Can someone point me to a discussion of the connections between the spread of
the feast of the Conception of the Virgin in the 13th and (especially) 14th
centuries, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception? Did acceptance of
the feast into local liturgies and sermon collections _de sanctis_ generally
imply acceptance of the doctrine?
I'm interested in this because the Dominican John Bromyard included the feast
of the Conception in the sanctorale cycle of one his model sermon collections
(the Distinctiones). In selecting feasts for inclusion he generally follows
the Dominican calendar, but adds feasts of local interest (he wrote in
Hereford). The Conception was certainly not yet accepted by the Dominicans,
and it seems not to have been celebrated in Hereford before Archbishop
Mepham's statute of 1328 prescribed it for the whole province of Canterbury
(see Cheney's article "Feast-days in Medieval England"), so this looks like a
useful _terminus a quo_ for the Distinctiones.
In the sermon, moreover, Bromyard follows the Thomistic line, without being
controversial about it: he implicitly denies the "immaculate" nature of the
conception by placing the "sanctification" of Mary in the womb after her
conception. In his _Summa predicancium_ Bromyard explicitly adopts the
Thomist position that Mary was sanctified at her "animatio", and not earlier.
Now, as the Lexikon des Mittelalters puts it, the feast of the Conception
became an "Ideenfest" associated with the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception; but Mepham's statute does not mention this doctrine (he refers to
it as the predestined conception). Would a Thomist preacher in the 1330s have
felt himself immediately involved in doctrinal controversy when he preached on
the feast of the Conception without preaching the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception, or would he and his audience have accepted that celebrating the
feast did not imply accepting the doctrine? Is there evidence in other sermon
collections?
Peter Binkley
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