Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages

Description: Conflicted cooperation between authority and authorization is a manifestation of the fundamentally hybrid nature of the preacher's calling, one recognized in medieval handbooks as standing between earth and heaven. Significantly, women's preaching was a formative influence on ideas of men's preaching, particularly because theorists' discussions of women preachers raise and examine questions about personal authority and the body's role in that authority without directing those questions toward male preachers.; Chapter 2 argues that Chaucer's CT, with its intense emphasis on speech, embodiment, and authority, illuminates central issues in preaching theory by presenting them in concentrated and personified forms. The Parson and the Pardoner encapsulate a central ethical and moral issue: the appropriate relationship between the preacher's human body and his spiritual task.