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 text 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 13th century. The relation between genre, content, and gender is analyzed, 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 analysis 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 compromize between simple transcriptions which ignore stemmatic relation and full-scale editions attempting to fit all manuscripts into a genealogical table,

Review:

As an example of textual editing, this book could scarcely be bettered ... Anyone interested in the processes of oral and scribal transmission, for whatever period, would do well to study its conclusions. * Arnold Hunt, Times Literary Supplement * Medieval Marriage Sermons is a book to be pondered over and to inspire future scholars to imitation. * English Historical Review *