Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without PrintDavid D'Avray OUP Oxford, 2001 M07 12 - 331 pages Before the advent of printing, the preaching of the friars was the mass medium of the middle ages. This edition of marriage sermons reveals what a number of famous preachers actually taught about marriage. David D'Avray teases out the close connection between marriage symbolism and social, cultural, and legal realities in the thirteenth century. The relation between genre, content, and gender is analysed, with particular attention to the likely impact of preaching, viewed as a means of intellectual power in competition with vernacular genres and other social forces. Its mass diffusion anticipated printing, but the means of production were those of the monastic scriptorium. Professor D'Avray's textual criticism and palaeographical analsyis of these sermons undermines central assumptions of both medieval and early modern historians of the book. He establishes a technique of textual criticism appropriate for texts of this kind: a pragmatic compromise between simple transcriptions which ignore stemmatic relation and full-scale editions attempting to fit all manuscripts into a genealogical table, Medieval Marriage Sermons makes an important contribution both to the sermon literature of the period, and to our understanding of marriage and its religious and cultural significance in the middle ages. |
Contents
1 | |
Pierre de Reims OP | 50 |
Hugues de SaintCher OP | 127 |
Jean de la Rochelle OM | 166 |
Pierre de SaintBenoit OM | 190 |
Gerard de Mailly OP | 227 |
Guibert de Tournai OM | 274 |
317 | |
323 | |
325 | |
Common terms and phrases
Agreements in Error agrees in error apparatus appearance autem base manuscript based on microfilm Bataillon beginning BN lat carnal catalogue Christ collated collection columns common contents copied corrected Description Description based di·erent dicitur edited eius enim error etiam evidence exemplar fact folios friars give Guibert hand Hugues independent indications initiated Italy kind Latin less look Lord manu margin marks marriage married means medieval microfilm printout noted nuptie paragraph-marks parchment manuscript Paris passage pecia perhaps Pierre de Reims possible preachers preaching present probably quia quod reading reason religious scilicet scribes script seems sense sermon sicut significant soul spiritual spiritual marriage standard structure sunt symbolism textual things thirteenth century virginity wife written
Popular passages
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