medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Dear Phyllis,

At 04:39 PM 3/5/2004 -0800, you wrote:
>Today (6. March) is the feast day of:
>
>Jordan of Pisa (blessed) (d. 1311)  Jordan became a Dominican at Pisa
>in 1280.  After studies at Paris he became a famous preacher in
>Florence.  Especially noteworthy is that he started using the local
>vernacular for sermons instead of Latin, thus playing an important
>role as aone of the founders of the Italian language.  At least
>that's what my source says; I had always assumed that popular
>preachers *must* have been speaking in the vernacular (??)


I'm surprised that no one else has yet responded to your query.  Here's my
take on the matter; those who are more knowledgeable are welcome to jump in.

The only thing about your summary that strikes me as off-base is that
"started" as used here seems to suggest that Jordan (Giordano da Pisa; in
older scholarship, Giordano da Rivalto) began the practice of couching
sermons in the local vernacular rather than Latin.  In that regard he
certainly had thirteenth-century predecessors; for a quick overview, see
Franco Mormando, "Preachers and Preaching," in Christopher Kleinhenz, ed.,
_Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia_ (NY: Routledge, 2004), vol. 2, pp.
931-33).  Like his predecessors, apparently, J. either did not commit his
vernacular sermons to writing or, if he did, posterity has not preserved
them in this form.  What we have, rather, is a substantial corpus of
sermons preserved in summary form by lay members of his audiences in
Florence and Pisa.  Many of his sermons (not all have been edited,
BTW)  seem to have enjoyed substantial manuscript circulation in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; to the extent they were used by others
as models, their syntax and vocabulary will have affected the development
of predecessors of modern Italian, especially forms of Tuscan.  In the
early seventeenth century they were mined by the editors of the influential
_Vocabolario della Crusca_ and through this and similar channels they
probably continued to influence the lexicon of Tuscanizing literary
Italian, itself an important precursor of today's Italian language.

It is worth remembering in this context that modern standard Italian (the
"Italian language" to which J.'s usage is ancestral) is a
nineteenth-century creation based largely on Tuscan and on the journalistic
practice of nineteenth-century Lombardy, especially Milan.  "Italian" in a
broader sense -- i.e. the so-called Italian "dialects" (actually, local or
regional Romance languages without armies or navies), only a few of which
participated significantly in the development of modern standard Italian --
is of course considertably older.  But J. could hardly be considered one of
_its_ founders.

We might also remember that in the early Middle Ages the vernacular of most
of Italy was Latin and that the Romance languages that developed on Italian
soil took a long time to differentiate themselves fully from this
parent.  Only in the twelfth century do we begin to have significant
amounts of preserved writing in any of the Italian dialects, and when this
occurs it often alternates with Latin, as in the Piedmontese _Sermoni
subalpini_ (usually cited as the first vernacular sermons in Italian)  and
in the only partially preserved _Montecassino Passion Play_ (which breaks
off after a few lines in the first/only Italian segment of the play).

Finally, in medieval Italy the choice of vernacular did not always imply
use of Italian or any other Romance tongue (e.g., Sardinian or Alpine
Romance).  Apart from the Greek-speaking areas of the Italian south, there
was also German, spoken in various Alpine regions.  The _Greater Carmina
Burana Passion Play_, now thought to be of the late twelfth century and
probably to have originated in the south Tirol, has many verses in the
latter tongue.

Best,
John Dillon

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