Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without Print

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.