“A devout and holy sermon”: sources of parody in sermons joyeux

1 Introduction

Medieval comedy had a long history of incorporating Christian writings, symbols, and imagery into humorous narratives. One of the results of such a seemingly incongruous combination was a late-medieval genre of sermon joyeux, or the mock sermon: these short writings in verse (usually around 150–200 lines, the longest not exceeding 400) took the form of a theatrical monologue, where the narrator is assigned the role of a preacher and is willing to instruct the listeners in a humorous way (Aubailly 1984: 55). This genre was quite popular across late medieval Europe: similar texts can be found in France, Germany, the Low Countries, and England; the French corpus alone contains over 30 examples (Koopmans 1988a, 1988b: 10). Authors tend to agree that those texts were destined to be performed in different social contexts. For instance, Koopmans (1988a) suggests that they may have been a part of festivities connected either with folkloric traditions (such as engagements, weddings, harvest festivals) or Christian feast calendar (Feast of Fools, Feast of the Ass, etc.). Koopmans also describes the dual nature of the medieval theatrical texts as para-dramatic, as they are creations of both dramatic fiction and ritual significance (Koopmans 1996: 113).

For this study, however, I shall not concentrate on the performative aspects of the sermons joyeux and rather focus on the literary analysis of the texts (the corpus will be discussed later). The purpose of the current article is to provide an account of various sources of parody that constitute the humour of sermons joyeux centered around parodic saints and parody hagiography. The parody of these particular sermons joyeux, as I will demonstrate, comes from three main sources. First, the genre inherited a very prolific tradition of Latin ecclesiastical parody and often borrowed imagery and techniques from its predecessors; second, sermons joyeux adopted certain traits from the Christian sermons and their rhetorical devices; and last, but by no means least – they made use of hagiographical accounts and saints’ vitae, both Latin and vernacular. This study will explore a general landscape of the comic tradition in which sermons joyeux were created, highlighting some probable precursors to the genre, and then offer an analysis of the texts themselves in order to see how all the described influences and traits manifested in them specifically.

2 Methodology

To contextualise the methodology used here, we first have to consider the existing approaches to interpreting medieval and Renaissance comedy. The first approach, which was particularly influential in the 1960s, is the carnival theory developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. In Bakhtin’s opinion, the Christian church acted as an oppressive institution, its members being unanimous in their ‘devout seriousness’ and strict unchangeable nature (Bakhtin 1984: 90). These ideas were dispelled by closer study of medieval and Renaissance religious narratives. Horowitz and Menache (1994: 55) in their extensive analysis of Latin collections of exempla (short stories destined to help the preachers illustrate their sermons) conclude that medieval preachers were not afraid to use humour in their everyday liturgical discourse without any reference to carnival festivities. Martha Bayless in her study of medieval Latin parody also claims that most of the ecclesiastical parody was created within the church by the clerics themselves (Bayless 1996: 13). Although religious authorities had strikingly different views on the use and abuse of laughter, the general attitude towards laughter seems to be tolerant, as long as it was employed for a good cause and enjoyed in moderation (Verberckmoes 2003: 4). Overall, I believe it is important not to see the church and, by extension, the Christian religious framework as a rigid oppressive structure that remained unchanged throughout history and opposed to any forms of non-serious behavior.

The paradox of the coexistence of medieval and Renaissance laughter and religious consciousness is in fact the greatest point of interest in studies of comedy of these periods. Numerous studies suggest several different approaches to resolving this contradiction, one of them being the ‘safety valve theory.’ The reason for its popularity lies most likely in the substantial evidence for the church authorities tolerating and encouraging laughter as well as other powerful religious figures denouncing and condemning comedy. The attempt to combine those two opposite points of view resulted in a compromise claim that authorities tolerated laughter only to avoid more serious consequences of criticism and uneasiness. There are, however, several important points against this position. First, not all medieval jokes and comic writings necessarily had a victim, sometimes looking more like an exercise of wit rather than satire or direct criticism (we shall see the examples of such humour later during the analysis of our selected texts). As Yunck (1963: 31) stated, a medieval parodist ‘does not intend to lower the dignity of the sacred literature he imitates, but on the contrary to use it as an exemplar, or ethical standard, against which to measure his subject-matter.’ Secondly, laughter was never a separate sphere of society that was meant to be restrained, regulated, or merely exist outside the ‘mainstream’ culture: medieval authors frequently included comedy in their ‘serious’ texts and forms of devotion, such as preaching practices.^[1] If there is no strict opposition, there is simply no need for a valve.

A completely different, but still problematic approach looks at medieval and Renaissance laughter from a utilitarian point of view. Scholars holding this opinion argue that laughter was tolerated and widespread mainly because it served a purpose that is characterised as either didactical or castigatory, depending on whether it was needed to instruct the faithful or punish the sinful. Horowitz and Menache claim (1994: 81; 109) that ecclesiastical humour is ‘an instrument to correct the morals’ and ‘stigmatise vices’ within the laity and the clergy, ready to turn against the individuals who fail to keep up with the standards of the group. Many genres (such as fabliaux, parodies on religious writings and goliardic poetry) that Bakhtin viewed as progressive appear to convey some particularly conservative ideas, not calling for any action towards actual societal changes but rather attacking isolated and less powerful victims, such as individual corrupt priests (Verberckmoes 2003: 4–5). This approach, just as the previous one, has its own flaws. Both are grounded in an understanding of humour that is too categorical and essentialist to be effectively used as a tool of analysis: a great number of medieval and Renaissance comic writings did not serve a visible utilitarian purpose. It is also sometimes hard to distinguish rebellious laughter from disciplinary laughter: for instance, sermons joyeux and other humorous accounts often contained subversive elements alongside conservative ideas.

The reasonable approach, in my opinion, is finding a middle ground: it is most fitting to not look for strict categories and definitive answers, accepting that even the seemingly opposing spheres are never entirely separable. I believe that the present study calls for a holistic approach to laughter, viewing it as both the product of human nature and as a part of social relations and consider it an integral part of an inherently Christian intellectual landscape of the time.

3 Texts

The existing Middle French sermons joyeux can be separated into several thematic clusters based on the topics that are chosen for their preaching discourse. A significant group of sermons includes instructions and meditations on the married life (e.g., Sermon joyeux [de] tous les maux; Sermon joyeux du mesnage et des charges de mariage), where the ‘preacher’ describes numerous facetious exempla from the lives of happily or, more often, unhappily married characters. Erotic stories, hints and sexual metaphors also constitute a prominent topic of sermons (e.g. Sermon joyeux des friponniers et des friponnieres; Sermon joyeulx pour rire). There are also plenty of general parodic preachings on various topics, such as the nature of stupidity (Sermon joyeux de tous les fous), the ruses and malicious intentions of women that cause a lot of problems to the mankind (Discours joyeux en façon de sermon) or, on the contrary, the virtues of women and the necessity of marriage (Un sermon joyeulx des fames).

The group that stands aside from those described above are sermons joyeux that concentrate on parodic saints and their lives. Instead of following general rhetorical rules of preaching (that will be discussed later in greater detail), these parodies focus on their characters’ passions and miracles. The mock saints that become the central point of their narrative are usually food and drink-based (like Saint Herring, Saint Onion or Saint Raisin) or sexual-themed (such as Saint Billouard). The present study is going to be centered around this particular concept, and will analyze three texts as examples of this group: “La vie saint Harenc, glorieux martir, et comment il fut pesché en la mer et porté à Dieppe” (c. 1500), “Le dévot et sainct sermon de monseigneur sainct Jambon et de madame saincte Andoulle” (c. 1521), and “Sermon joyeulx de la vie saint Ongnon. Comment Nabuzarden le maistre cuisinier le fist martirer. avec les miracles quil fait chascun jour” (c. 1520).^[2] The first text tells the life and passions of Saint Herring, the second one deals with the story of saint siblings, Ham and Sausage, and the last one describes the fate and miracles of Saint Onion. For the sake of brevity, I shall further refer to these sermons as ‘Saint Herring,’ ‘Saint Ham’ and ‘Saint Onion.’

I argue that this group of sermons is different from the rest of the corpus for several reasons. Firstly, I believe that this group of texts combines two parodic traditions – those of parodic hagiography and parodic liturgy – which allows for versatility in plots, narrative structures and humour; in this article I intend to show how the concept of parodic saints was developed and incorporated into sermons joyeux. To illustrate the development of this concept, I plan to discuss three texts which provide us with examples of the saint-themed humour of their time, as well as demonstrate certain traits that later became characteristic of parodic saints from sermons joyeux. As studies by Gilman (1974) and Koopmans (Koopmans and Verhuyck 1986) have shown, there can be a great number of sources and parallels to the genre of sermon joyeux, but I shall only review the texts that exemplify significant changes in the formal structure and/or contents, marking key stages of development in what later becomes the sermon joyeux.

Secondly, I intend to prove that these texts are grounded in hagiographic material and only adopt certain parts of the actual sermon structure, unlike other sermons joyeux that follow the rhetorical patterns of real sermons more faithfully. To do that, I shall compare the structures of the chosen sermons that deal with parodic saints to those of real sermons as described in artes praedicandi and those of saints’ vitae: this will help us understand what the authors of our selected parodies adopted from both traditions and why they decided to focus on those certain structural elements. Bearing in mind that most of the parodies, be they ecclesiastical or profane, only followed the structures of their original material to a certain extent, I shall nevertheless demonstrate that our chosen group of sermons joyeux gravitates towards hagiographical parody rather than liturgical parody.

4 The tradition of parodic saints

The first stage of the formation of the tradition of parodic saints was the appearance of mock saints as a concept. During the Middle Ages, a textual tradition of personifying abstract ideas (often in allegorical form) was used in didactical and philosophical writings (Bayless 1996: 92). Comic – mostly satirical – texts made use of this device to enhance their vision of the world of vices ruled by false deities, such as Avarice, Greed, Money, and other conceptual gods. However, seeing abstract notions presented as saints is much rarer. One of the examples can be found in a late 11th century work of a supposed Toledo cleric, Tractatus Garsiae, also known as Garcineida. This satirical treatise tells a story of the Archbishop of Toledo’s journey to Rome, in which he plans to give relics of two saints to the Pope. The saints whose remains the ecclesiast is carrying with him are called Albinus (“White,” or, metaphorically, Silver) and Rufinus (“Red,” standing for Gold), and are meant to be a satirical commentary on the cupidity of the clergy; funnily enough, the Pope eventually transfers the relics to the shrine of the third saint, St. Cupiditas, or Saint Greed.

The author, however, goes further than just using the allegorised money-saints as a witty commentary: St. Silver and Gold are treated as proper saints, and the text resembles a veritable account of their translatio. Their relics can work miracles, they are universally recognised and worshipped to such an extent that their names open every door (Cienfuegos 1981: v.41-44). Throughout the story clerics and lay people often resort to the help of these supernatural patrons, in the end, “Quis obpugnat, ubi Albinus intercedit? Quis contradicit, ubi Albinus orat?” (Who shall oppose when Silver intercedes? Who shall contradict when Silver prays?) (Cienfuegos 1981: v.54-55: v.54-55). Although these abilities are granted to the tongue-in-cheek money-saints, a transparent allusion to corruption in the ecclesiastical milieu is made; they constitute a parallel with qualities and expectations commonly ascribed to saints, especially in the early middle ages. Therefore, even though holy precious metals in this text merely serve as a catalyst for the plot and exist as one of many means to condemn humorously the vices of the church, these characters already possess some traits that are crucial to identifying them as saints.

Jumping ahead two centuries, we also see false saints appear in what at first appears an unlikely genre, the romance. New humorous writings, such as the famous Roman de Renart, a literary cycle consisting of various stories about Reynard the Fox and other anthropomorphic animals, could not abstain from incorporating false saints into their narrative. The joke that was quite simple in eleventh-century texts like the Garcineida is taken further: false saints are now characterised not only by their name and abstract miracles, but also by their abilities to attract pilgrims and form a fully established worship. One of the reasons this happened was the development of the cult of saints, or rather the stricter establishment of its formal regulations, in the 12th–13th century, when some of the branches of the Renart were created. Robert Bartlett describes the three key features of saints’ veneration at that time: “That “way” can be summed up by the word “cult,” and its three key elements were public recognition of the name and the day of the saint; special treatment of the saint’s bodily remains; and celebration of the saint in writing” (Bartlett 2013: 95).

In the branch “Reynard’s Death” the action takes place during a festive dinner held at the king’s court: all the animals come together, having set aside their differences, to celebrate the memory of a holy martyr, Dame Pinte, who is, in fact, a hen killed (and eaten, to be precise) by Reynard in one of the previous stories. This one scene of a commemorative gathering already establishes Pinte’s position as a saintly figure: having a veneration day was the minimal requirement for a deceased person to be considered as a saint (Bartlett 2013: 95). The martyrdom of the poor hen itself also bears resemblance to the later examples of sermons joyeux as a stand-alone genre. Although we have encountered parodic characters being called “martyrs” previously (like St. Albinus and Rufinus in Garcineida, probably for the sake of importance and higher status that was attributed to martyrs among the other saints), we have not witnessed any of the trials and tribulations they had to face before finally gaining their sacred status (Bartlett 2013: 184).

Another important feature that parodic saints and their lives gain at this stage is the absence of the satirical component. The parodic saint hen is not here to denounce vices or serve as an allegory or a sneer towards some scholastic traditions. Evelyn Vitz, contemplating the possibility of blasphemy and anti-clericalism in the Roman, claims that “On one hand, the anti-religious laughter of Renart is often fierce. On the other, these tales contain a lot of references to liturgy, sacraments and religious life in general” (Vitz 1991: 206).^[3] She also argues that this means that humour in the Roman generally does not seek to mock the Church or its representatives, using them for humorous and not satirical purposes. Some scholars, such as Gravdal (1989: 85), view the Roman as completely devoid of any critical power. I do not necessarily think these claims are universally applicable to the Roman as a whole, but they seem reasonable in this case. Pinte is a background character, whose parodic nature signals the importance and recognizability of the cult of saints: as is the case with any ecclesiastical parody, the joke would only work if the audience were acquainted with the subject enough to get it.

One of the first mock saints to get his very own hagiography was St. Nemo (Nobody). The text of his vitae appeared around the end of the 13th century and, although the manuscript itself is now lost, scholars have been able to reconstruct what it must have looked like by bringing together later versions.^[4] This story turned out to be extremely popular, as further derivative, altered and extended variants of Nemo’s life continued to appear even three hundred years after its original creation, both in Latin and in several vernacular languages, all over Europe (Bayless 1996: 87). The humour in Nemo is based on the parody of medieval exegesis: the story presents an interpretation of Scripture so literal that it creates an absurdly impeccable saint from a deliberate misinterpretation of the text. Nemo turns out to be a perfect human being, possessing every virtue imaginable, and the author uses lines from Scripture to prove this. He had never committed any sins, since Nemo sine crimine vivit (Nobody lives without guilt) (Bayless 1996: 259). Universal Christian laws do not apply to him, as, for instance, Nemini permittitur binas habere uxores (Nobody is permitted to have two wives), and his power is equal to that of God, since Deus claudit et Nemo aperit, deus aperit et Nemo claudit (God shutteth and Nobody openeth, God openeth and Nobody shutteth) (Bayless 1996: 163). Although this joke is practically the only means of humour used in the text, it appears very versatile and allows for a significant number of ingenious ways to praise the perfection of Nemo.

While the Garcineida and the Roman de Renart show interesting parallels to the sermons joyeux, these Latin vitae Nemini can be seen as the more immediate predecessors of the vernacular language mock sermons that will be discussed in the next section. Firstly, they finally represent a form of homily that was later used in sermons joyeux – a sermon based on the life and personality of a saint. Secondly, they construct their humour not only by parodying the essence of being a saint, but also by using a formal structure of scholastic works, which became a characteristic trait for vernacular mock sermons. By the time of their creation this structure was so well-established and recognizable, that it caused laughter even when its lost its original Latin context and was translated into vernacular languages. The life of St. Nemo actually received a significant number of translations in the 15th–16th centuries: Dutch “Spotsermoen over Sint Niemand,” French “Les grans et merveilleux faitz du Seigneur Nemo avec les previleges qu’il a et la puissance qu’il peut avoir,” German popular stories about miraculously gifted “Niemand.” I argue that at least partly the popularity of the story of St. Nemo came from its appearance in vernacular form, which later influenced the sermons joyeux as a genre.

To conclude the analysis provided in this brief section, I have identified several features that hagiographical parody managed to acquire during its existence as a part of other literary forms. Coming from a simple personification of abstract notions in the form of false saints, hagiographical parody then developed a structure more faithful to that of real saints’ accounts, incorporating such essential traits as memorial days, relics worshipping, miracles, sometimes specialised in certain areas. On the last stage of genre formation, the authors of parodies drew their attention towards wordplay and linguistic puns, which later became an important feature of sermons joyeux. Dissemination in vernacular, which had proven its effectiveness during the medieval literary process, provided recognition to genuine hagiographical literature as well as its parodic counterparts. In the next sections we will see, how these features – vernacular form with a certain amount of wordplay, formulaic structure borrowed from hagiographical accounts and key attributes of the saints were played upon and explored by the authors of sermons joyeux.

5 Liturgical parody

While looking for the sources of parody in sermons joeyux it is logical to refer to the main source of rules on creating sermons, the artes praedicandi – various Latin treatises of the same name destined to instruct the preachers. Artes praedicandi generally contained rules and regulations regarding multiple aspects of composition, preaching practice (such as appropriate gestures and articulation) and sometimes the preacher’s moral life and study: some of the artes covered all the above, some strictly dealt with sermon structure, and some of them were limited to only one aspect of this structure (Wenzel 2015: 3). The suggestion that sermons joyeux followed the rules of artes seems to have originated from Gilman (1974: 11), but later scholars adopted it as a maxim. Jelle Koopmans, for instance, promoted this idea in his earlier articles on the subject (Koopmans and Verhuyck 1986: 169; Verhuyck and Koopmans 2014 [1987]: 11), though in his later critical edition of 30 sermons joyeux he opted for a more subtle and nuanced approach. In his introduction to the edition, Koopmans suggests that the reason mock sermons were so divergent from the artes canon was that they were reminiscent of sermones de sanctis, which were, as he puts it, narrative sermons that focus on the life and miracles of a saint, the structure of which was different from a classic scholastic sermon (Koopmans 1988b: 89). However, it is not quite clear what he based this claim on: a source book Koopmans used, Charland’s Artes Praedicandi, does not state that sermones de sanctis were structurally or rhetorically different from classic sermons (Charland 2002 [1936]: 95). Instead, it mentions that sermones de sanctis were preached on specific dates of saints’ feasts and borrowed examples from the saints’ lives, and not from the scripture, but kept the same general rhetorical structure as classic sermons (Charland 2002 [1936]: 115). One of the biggest collections of sermones de sanctis, that by Jacobus de Voragine, is explicitly described by modern scholars as based on the models of scholastic sermons (Maggioni 2008: 21). Therefore, as sermones de sanctis are not generally distinguished from other sermons, they cannot be used as an explanation of the differences between sermons joyeux and the rules described in artes.

This connection between artes praedicandi and sermons joyeux seems dubious. Even though some elements and formulae usual to sermons are present in the humorous texts as well, I argue that this explanation does not fit all the mock sermons equally: our chosen sermons of false saints, for instance, must be seen not as parodies on medieval preaching per se, but as parodic texts grounded in the hagiographical tradition. The only reason they bear any resemblance to the actual sermon structure, in my opinion, is that they share the performative aspect: as Charlotte Steenbrugge (2017: 28) claims, “performance styles of sermons and drama must to some degree have been similar,” and the authors of sermons joyeux might have chosen the general framework of a sermon to give a more conventional form for an oral presentation of a saint’s vitae. Sermons joyeux that deal with accounts of mock saints’ lives have much more in common with the real saints’ vitae than they do with any kind of sermons described in artes, and structure-wise they should be considered as more hagiographical, and less liturgical parodies.

Let me begin the comparison of the structures of sermons joyeux to that of serious sermons by describing the components essential for a scholastic sermon (see Table 1). Combining several artes praedicandi, we may find that sermons usually begin with a thema (a word or string of words taken from Scripture upon which the entire sermon is built), followed by a prothema (a short passage meant to capture the audience’s interest, draw their attention to the upcoming sermon and make them engage in listening). The subsequent parts include a prayer, an optional repetition of a thema, a bridge passage, an introduction to the main contents of the sermon, and then the sermon’s main body. The core of the sermon consists of division, confirmation and explanation of the divided members, possible subdivisions and other processes of dilation. At the end of the sermon the members are brought together again, and the preaching is finished with a closing prayer.^[5]

As can be seen from our textual examples, this structure as seen in Table 1, is never truly kept in the sermons joyeux that focus on parodic saints. In our three texts of interest, only three to four parts can be observed without significant deviations (namely, a mock thema, which is sometimes reiterated later, a shortened and purely symbolic prothema, the initial prayer, and the closing prayer). This, as I have stated earlier, is far from being enough to claim that all sermons joyeux were based on artes praedicandi: instead, the authors of the texts from our chosen group adopted some parts that made the parodies identifiable as “sermons,” but they did not employ the rhetoric used in such sermons and went for a far more popular and recognizable form of hagiography.

The formal structure that was parodied in its entirety, keeping the humorous images together, is, as I have already mentioned, that of saints’ lives. The three sermons joyeux we are looking at, as well as other texts of the genre that talk about mock saints, follow the same pattern of their life description, which repeats a basic martyrs’ vitae canon. The hagiographical texts were so formulaic, that sometimes a saint’s life could have been constructed entirely from some generalised passages with a great number of borrowings from other hagiographical texts (Bartlett 2013: 520–523). There were even extreme examples when two lives of saints were found to be identical, the only difference being the names, and yet these texts were considered valid as long as they fitted into the saintly narrative structure. As Robert Bartlett justly noted, “the things the saints had in common were more significant than the things that gave them individual identity. It was hence possible to write the Life of a holy man without any specific knowledge, since it was clear what it meant to be a holy man” (Bartlett 2013: 250).

The opening and the main part of the sermon, thema, using a handy definition by Siegfried Wenzel, is a “word or string of words taken from Scripture upon which the entire sermon is built” (Wenzel 2015: 50). This exact component was so important that sometimes scholars call a scholastic sermon a “thematic sermon” since its discourse develops entirely from this part (Wenzel 2015: 46). Different artes have different views on what can or cannot be used as thema: some recommend beginning with “an auctoritas, that is, a biblical or patristic quotation used as the sermon’s foundation,” since “in general, the artes speak against using a quasibiblical text from the liturgy.” However, some artes allow the use of proverbs in Latin or in the vernacular “for the sake of novelty.” Nevertheless, most of them prescribe that it must be a short, complete, grammatically correct sentence, making full sense (Wenzel 2015: 50–55).

Let us examine the short introductory passage, which can be found in Saint Herring (Saint Harenc: v.1–3):

Graticulus Harengio,

Super ignem tribulatio,

Vinaigria, sinapium.

[Glorious Herring,

Tortured in fire

With vinegar and mustard.]

A parody of martyrdom appears right in the beginning: a process of cooking a herring is compared to the tortures faced by real saints in the hagiographic literature and is described using the same categories. Moreover, a lowering tendency is visible in the given verse: instead of calling the Herring “gratus,” the narrator uses the word “graticulus,” which appears to be a combination of two words – “gratus” (glorious) and “culus” (arse).^[6] Koopmans sees a parallel between the given word form and a French name for rosehip – gratte-cul, which adds another food pun (Verhuyck and Koopmans 2014 [1987]: 15).

Despite the travesty, this piece includes a serious subtext: the instruments of Herring’s torture are meant to provide a symbolical reminder of Christ’s suffering (e.g. Matthew 27:48 “And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink”). This comparison is justified by the fact that “conventional hagiographies are modelled on the Bible” and the progress of saints related to the events of the Gospels, Passions or Acts of the Apostles (Bayless 1996: 61). The authors of hagiographical literature searched for the parallels between lives of the saints and the life of the Savior, for the sake of imitatio Christi.

The prothema, as I have already mentioned, was meant to capture the audience’s interest, draw their attention to the upcoming sermon and make them engage in listening (Wenzel 2015: 45). As we have seen previously, when I was describing the vernacular language of the sermons, calls for attention are quite frequent in these texts, and our three sermons are not an exception. Sometimes the prothema is no longer than one line, like in Life of St. Onion (Saint ongnon: v.1-5). Here, it interrupts the thema, creating an additional humorous effect (Latin cursive):

Ad deliberandum Patris

Sit sanctorum Ongnonnaris

Filius Syboularis

In ortum sit vita.

Capitulum… M’entendez vous ?

[From what is coming, of the Father

May Saint Onion,

The son of Chives

In garden^? is life.

Chapter… Do you hear me?]^[7]

In the last line, instead of going on with (rather broken) Latin and naming the chapter, the narrator suddenly asks in French “Do you hear me?” which was sure to cause laughter in the audience, where some (or most of the) listeners might have been bored while listening to an unknown liturgical language of Latin. I have already brought up the subject of the importance of the role that vernacular language played in the dissemination of mock sermons previously, but the Life of St. Onion offers textual evidence of the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in parodic writings. Latin here is used only as a reference to the real sermons’ structure and a possible hint for those who know it; however, the text does not exclude the audience unfamiliar with the language and chooses to interrupt the Latin verse with a vernacular line, which might have been an effective way to capture the listeners’ attention.

After these introductory parts, all the three texts diverge from the plan of scholastic preaching, keeping only the spirit, or, in the words of Aubailly (1984: 41), a “vague allure” of a sermon. They proceed to describe the lives of the title saints, their passions and miracles, which, indeed, was a thing in sermones de sanctis as well, as I have mentioned previously, but the main difference comes in the purpose of this material. As Aubailly (1984: 41) has stated, among the sermons, in which the author limits himself to imitating the manner of preaching, we should distinguish those that parody moral exhortations from those that parody the didactical structure or the lives of saints. The three sermons joyeux that we are looking at are completely saint-centered: they do not use their characters’ vitae as examples proving some thesis, nor do they derive any moral lesson from the stories they tell. I argue that this is important for understanding this group of sermons joyeux. They do not have an explicit moralistic and didactical component, be it serious or facetious. The reason for this infidelity of the parodies to canons of preaching is obvious, as the authors were seeking to entertain the listeners, not exploit the comic potential of the established sermon structure to its fullest. The intended audience clearly included those outside the ecclesiastical milieu. As lay people were much less familiar with the preaching rules of Latin treatises, following the formal requirements too strictly would have been a waste of time and wit for the authors since jokes and allusions to scholastic knowledge (that were often the only source of humour in Latin ecclesiastical parodies) were likely to have been missed. Therefore, the creators of the saint-centered sermons joyeux sought comedic material in the hagiographical writings, while adopting only the most characteristic passages from the classic sermons and leaving behind all the logical and rhetorical procedures they required.

The only remaining part of our sermons joyeux that coincides with that of real sermons is the final prayer. The narrator encourages the audience to pray to the holy intercessors whose glorious lives were described in the sermon, in order to get divine grace and saints’ blessings. The Life of St. Herring offers a prayer with a peculiar tone to it (Saint Harenc: v.128-135):

Nous prions pour les povres gens

Que Dieu leur doint faulte d’argent

S’ils veullent au besoing secours

Qu’il leur fasse tout au rebours

Pour cardinaulx ou archesvesques

Ne pour abbez ne pour evesques

Ne fault il ja faire priere

Car tout va sens devant derriere.

[We pray for the poor people,

So God may give them enough money,

And if they are in need of help in misery,

May he make everything for them upside down.

And for cardinals, nor archbishops,

Nor abbots, nor bishops

You should not pray,

As everything goes backwards]

There definitely can be more than one interpretation of these lines, but I believe this prayer represents the imagery of mundus inversus, a literary topos of ‘the upside-down world’ in which the natural order of things is overturned, which was a source for an enormous stratum of medieval comedy.^[8] This desire to reverse the social roles, making the poor take the place of the rich, and vice versa, brings forward a whole series of associated motives. The first allusion coming to mind is the philosophical image of the wheel of fortune (which represented the exact same process of humans gaining and losing the favor of the God and, consequentially, fate). The second, but probably even more prominent here, is the “reverse logic” of medieval carnival that we have discussed in the introduction, which played greatly on the trope of switching places, elevating the low and lowering the high within the societal hierarchy for comic purposes in the context of humorous festivities.

To sum up this part of the analysis, I have established that sermons joyeux that focus on parodic saints do not have much in common with the liturgical structure of a sermon described in artes praedicandi, but follow it rather shallowly, deliberately omitting or adding sections that would be important in a real sermon. The only features of classic sermons that appear in all three chosen examples are the prothema (which announces the biblical verse or another subject of the sermon) and the final prayer. The authors likely chose this approach in order to appeal to the (most probable) lay audience of the sermons that would rather appreciate allusions to the more widespread canons of hagiography than strict obedience of the rhetorical rules of classic sermons. I suggest considering sermons joyeux less liturgical and more hagiographical parody despite them being called “sermons.”

6 Hagiographical parody

The general plot of saints’ vitae was established since the first Christian accounts of the lives of holy martyrs. These texts usually began with a description of a saint’s birth and descent (although this part was occasionally omitted), then went on to recount stories from the saint’s life, highlighting the most important events, and finishing with their death. As our texts faithfully follow this plan, we shall see the exact representation these essential plot points received and will examine different ways their authors fitted their sermons into the same structure.

Most of the genuine saints’ vitae were not strictly chronological, and parodic hagiography takes after them, resembling a collection of anecdotes more than a consistent narrative. However, some of the vitae (and, consequentially, sermons joyeux) do start at the beginning: the Life of St. Ham and Sausage begins by presenting the reader with the holy siblings’ genealogy. We get to know the parents of the saints, which was indeed a common place for saints’ lives; although many hagiographers limited themselves to giving a short outline of the saints’ family name, place of birth, and an indication of social class, some of them went on describing several generations of the saint’s ancestry (Bartlett 2013: 524). In our parodic vita we encounter both saints’ parents and learn that their mother’s name is Thias, possibly derived from the old French thyes – “from German lands,” which in this case may suggest that the holy brother and sister came from the north (which might fit historically with the fact that a lot of charcuteries in France were produced in those regions).

The genealogy of St. Onion remains vague: the audience learns his mother was called “madame sainte Siboule” – madam saint Chives (it is unclear however if “saint” in this case a description of her piety or a religious term) – and that she taught her son Latin. The text also gives an interesting account about his birth – the author, recognizing that the saint was born in the ground (since that is how onions naturally develop), turns this circumstance into a legend about a miracle (Saint ongnon: v.15-16):

Je sçay bien le lieu et la terre

Dont il yssit hayté et sain

De terre ne sortit onc nul saint

Se ce ne fut ung [bon] preudhom

Qui avoit nom saint Lazaron.

[I know well the place and the land

Where he was happy and healthy.

No saint has ever left the ground,

Except for a good man

Named St. Lazarus]

These connections and parallels to genuine saints occur quite often in the sermons joyeux. It was easy to create a desired image or imply a joke with a reference to a saint, because, as we have already seen, the stories of their lives were one of the most common readings of the time and were familiar to the audience. The mention of St. Lazarus works for an obvious joke, as the episode of his resurrection appeared in the Bible (John 11:1-44) and was recorded in several other variants throughout the Middle Ages, but we are going to see some more deep and interesting parallels.

St. Ham and Sausage happen to be very active: for instance, St. Ham travels to Spain to visit his sister (.”⋯sainct iambon sen alla/Hors son pays et devalla/A sa seur jusques en Espaigne”). There he starts preaching, but instead of Christian faith, he promotes a religion of drunkards (Des biberons aussi la loy) and Bacchus worship. This passage clearly contains a reference to multiple parody masses on drinking, which appeared around the 13th century and existed up to the 15th. The traditions of sermons joyeux and parody masses developed simultaneously and, although there are many more surviving examples of mock sermons than there are of such masses, the texts of the latter were relatively well-known and widespread. One of the reasons for their decrease in popularity (since there are less examples of Latin parody masses found in print or manuscripts after late 15th century) was probably the linguistic factor: masses were much harder to translate into vernacular, as this would have interfered with the very essence of their parody, since most of the humour in those texts was based on wordplay in the formulaic Latin language of liturgy. The structure of sermons joyeux combined with its versatility and ability to be converted to different languages without loss in spirit was an important component to their longevity and spread.

7 Conclusions

Having started by reviewing the literary precursors of sermons joyeux that deal with parodic saints, I demonstrated that the genre inherited a prolific literary tradition and made use of the devices developed by its predecessors. The tradition of humorous descriptions of false saints existed as a part of other literary forms and then became incorporated into the sermons joyeux due to its versatility and ability to be converted to different languages without loss in spirit. Coming from a simple personification of abstract notions in the form of false saints, hagiographical parody developed a structure more faithful to that of real saints’ accounts, incorporating such essential traits as memorial days, relics worshipping, miracles. I have also identified that our chosen group of sermons joyeux, although clearly borrowing from both artes praedicandi as the other representatives of the genre, leans towards hagiographical parody rather than liturgical parody: adopting a highly formulaic structure, based on the universally recognised generic features of saints’ lives, they managed to create a pattern which allowed creating more and more texts of the kind, adapting them to the needs and topics each individual author wanted to explore.

On a more general level, the article has provided substantial evidence to the fact that humour in these sermons, and especially its connection to the sacred, followed a long tradition of ecclesiastical comedic literature, which was prominent throughout the Middle Ages. The approach taken in the present study suggests that the authors of sermons joyeux most likely did not seek a utilitarian didactic purpose (or at least not only the utilitarian purpose), but participated in a prominent creative tradition that, at least at the time of the creation of our chosen texts, did not seek to criticise its material. I believe that medieval parody (and, consequentially, that of sermons joyeux) of the cult of saints and other religious practices does not attack neither the predictable nature of the real saints’ vitae, nor the concepts of improbable miracles that repeat each other from one saints’ life to another: instead, it signified the importance, recognition and interest towards religious life, symbolism and literature. As the spheres of comic and serious literature were not as strictly defined as multiple scholars supposed, the texts that we have discussed in the present article do not represent a conflict, but rather a connection between parody and reality, false and real hagiography, religious and comic spirit.