Preaching in thirteenth-century hospitals

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Preaching in thirteenth-century hospitals

By Adam J. Davis

Journal of Medieval History, Vol.36:1 (2010)

Abstract: This article uses thirteenth-century hospital sermons as a window into the moral and religious environment of these charitable institutions, large numbers of which were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What emerges from the reportationes of sermons preached in the hôtel-dieu of Paris and ad status sermons directed at hospitals’ personnel and inmates by Jacques de Vitry, Humbert of Romans and Guibert de Tournai is a spirituality that stressed the penitential (and potentially salvific) power of doing works of mercy (in the case of hospital workers) and bodily suffering (in the case of hospital inmates). The particular social context of hospital preaching is also evident in preachers’ anxieties about the quality of hospital administration. The sermons that were preached in thirteenth-century hospitals reflect the heightened value placed on caring for the sick and poor, a historical development more often associated with the later middle ages.

Introduction: During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of hospitals for the sick, poor, and powerless were founded all over western Europe, creating a dense network of charitable institutions, part of what André Vauchez has called ‘une véritable révolution de la charité’. Medieval hospitals were often multifunctional institutions that housed travellers, the indigent, widows, the elderly, the disabled, and those suffering from a variety of different illnesses. Managed mostly by quasi-religious women and men, hospitals represented a religious and social commitment to helping the poor and sick through the creation of a new kind of social-welfare institution. While hospitals were founded, at least in part, in response to demographic growth, urbanisation, commercial expansion, and the monetisation of the economy, they were also tied to a renewed concern with the poor and sick among theologians and canonists, and a rise in lay spirituality.

Most of the scholarly literature on medieval hospitals has relied on a range of sources — such as charters, wills, statutes, and archaeological evidence — to reconstruct daily life inside hospitals and the charitable support they received. Although wills and charter donations provide strong evidence for a new charitable impulse in twelfth and thirteenth-century society, they do not explain the source for this charitable impulse, nor do they reveal much about the experience of hospital inmates. Why did the corporal works of mercy enumerated in Matthew 25:31–46 (feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, granting hospitality to strangers, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and visiting prisoners) resonate with hospital donors and hospital workers? What motivated those who worked in hospitals to do so, and how did they view their mission? What administrative challenges did they face?

The sermons that were preached to inmates and workers inside hospitals, which scholars of medieval hospitals have tended to neglect, represent a valuable source for understanding the moral and religious environment inside hospitals. Preaching represented an important opportunity for moral and religious edification inside hospitals, and sermons illustrate the ways that preachers sought to exhort, commend, comfort, and correct hospital workers and the inmates they served. For the historian of medieval hospitals, moreover, sermons that were directed at hospital audiences serve as windows not only into the values, ideals, and assumptions of the preacher, but into the particular moral and religious environment of these institutions, showing the ways that the themes of a sermon both shaped and were shaped by the particular social context of the preaching.

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