Looking Through the Preacher’s Kaleïdoscope: Digital Humanities and the Study of Intertextuality in Preaching Material (13th-15th c.)

Résumé 0

The preaching revival that began towards the end of the 12th c. left us an impressive body of manuscript sources: sermons by the thousand of course, but also a wide range of preaching aids, like collections of exempla or distinctiones, florilegia, biblical tools, etc. The preachers could delve into this materia praedicabilis or 'preaching material' to borrow entire sermons, compose new ones, or simply rearrange existing material into a new shape, creating new texts like one creates a new image by rotating a kaleidoscope ‐ to borrow an image coined by David D'Avray. At the same time, the architecture of a text was becoming somehow more important than its contents. Powerfully structured and made from building blocks sometimes borrowed from other monuments: 13th c. sermons bear a certain resemblance to Gothic cathedrals, their contemporaries.In this paper, I will discuss the different takes on authorship revealed by the practice of medieval preachers. For instance, how was reuse considered in a performative form of communication like preaching? What is the place of invention in Bonaventure's famous division between scribe, compilator, commentator and author? But also, for us modern scholars using digital methods, what does it mean to edit and publish texts that were part of a complex system where the 'building blocks' were circulating widely and constantly reshuffled?