Popular Preaching in the Thirteenth Century: Rhetoric in the Fight against Heresy

ABSTRACT

Much has been said about the new path forged by preaching during the thirteenth century. In that era of economic revival and material development of towns and technology, along with innovation in scholastic methods, it seems only natural that mendicant preachers, firmly engaged in society, would infiltrate the social organisation and take the spiritual lead. Also, from that time on, eradicating heresy was paramount. Mendicant preachers, the spearhead of the papacy, devised new advanced rhetorical weapons that were able to reach far and wide. Indeed, close scrutiny of their activism reveals an innovative modus operandi, necessitated by the systems of communication for lay and clerical society alike. Based on the so-called ‘popular’ preachers' discourse and exempla, this article appraises and re-evaluates the character and efficiency of the means of communication applied through popular rhetoric in the enterprise of mass-persuasion in the face of a peril deemed to threaten the very foundations of Christian society. However, investigating the extent to which the anti-heretical preaching campaign, verbo et exemplo, reached its expected goal in the long run, given the increasingly repressive parallel mechanism of the Inquisition, exposes an asymptotic struggle.