The thirteenth-century Northumberland Bestiary (NB) [Getty Museum, MS. 100], one of the richest bestiaries of all English-Latin manuscripts, preserves an unidentified sermon on “How the Sinner May Be Pleasing to God,” which begins “quotienscumque peccator,” and which, according to many scholars, is totally irrelevant to any bestiary. This paper will isolate four kinds of ars praedicandi models in NB to argue that not only is the quotienscumque sermon not irrelevant, but that sermon material in this bestiary forms a pervasive subtext that reflects the themes and rhetorical directives of the artes praedicandi handbooks and is responsive to the contemporaneous papal injunctions regarding clerical instruction. Several passages in NB are explicitly interpreted for boni precatores, and these passages often relate to its quotienscumque peccator sermon. All of this suggests that NB was a preaching tool — a source of exempla in sermons and a teaching resource for anyone responsible for training clerics in the cura animarum. As beasts serve man in nature, so the bestiary text serves his salvation, as fodder for the didactic sermon that clerics will preach to their flocks. - [Abstract]

Language: English

Locators: DOI: 10.1075/rein.18.12whi