"Friars' Tales, intended for seminars on medieval religion and popular culture, may also benefit any reader eager to find out more about how men and women once may have conceived their world and the next world."
Chaucer's conniving Pardoner and crafty friars may linger longer in memory, but real-life counterparts of those who preached sermons and promoted indulgences have long been relegated to manuscripts. The last quarter-century has produced more accessible, if still pricy and academic, studies of how sermons worked to convince their audiences and how clerics organized their contents. David Jones, with an affordable, accessible, small volume, offers today's audience a chance to read what their ancestors may have heard eight centuries ago.
He annotates brisk, fluid translations of the two earliest known British Isles collections of exempla, illustrative stories that preachers used to grab the attention of their congregants. Relentlessly moral, these hard-sell tales also allow us to glimpse what sustained a listener-who likely had little to no literacy if a layperson-as to what beliefs and attitudes of popular culture survived in towns and on farms away from the quill-penned parchment. These two collections originated in the late 13th century. An edition of the first, the Latin anthology Liber Exemplorum, was edited by A. G. Little in 1908; it was organized by an English Franciscan friar, who later worked in Ireland, trained in Paris alongside his famous confrere Roger Bacon.
Unfortunately, the 213 exempla contained in this Franciscan manuscript represent probably just over half of what was intended-we only have the first volume that ends with "M" in alphabetical order of its thematic contents. (The original survives in one copy, now at Durham Cathedral.)
Still, the value of this anthology remains, for an eighth of the stories can be found in no other source that we know of. This friar adds useful asides to his fellow friars, commanded to spread the Word with careful words, as the lively stories interspersed might offend or scandalize or tempt the laity-for clerics, more candor is allowed them as insiders into the difficulties within the cloister.
Viewing what captured the ears of audiences in medieval Ireland and Britain reminds us of what techniques endure in rhetoric and advertising today. Listeners constantly are assured by names, places, and "I heard this from so-and-so who witnessed it in the presence of this-and-that. . . ." of the veracity of the miracles, sins, visions, and dangers which assailed the deluded, the vain, and the unwary.
Sermons are meant to convince the Catholic of the efficacy of the sacraments, the mechanisms of hell and purgatory, indulgences, and Masses that constituted late-medieval Church teaching, and to stimulate constant repentance. Countless miscreants delay confession in these vignettes only to choke, writhe, and collapse before a priest can be found to shrive them.
Therefore, the impression of urgency upon the listener to act now, a mainstay of salesmanship, endures. The friars charged with evangelizing the everyday folks who flocked to their sermons were enjoined to do so by the necessity of this task to save souls, and the practicality of continuing an intricate economy that sustained their own Orders and their own upkeep. Their listeners had to attend Mass, but they also might come upon friars as they held forth at festivals, markets, and frequent feast days.
Throughout the Franciscan's collection, reminders to the clergy are given on how to modify, emphasize, or rework a story so as to stick in the minds of their impressionable audiences. Mr. Jones, in his introduction, notes how these sermons "indicate what preachers thought a congregation might find plausible, and they therefore constitute an important source for the mentalit©s of the past."
Scholar Alan E. Bernstein is quoted by author Jones as to how exempla demonstrate
