Forde points out, modern scholars have been perhaps too ready to accept a “narrow, orthodox definition” of preaching that reflects clerical biases rather than the “range of acts that form part of the transmission of the faith and the living of the gospel” in medieval religious life.13 His argument is supported by the fact that medieval texts may refer to such activities as disputation, prophecy, exhortation, and teaching, whether performed by men or women, as preaching, and definitions of preaching often seem to describe activities that in other contexts are permitted to women and laymen.14
When explicitly faced with the possibility of unlicensed preaching, however, theorists took care to regulate and define the activity so as to exclude those who were not part of the church hierarchy. The Benedictine Ranulph Higden’s fourteenth-century manual asserts that “preaching is the public persuasion of many people, for the promoting of salvation, at an appropriate time and place.”15 Although he does not belabor the point, this definition implicitly excludes those who were not permitted to speak publicly and retains control over the definition of preaching by its mention of “appropriate time and place.” It is clear, of course, that preaching could occur in many forms, places, and times; but there were also times, places, subjects, and certainly persons that were considered to disqualify an act from the characterization “preaching.” Perhaps the best way to formulate this problem would be to say that there is a strict set of criteria that define what might be called, by analogy to J. L. Austin’s concept of “explicit performatives,” “explicit preaching.” Though preaching almost never verbally declares itself as such (“I preach to you”), a properly authorized man standing in a pulpit, at the appropriate point in a Mass, dressed in clerical garb and speaking on the right sort of topic in the right manner could hardly be regarded as doing anything other than preaching.16 It might be fair to say that preaching theorists would have wished to exclude from consideration as preaching any speech-act that could not properly have taken place in those circumstances (at Mass, from the pulpit)—a criterion that would obviously, and from their point of view desirably, exclude female and lay preaching altogether.17 This is indeed the view promulgated by the popular fourteenth-century work Speculum Christiani: “A grete differens es be-twene prechynge and techynge. Prechynge es in a place where es clepynge to-gedyr or foluynge of pepyl in holy dayes in chyrches or other certeyn places and tymes ordeyned therto. And it longeth to hem that been ordeynede ther-to, the whych haue iurediccion and auctorite, and to noon othyr. Techynge es that eche body may enforme and teche hys brothyr in euery place and in conable tyme, os he seeth that it be spedful.”18 Here the notion of “iurediccion and auctorite” is specifically linked to the issues of time and place, and each is used to reinforce the other in a definition of preaching that strictly limits what kind of speech may bear that label.
Despite these attempts at definition, however, it is clear that there must have been innumerable instances when any one or a number of the ideal characteristics of licensed preaching—the appropriate time, place, type of sermon, even an officially authorized person—were lacking without that speech-act ceasing to count as preaching, and this fluidity at the definitional boundaries of preaching opened the door for persons other than priests and bishops to preach.19 We can gain a more specific sense of how and why preaching needed to be regulated by looking at three categories frequently seen together in such texts as the artes praedicandi, disputations, and canon law: prophecy, preaching, and priesthood. The juxtaposition of these categories, particularly as they relate to women, helps to suggest what qualities and problems were felt to be essential to the activity of preaching, by contrast with its near neighbors.20
Crucial to the link between preaching and priesthood was the sense of lineage and mission referred to in Rom. 10:15. Because Christ had chosen only male disciples, only men were “sent”; they derived authorization from that original mission, rooted in the will of Christ and preserved in the ultimate textual authority of the Bible. The mission Christ gave his Apostles came to be seen as an office and one that could only be conferred by a person who already held that office.21 This created a lineage of male priests and preachers whose words derived from the words of Christ, who were supposed to follow and imitate him, and who were authorized both by that point of origin and by the ongoing tradition of priestly office in which they stood. Compounding the importance of priestly lineage in the later Middle Ages was the reformist concept of the priesthood as “a human condition quite distinct from laity,” which made it even more difficult for laymen and persistently impossible for women to take on priestly functions.22
Since prophets, on the other hand, were sent directly by God without human mediation, they could to some degree avoid the issue of lineage, and the role of prophet was thus open to women, as biblical example confirmed.23 At the same time there was a consistent effort to emphasize the charismatic, noninstitutional nature of prophecy and thus to prevent women prophets from becoming models for a tradition of female public speech.24 There was also an insistence that such charismatic authority be regulated, either by direct miracle or, more likely, by clerical approval.
If priesthood and prophecy seem fairly clear in their willingness or lack thereof to accommodate unofficial speakers, particularly women, preaching is a gray area lying between the institutional and the charismatic and thus more difficult to assess. Insofar as it partakes of the qualities of priesthood, there is a tendency to emphasize institutional authorization and thus to exclude women, among others.25 But insofar as preaching is assimilated to prophecy, it claims a charismatic, personal authority for the speaker that is much more difficult to regulate. The negotiation between these two aspects, both of which were essential to the preacher’s role, takes place largely in terms of the preacher’s relationships to clerical lineage and to language, particularly the scriptural text.
The medieval concern with these matters can be illuminated by reference to similar problems in the works of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, focusing on the ownership of speech and on citation as a source of meaning. In her discussion of the performance of (gender) identity Butler raises the important question of who is to be imagined as the “author” of that performance.26 She argues that a performed identity has a history that exceeds any individual performer: “The act that one performs … is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene … much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but … requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”27 While the performance of preaching, like the performance of gender, has no explicit script, it draws on both Scripture and an authoritative lineage of performance, and those origins structured late medieval theorists’ attempts to create and defend the boundaries of preaching.
Butler’s concept of performance as repeated acts derives from the Derridean notion of “iterability,” which “implies that every act is itself a recitation, the citing of a prior chain of acts which are implied in a present act.”28 For Derrida, it is precisely repetition, or rather the possibility of repetition, that makes meaning possible.29 His concept of iterability also implies that all language is citational, that “every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring (ancrage).”30 The notion of a sign system “without any center or absolute anchoring” would have been anathema to medieval preaching theorists; in fact, it seems to have been precisely a fear of unanchored contexts that led them to regulate preaching so energetically.31 The attempts to prevent unauthorized speakers from entering into the chain of citations described at the beginning of this section helped to give preaching its authoritative form in the later Middle Ages. Ultimately both Butler’s and Derrida’s theoretical approaches raise the question of authorship or ownership of language, which proves to be central to how preaching’s purity of lineage was controlled. An examination of texts that address women’s relationships to the offices of priest, preacher, and prophet leads to an understanding of the importance of ownership and lineage as foundational categories for male preachers.
Lineage