the terms "Old World" and "New World" are commonplace in studies of Europe and the Americas, this volume explores how preaching in the Atlantic world and beyond creatively engaged audiences in addressing new cultural and religious perspectives regardless of their geographical location and time period. The identification of the "other" in sermons is already an implicit recognition of a novel world, which could be equally enticing and intimidating. The scholars represented in this volume examine a wide panorama of medieval and early modern efforts as they identify how sermons, which often served as a highly effective media of mass communication, reflect shifting identities, sometimes contested and sometimes embraced, within long-standing traditional constructs. Particular themes include apocalypticism, art and mission, cultural interaction, multilingualism, forms of religious life, and theological innovation.

Section 1

New Worlds in this Life and the Next

1 Perceptions of the “Other” in Medieval Preaching

Anthropological-Historical Reflections

Laura Gaffuri

Since the 1980s, medieval historiography has been interfacing with the methodologies implemented by the social sciences in order to study collective identities and relationships between traditions and community building. That is why in the last twenty years, an increasing number of studies have tackled the theme of the perception of the “other” and “otherness” in medieval society, even though, as Pierre Monnet observes,

pour cette sorte particulière d’historien qu’est le médiéviste, la question de l’identité pose un … problème dans la mesure où son champ de recherche a longtemps été caractérisé par la suprématie de l’identité collective et universelle du christianisme … au détriment de l’identité individuelle.¹

Therefore, the expression “other world” has ceased to refer solely to the world of visionaries, to whom Robert Easting dedicated an important study twenty years ago.² Rather, it increasingly has become a plural, used to indicate the world encountered by travelers, missionaries, and preachers: a world that they defined as “other,” “foreign,” “different,”³ but that they nevertheless described. We therefore ask: what kind of impact did this new experience of the world have on medieval religious communication and preaching in its various contexts and uses?

Due to the expansive nature of this topic, my contribution will focus on only a few aspects, as follows: the first part of this chapter will consider some parameters used by current historiography to explore the medieval experience of “otherness,” as well as the topics of “racism” and subjectivity; in the second part, I intend to analyze three sermons by Nicholas of Cusa, the German philosopher and theologian recognized by historiography as one of the most enlightened intellectuals of Renaissance humanism. Active during the first half of the fifteenth century (he was born in 1401 in Cusa, near Trier), he studied and interpreted a highly varied narrative and experiential material regarding “others”: that is, the “externals” of the societas christiana. Above all, Nicholas of Cusa is considered the first to have collected all the materials that had been created during the previous three centuries on the topic of Islam, seeking a dialectic relationship between religions. In this respect, his most significant work is De pace fidei, which he wrote in 1453 immediately after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. With this work, he sought the path to a dialogue between the world’s principal religions (omitting only Buddhism), according to the principle of “one religion in rituum varietate,” a phrase he used often.⁴ It is therefore understandable that academics unanimously grant him a preeminent position in the history of the idea of tolerance.⁵ For this reason, he has also been the subject of some excessively modernizing interpretations. As Cary Nederman observes, this trend started in the 1920s with the interpretation made by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer in his work The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. According to Nederman, today historiography has repositioned the De pace in its context, believing that it “applies the Cusan methods of ‘concordance’ and coincidentia oppositorum to the issue of religious conviction, yielding a decidedly Christian unity of belief in matters of salvation.”⁶ Furthermore, according to both the philosopher Rémi Brague⁷ and the Dutch scholar Pim Valkenberg, the De pace can be considered the expression of a utopian and eschatological idea, closer to a literary genre than to reality. Nicholas, as Valkenberg says, understood religio to be

an identity-in-tension between the one proper religion willed by God as the ultimate destination of humankind, and the diversity of religions willed by God as a way to learn from one another and to reach peace and harmony between religions.⁸

Such wealth of interpretations does not exhaust the depth of his thought. My own contribution, on this occasion, will be to consider Nicholas’ pastoral concerns in order to discern the impact of his ideas, as a philosopher and humanist, on his practice of preaching.

Let us now turn to the first part of my purpose, identifying two parameters used in current historiography with regard to the medieval experience of “otherness.”

Medieval “Otherness”: Between Racism and Subjectivity

We begin with a question: were the Middle Ages racist? I must immediately admit that this question is not my own. It was posed by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, who in 2009 curated the publications of the Tel Aviv conference held in 2005 on the theme “Racism in Western Civilization before 1700.”⁹ Well aware that the phenomenon of racism must be distinct from the other forms of collective discrimination which derive from ethnic, religious, and more generally cultural stereotypes and prejudices, the editors open the volume by wondering if the concept of racism is applicable to Western societies in the Middle Ages, or—as they point out—“by using it, are we not importing a modern concept into a medieval reality which we thus gravely distort?”¹⁰

In the early Middle Ages, classification systems for the population complied with standards of ethnic, religious, or so-called “national” belonging, which were not, however, associated with any distinctive biological characteristics. It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that several significant developments took place, when “the sources reveal the growing importance of the body and its functions as a primary cause of behavior and as a marker of typical groups characteristics.”¹¹ That is to say, a naturalistic approach to diversity made its appearance, an approach the editors call “protoracist.” The twelfth century is regarded as a turning point even by Dominique Iogna-Prat, who describes significant changes in the era’s historical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. In his study of the principles of order and exclusion in twelfth-century Cluniac culture, Iogna-Prat notes the first examples of racial characteristics for all those who were denied membership of the human race, because they did not belong to the only society possible, that is to say the Christian one. Exclusion from the Christian community came to signify much more than a “social death.”¹² For the Jews, as Iogna-Prat observes, this was the first stage of the transition from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism, since their exclusion indicated a different species, or race¹³ (even though the term “race” only appears in the sources at the end of the fifteenth century).¹⁴

A significant marker of this transformation was a fourteenth-century Parisian quodlibet studied by Peter Biller. The text defines Jews as not secundum theologiam but secundum naturam,¹⁵ therefore binding together the religious, physical, psychological, and social characteristics of one part of the population. Hence, the medical approach was built on the philosophical and the theological, giving new strength to ancient tradition. As Biller also argued, “Such texts not only diffused ancient ideas, they also added new emphases such as the naturalness of whiteness, the hot black woman, and the scientific account of Jewish characteristic (the dominance in their bodies of melancholic humour).”¹⁶ Of course, the “ancient ideas” to which Biller alludes are those from Greek philosophy (Aristotle and Hippocrates in particular), reworked in the light of the new paradigm of medieval culture, which therefore “played a crucial role in the revival of proto-racist ideas and concepts in the pre-modern world.”¹⁷ Many of these ideas, as Robert Bartlett explains,¹⁸ found effective channels of diffusion in the iconography, which documented “an increasingly racist depiction of ethnic differences,”¹⁹ and in exempla collections which instilled many of these stereotypes into several forms of religious communication.

The outcome of this process was the fifteenth century “genealogical turn,” the attribution of special moral gifts or the lack thereof to the bloodline. As David Nirenberg observes, while in France moral gifts principally affected aristocracy, in Spain, the lack of such gifts concerned in particular Jews and Muslims (even after conversion), whose blood was considered inferior to Christian blood.²⁰ In England, according to David B. Leshock, “the Hereford mappamundi and The Book of John Mandeville attest to the inability to limit the idea of geographic identity to mere geography. Those who do not meet further requirements could be defined as foreigners in their homeland.”²¹ An increasing intolerance is one of the features of the transition from the Middle Ages to the early Modern. According to Albrecht Classen, intolerance is the “birthmark of the early modern age, whereas in the Middle Ages the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ was still a matter of complex and open-ended negotiations.”²²

In the meantime, Europeans found themselves in ever more frequent contact with new populations and cultures. The thirteenth century was not only the century of the crusades (indeed, five of them, from the fourth to the ninth); it was also the century of journeys of discovery and conversion missions carried out amongst the Arabs and in the East (especially during the papacy of Innocent IV). The principal protagonists are well known (especially with regard both to the Franciscan friars John of Pian de Carpine, William of Rubruck, Benedict the Pole, John of Montecorvino, Odoric of Pordenone, and to the Dominican friars Andrée de Longjumeau and Riccoldo da Montecroce). Their writings bear witness to their awareness of entering another world (aliud seculum, as William of Rubruck declared in his Itinerarium amongst the Tatars²³; a “far-off land,” as the Middle East is called by a truly pained Riccoldo da Montecroce in his letters to Heaven²⁴): a “far-off land” that these friars wished to convert, but that they also sought to describe. This gave birth to a bidirectional gaze that Shirin A. Khanmohamadi describes as an “ethnographic encounter in the premodern era,” capable of producing “a greater fluidity and dialogue in the relation between the viewers and the viewed, the subjects and objects.”²⁵ According to this researcher, the chief characteristic of premodern ethnographic observation is intersubjectivity: that is, the interplay of two subjects—both rooted in their own orthodoxy—that are, however, destined to influence one another. Concerning this, Khanmohamadi infers that “European ethnography … is characterized by more fluid, complex and unpredictable relations between Latin Christian subjects and their religious and cultural others,” with the consequence that “we can hear the voices of medieval Europe’s others in these narratives in spite of these orthodoxies.”²⁶

Still, we should not be fooled, since “les systèmes d’identification du Moyen Âge obéissent à une logique de mise en conformité,”²⁷ as Dominique Iogna-Prat writes about the topics of individual and identity in the Middle Ages. In other words, medieval attention to individual cases aimed to verify their conformity to the group, thus ensuring social control. The singularity always coincide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of Images
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1 New Worlds in this Life and the Next
• Section 2 New Identities in New Worlds
• Section 3 Sermons, Missions, and New Worlds