Medieval Sermons and Conversion: A Comparative Perspective. Introduction

The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary boom in the scholarship on inter-religious conversion. The old dichotomous models that privileged either the inner, subjective, affective, or psychological experience of the individual convert or the social, institutional, or ritual aspects of religious conversion have given way to more nuanced approaches that recognize not only that narratives of the experiences of individual converts must be historically and socially contextualized, but also that they play ideological and symbolic roles within society.¹ Ideally, sociological and biographical or psychological perspectives should be combined since no one approach or discipline alone suffices to comprehend fully the phenomenon of conversion.² Conversion studies scholars have increasingly moved toward introducing comparative and global perspectives, acknowledging that the processes, experiences, and contributing factors of conversion differ from one religion to another, change over time or in response to inter-religious interactions, and are inflected by other factors such as gender, ethnicity, or social status.³ Traditional images of passive converts and of conversion as a sudden radical change have been superseded by understandings of the convert as an active agent and of conversion as a lengthy process.⁴ Finally, new themes have emerged as foci of study: alongside inter-religious conversion, scholars are paying more attention to phenomena such as intra-religious conversion, the intensification of one’s own faith tradition, forms of resistance to religious conversion, ‘deconversion’, and conversion as a passage from one stage of life to another — rather than from one religious tradition to another.⁵

These advances and new perspectives in conversion studies call for a reconsideration of the role of preachers, preaching tools, and the content and impact of their sermons. A number of recently published works by scholars such as E. C. Kunz, Torrance Kirby, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, and Jacob Lackner evince this renewed effort to rethink the relationship between conversion, preaching, and sermon-related literature and performances.⁶ The 22^nd International Symposium of the International Medieval Sermons Studies Society, dedicated to the theme, ‘Conversions and Life Passages through the Mirror of Medieval Preachers’, sought to contribute to the new trends in conversion studies by adopting a comparative approach exploring various modalities of conversion, deconversion, and life passages in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.⁷ We invited papers that explored medieval and early modern Jewish, Christian, or Muslim preaching and sermon literature relevant to conversion, as well as other related literature reflecting preachers’ life choices in relation to existential conversion or passages from one identity or stage of life to another.

By approaching these topics from a cross-cultural perspective through the interrogation of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim preaching and sermon literature from the medieval and early modern periods we sought to illuminate and problematize the changing nature of conversion as an individual and a collective phenomenon. We also hoped to shed light on the homiletic strategies different religious traditions employ to encourage or resist conversion. Altogether, there were over twenty-five paper presentations, including two keynote speeches,⁸ eight poster presentations, and a roundtable session on preaching and the digital humanities. The articles in the current volume of Medieval Sermon Studies by Paula Cotoi, Jussi Hanska, Tahera Qutbuddin, and Amanda Valdés Sánchez were selected as a faithful reflection of the symposium’s goal to explore conversion preaching within diverse religious traditions and historical and geographical contexts — France, the Iberian Peninsula, the Kingdom of Hungary, and early Islamic Arabia — as a contribution to cross-cultural conversion studies.⁹

In his article, ‘The Figure of the Good Thief and Conversion in extremis in Late Medieval Preaching’, Jussi Hanska discusses the problems surrounding the invocation of the Good Thief St Dismas as a suitable model of repentance and conversion for medieval Christian audiences. Unlike Mary Magdalene, whose popularity as the preeminent model of repentance is widely attested in the countless extant copies of the saint’s day sermons dedicated to her, St Dismas is not featured in any of the known saints’ day sermon collections. Hanska’s article provides a plausible response to the question of ‘why the Good Thief was not good enough to serve as an exemplary penitent’ since Jesus himself confirmed his entry into heaven.

The article begins with a statistical and content analysis of the handful of sermons that mention the Good Thief or are based on the thema from Luke 23. 42–43. While most of these sermons are anonymous there are two by noted famous preachers, Jacopo da Varazze (c. 1230–98) and Giordano da Pisa (c. 1260–1311). Following a discussion of the sermon specimens that present the Good Thief as a positive role model for would-be converts, Hanska develops his argument that, on balance, medieval Latin Christian preachers and theologians considered the Good Thief’s in extremis conversion to be an unsuitable model for a mass Christian audience because it would encourage delaying one’s own conversion. This is borne out in evidence from other sermons and theological tractates that condemned delaying penitence as a sin — a subspecies of sloth — and preached that everyone would be subjected to the Last Judgment and not admitted immediately into paradise as St Dismas had been. Hence Hanska concludes that the most convenient solution was to minimize invocations of the Good Thief as a model for converts and penitents in favor of more suitable saintly models such Mary Magdalene. In sum, Hanska’s article expands our understanding of penitential and conversion preaching in a medieval Latin Christian context through his analysis of rare sermons on the Good Thief’s in extremis conversion and his identification and synthesis of a broad range of materials, including exempla collections, sermons, and theological compendia that struggled to negotiate the tensions between the story of St Dismas’s conversion and immediate entry into paradise and mainstream Catholic teachings about penitence and the Last Judgment.

Paula Cotoi’s article, ‘De damnabili ritu Graecorum: Osualdus de Lasko’s Sermons regarding Orthodox Christians in Late Medieval Hungary’, focuses attention on intra-religious conversion preaching in eastern Europe. The author analyzes three sermons in the Lenten sermon collection composed by the Observant Franciscan Osualdus de Lasko (c. 1450–1511), entitled, Quadragesimale Gemma fidei (1506), which advocate the ‘damnation’ of the Greek Orthodox rite. The author interrogates the extent to which Osualdus de Lasko’s sermons served as instruments of inter-religious conversion, internal conversion or of resistance to conversion. Toward this end Cotoi critically reassesses the stock Roman Catholic polemical arguments that the Observant Franciscan preacher reproduced in his sermonary. For instance, the Greeks are ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’ because they do not recognize Roman primacy over all the churches and deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son. Based on her close reading of the prologue and three sermons in the Gemma fidei, Cotoi argues that the sermonary reveals Osualdus’s heightened concern that the presence within the Hungarian kingdom’s borders of ethnic minorities affiliated to the Byzantine ‘schismatics’, namely, Romanians, Serbs, Ruthenians, Armenians, and Bulgarians, would make the kingdom more vulnerable to conquest by the Ottomans. For Cotoi, the Gemma fidei reflects Osualdus’s conviction that events such as the fall of Constantinople and the ongoing ‘Ottoman threat’ were ‘divine punishments for the disobedience, pride, and schism of the Greeks’. Hence resistance to the ‘Ottoman threat’ led Osualdus to conceive of his sermon cycle as an instrument to convert the Greeks to Roman Catholicism and subordinate them to papal authority, rather than as a means to promote ‘union’ or ‘communion’ between the Greek and Latin Churches. Cotoi considers this to be a characteristic of the Observant Franciscans who refused ‘to recognize the Orthodox as the equals of the Catholics’. Cotoi’s contribution illuminates how changing historical circumstances influenced the discourse and the intensity of the Franciscan campaigns promoting the conversion and latinization of these ethnic minorities, as well as the strategies employed toward these objectives. In so doing, she also introduces a cross-cultural perspective by demonstrating how concerns about the Ottoman Islamic ‘threat’ informed Christian intra-religious conversion strategies.

For her part, Amanda Valdés Sánchez examines a case of Christian-Muslim inter-religious conversion encounters in her article, ‘“Images as preachers”: The Role of Marian Imagery in the Religious Indoctrination of the Moriscos of the Albayzin of Granada’. The author studies the use of visual and textual images of the Virgin Mary and Christ as preaching aids in the proselytization of the Muslim populations of Granada during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although the Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity in the Catholic Monarchs’ royal edict of 1501, the populations, thence forth known as ‘Moriscos’, continued to observe Islamic religious and cultural practices in secret. The forced conversion en masse of these Muslim populations necessitated the construction of new parochial churches with the attendant production of devotional images and the composition of liturgical, catechetical, and homiletic materials targeting these audiences, as well as the translation of Islamic literature and Christian polemical works about Islam for preachers to use in their preaching and instruction of the Morisco denominations. While scholars have long recognized the pivotal role played by Archbishop Hernando de Talavera (c. 1430–1507) in these endeavors, Valdés Sánchez reassesses his role by demonstrating that his Castilian translation of the Catalan preacher Francesc Eiximenis’s (c. 1330–1407) Vita Christi, intended for use by Christian preachers and priests, offered an image of the Virgin inspired by the Islamic traditions that could be deployed to accommodate Muslim sensibilities by highlighting points of contact between Christianity and Islam. The ultimate goal was to achieve the authentic, as opposed to nominal, conversion of the Morisco population. Valdés Sánchez further argues that the cast sculptural images of the Virgin Mary and Christ created by the early sixteenth-century image-maker Huberto Alemán at the behest of Queen Isabel (1451–1504) as preaching and catechetical aids targeting the Moriscos were similarly designed to accommodate Islamic views of Christ and the Virgin. Her article lends new insights into the dynamic interactive nature of Christian-Muslim inter-religious proselytization.

Finally, Tahera Qutbuddin’s article, ‘Classical Islamic Oration’s Power of Persuasion: Art, Function and “Conversions” of Imam ‘Ali’s Hamman and Imam Husayn’s Hurr’, explores Islamic oratory’s power of persuasion. The first part of the article provides a general overview of classical Arabic oratory’s art and function. Here Qutbuddin dissects the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’, by which she means the rhetorical and stylistic elements of classical Arabic oratory that enabled orators to ‘persuade, convince, and achieve their oratorical goals’. She argues that ‘classical Arabic oration’s stylistic choices stems from its oral culture’, which relies heavily upon vivid imagery and ‘pulsating rhythm’, achieved through the use of parallel grammatical structures and rhymed prose. Not only do these aesthetic elements function as mnemonic devices; citing literary critic Richard A. Lanham, Qutbuddin posits that they also constitute rhetorical techniques of ‘tacit persuasion’ used to convince the target audience to modify their behavior, thought, or their religious convictions. She then considers the administrative, social, and devotional functions of classical Arabic oratory, focusing on how persuasive strategies were deployed according to the sub-genre of oratory — sermons of pious counsel, liturgical Friday and Eid sermons, battle orations, or political orations. In the second part of the article Qutbuddin analyzes two famous specimens of Arabic oratory that reportedly induced a life-changing impact on members of the audience: the famous ‘Sermon on Piety’ by the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, which reportedly provoked the death of one of its listeners, and Husayn ibn ‘Ali’s sermon on the battlefield at Karbala, which resulted in the conversion to the Shi‘i cause of one of his Umayyad enemies. Qutbuddin analyzes the content of the sermons and the literary accounts of the reactions they allegedly produced, thereby shedding light on the diversity of the classical Arabic oratorical tradition’s techniques of persuasion, its capacity to function as an instrument of internal conversion, and the dynamics of audience response.

Taken together, the four articles in this special volume illustrate some of the novel insights that arise from exploring the intersection between conversion studies and medieval sermon studies. Placing distinct regions and periods of Christendom — thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France and Italy, late medieval Hungary and sixteenth-century Spain — into scholarly conversation has revealed that Christian agents had a plethora of conversion strategies at their disposal, which they judiciously used according to the composition of the target audience, theological and doctrinal considerations, and the given political context, among other factors. Although the perception of Islam as a threat to Christendom has been a dominant theme in the history of the medieval and early modern Church’s encounters with Islam, the juxtaposition of the articles by Cotoi and Valdés Sánchez reminds us that anti-Muslim polemics is merely one strategy among many that Christians deployed in the quest for inter- or intra-religious conversion. As Hanska, Valdés Sánchez, and Cotoi illustrate, Christian conversion strategies typically involved the use of real images often combined with the evocation of mental depictions of the deeds of particular saints to elicit a particular emotional response from the audience. Yet Qutbuddin has shown how the Arab-Islamic ‘aesthetics of persuasion’ relied far more heavily upon the rhetorical and stylistic techniques of verbal communication to achieve the desired goal of persuasion or conversion. That said, an intriguing common denominator between Qutbuddin and Cotoi’s analyses is that of the imbrication of politics in intra-religious sectarian differences both as an underlying cause and as a means of overcoming them by conversion or other means. We hope that the four articles in this special volume will stimulate further cross-cultural studies on medieval preaching and conversion that will deepen our understanding of how conversion, deconversion, and resistance to conversion are impacted by the use of visual and verbal-rhetorical techniques of persuasion, by rational argumentation and appeals to the emotions, and by the historical and political contexts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda G. Jones

Linda G. Jones ([email protected]) is a tenured research professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Jussi Hanska

Jussi Hanska ([email protected]) is a university lecturer in didactics of History and Social Sciences at the Tampere University, Finland and the member of Trivium – Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies.

Notes

1 Ryan Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

2 Ines W. Jindra, A New Model of Religious Conversion: Beyond Network Theory and Social Constructivism, Religion in the Americas, 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

3 In addition to Szpiech and Jindra, see, among others, Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World, ed. by Yosi Yisraeli and Yaniv Fox (London: Routledge, 2017); The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. by Louis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and Harvey Hames, ‘Approaches to Conversion in the Late 13^th-Century Church’, Studia Lulliana, 35 (1995), 75–84.

4 Oxford Handbook, ed. by Rambo and Farhadian.

5 On the phenomenon of ‘deconversion’, see the eponymous article by Heinz Schreib, ‘Deconversion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. by Louis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 271–96.

6 Emily Ciavarella Kunz, ‘Transformed Within, Transformed Without: The Enactment of Conversion in Medieval and Early Modern European Saint Plays’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 2020); W. J. Torrance Kirby, Persuasion and Conversion. Essays on Religion, Politics and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 166 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Maria Mäkelä, ‘Conversion as an Exemplary Experience in the 14^th Century and Today: Narrative-Comparative Approaches to the Exemplum’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 47 (2022), 16–38; and Jacob Lackner, ‘Violent Men and Malleable Women: Gender and Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Sermon Exempla’, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, 30 (2016), 24–47.

7 The online symposium was co-organized by Linda G. Jones and Oriol Catalán under the auspices of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society within the framework of the research project, ‘Writing Religious, Transcultural, Gendered Identities and Alterities in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean’, funded by the Spanish government and the European Union (PGC2018–093472–B–C32, FEDER/MICIU/AEI, 2018–22).

8 The keynote speeches were delivered by Dr Francisco Gimeno Blay, ‘Ediciones manuscritas de los sermones de san Vicente Ferrer (ante 1485)’ and Dr Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘Arabic Oration in Early Islam: Art, Function, and Two Instances of “Conversion”’. A revised version of the latter is published in the current volume.

9 Additionally, Linda Jones is currently editing a special volume of articles on Islamic and Judeo-Arabic preaching, conversion, and techniques of persuasion for the Islamic Studies journal, Al-Qantara.