LATERAN IV to IGNORANTIA SACERDOTUM by Andrew B
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TEACHING THE CREED AND ARTICLES OF FAITH IN ENGLAND: LATERAN IV TO IGNORANTIA SACERDOTUM By Andrew B. Reeves A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Andrew B. Reeves 2009 Abstract Title: Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England: Lateran IV to Ignorantia sacerdotum Submitted by: Andrew B. Reeves Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (2009) Department: Medieval Studies, University of Toronto This study examines how English laypeople and clergy of lower ranks were taught the basic principles of Christian doctrine as articulated in the Apostles‘ Creed and Articles of Faith. Chapter one addresses the theological and historical background. Over the course of the twelfth century, school-based theologians came to place an increasing emphasis on faith as a cognitive state while at the same time moral theologians sought to make sure that all Christians had a basic participation in the life of the Church. These trends led to an effort by the Church as an institution to make sure that all Christians had at least a basic understanding of the Christian religion. Chapter two examines how the episcopate carried out a drive to ensure this basic level of understanding through the venues of councils, synods, and deanery and archdeaconry meetings. In all three of these venues, the requirements of making sure the laity know the Creed and Articles of Faith were passed on to parochial clergy, and through these clergy to the laity. Chapter three concerns one particular aspect of presenting the basics of doctrine to the laity, viz., preaching. An examination of a sample of three works of religious instruction for clergy and three sets of model sermons shows how parochial clergy, Franciscans, and Dominicans preached the basics of Christian doctrine. The distribution of the manuscripts of these works shows a broad distribution among parochial clergy, Augustinian canons, and Franciscan and Dominican friars. Such a broad distribution suggests that the Augustinian canons may have been carrying out a good deal of pastoral care and catechetical instruction and that the ii ready access of preaching aids to clergy indicates that those with responsibility of preaching Christian doctrine to laypeople would have had resources available to do so. Chapter four concerns vernacular literature as a means of religious instruction. Most thirteenth-century literature of religious instruction was in Anglo-Norman, a language spoken and read by aristocrats, clergy, and the upwardly mobile. Three Anglo-Norman works, the Château d’amour by Robert Grosseteste, the Mirour de Seinte Eglyse by Edmund of Abingdon, and the Manuel des pechez by William of Waddington all contain the foundational Christian doctrines contained in the Articles of Faith. The manuscript distribution of all three show that they were owned by both clergy and laity, indicating that they served as teaching aids for clergy, and also that they served to provide laypeople who could afford copies of them with unmediated religious instruction. The broad conclusion of this thesis is that the available evidence shows that the basic principles of Christian doctrine were available both to the lower clergy who would preach and teach the Creed and Articles of Faith and also to the laity who would receive this preaching and instruction. iii Acknowledgments Although it may seem to be the case when confined to one‘s library carrel, a dissertation is never written in isolation. I want to extend the warmest of thanks to the many people who made this possible. In the first place, I want to thank my thesis adviser, Professor Joseph Goering for his counsel in helping me find a thesis topic in the first place. I am also extremely grateful to him and to Greti Dinkova-Bruun for allowing me to use the working texts of several editions that they have in progress. Many thanks to the other two members of my committee, Bob Sweetman and Suzanne Akbari, for helping me as I scrambled to finish writing. I would like to thank the fellows of Cambridge‘s Trinity and Goneville and Caius Colleges for access to manuscripts held in their collections. My especial thanks go to Julian Reed of the library of Oxford‘s Merton College for allowing me access to a manuscript on extremely short notice, and to Cesar Pimenta and Naomi van Loo of the library of Oxford‘s New College for photographing and e-mailing me images of MS 145. I also extend my sincerest thanks to the staff of the British Library, the Cambridge University Library and Oxford University‘s Bodleian Library. I am also grateful to my friends here in Toronto who provided encouragement and diversion, both of which are necessary to the writing of a dissertation. I want to especially thank Victoria Goddard for proof-reading my dissertation. I also appreciate Rachel and Leeman Kessler and Alice Cooley for letting me talk their ears off about the contents of my dissertation. Rachel was able to point me to several Old English sources that I might otherwise have neglected. I want to thank my wonderful wife Heather for all of the emotional support that she has provided as I have gone down this particular road. I am so grateful that she married me even when she knew that I would be spending at least six years in graduate school. I extend thanks to my mother Susan for having inculcated in me a life-long love of the written word. Finally, I want to extend thanks to my late father, Charlie Reeves, who is not here to see the completion of my doctoral work. He always believed in me and was supportive of every career choice I made, from enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps at seventeen to enrolling in graduate school. Thanks, dad. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace et surgat in gloria. Amen. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Historical and Theological Background 11 Chapter 2. ―Let them see to the observance of these things…publishing them in episcopal synods…‖ Bishops, Councils, and Synods 43 Moral and Dogmatic Reform 43 The Synod 47 Circulation of Synodal Statutes 54 Content of Statutes 56 Treatises Issued by Bishops 65 Comparison to French Statutes 72 Synodalia and Literature of Preaching 76 Chapter 3. ―Those Things Pertaining to Faith and Morals Shall be Frequently Preached: The symbol of Faith, which Contains Twelve Articles...‖ 78 Secular Clergy and Canons Regular 81 Qui bene praesunt 89 The Sermons of Maurice de Sully 98 Circulation of Maurice‘s Sermons and Qui bene praesunt 102 Canons Regular and Maurice‘s Sermons and Qui bene praesunt 108 The Friars 113 The Dominicans 117 Circulation of the Writings of William Peraldus 123 Peraldus on Faith and the Doctrinal Content of his Sermons 127 The Franciscans 140 Circulation of John of la Rochelle‘s Sermons and De articulis fidei 146 Conclusions 162 Chapter 4. ―…at Least in the Mother Tongue.‖ 165 The Mirour de Seinte Eglyse 172 The Château d’amour 179 The Manuel des pechez 186 Cultural Context and Reception of the Mirour, Château, and Manuel 190 v Conclusions 198 Conclusion 200 Bibliography 206 vi 1 Introduction When a baby is baptized in one of the churches of the Worldwide Anglican Communion that share a common progenitor in the Church of England, the priest reads to the child‘s parents and godparents Cranmer‘s admonition to teach the child the Ten Commandments, the Apostles‘ Creed, and the Lord‘s Prayer. Cranmer himself took this admonition from the English Church‘s Sarum manuale, and this practice in particular goes back to earlier baptismal ordines that themselves go back to the Carolingian period and the Fathers of the Church in a time before Christian missionaries set foot in England.1 Of course, learning to recite a thing and learning what a thing means are two entirely different creatures. Many an American schoolchild has recited the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, ―and to the Republic for which it stands,‖ and wondered who exactly this Richard Stans is and why he occupies such a place in the school day. And indeed, it is uncontroversial that prior to the drawing of the Reformation‘s confessional battle-lines, there was less emphasis on the lay believer being able to know and articulate doctrine as long as the believer had a heart disposed to obeying the Church and living well.2 Taking such a view further, one encounters no less a leading light than Sir Maurice Powicke stating that the belief and practice of the rank and file of baptized laypeople in medieval Christendom was ―the literal paganism of the natural man.‖3 Such a statement recalls the Romantic search for an Anglo-Saxon paganism covered by 1 John Harper, The Forms and Orders of the Western Liturgy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 166-87. On Carolingian ordines, see Susan Keefe‘s Water and the Word: Baptism and the Education of Clergy in the Carolingian Empire (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2002). 2 On how faith was treated in the medieval Church, see John Van Engen, ―Faith as a Concept of Order in Medieval Christendom,‖ in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 19-67. On the concern of Innocent III primarily for humble submission to the Church, see especially Leonard Boyle, OP, ―Innocent III and Vernacular Versions of Scripture,‖ in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, Studies in Church History 4, eds.