A ready-made outline for a sermon

 

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 820, fol. 3 (detail)

(from link) The featured image for this blog post shows a distinctio from the Distinctiones Abel by Parisian theologian Peter the Chanter (d. 1197). What is a distinctio? The word had many senses during the Middle Ages, but in the Chanter’s Distinctiones Abel, a distinctio consisted of a diagrammatic arrangement of the symbolic meanings or attributes of a word or concept. The entire work consists of diagrams for some six hundred words taken from the Bible, arranged in alphabetical order. The distinctio featured here (see transcription and translation below) is one of many devoted to the word “church” [ecclesia]. It provides two lists of eight to describe the church: one of flowers and herbs–roses, lilies, violets, crocuses, ivies, frankincense, myrrh, and aloe–and the other of the categories of the faithful associated with these plants: martyrs, virgins, confessors, the continent, the married, prayers (an activity rather than a group of people), those who mortify their flesh, and the contrite.

For a priest, this diagram would work as a ready-made outline for a sermon on the well-known topic of the church as a garden, a diverse habitat that sustains many species of faith in the form of as many categories of people.[2] This sermon would be easy to memorize as well since it would be grounded in a list of concrete, easily visualized items: a list of flowers and plants. Moreover, the image of a church garden could serve as a mnemonic locus, where the flowers’ arrangement would provide the priest with additional reminders of the categories they represent: for instance, he could group the roses, lilies, and violets together to remind himself of the three categories of saints (virgins, martyrs, and confessors); he could visualize the ivy clinging to the garden’s wall to remind himself of the married, who cling to each other; and to remind himself of their opposite–the continent (or chaste)–he could visualize a row of crocuses growing right in front of the ivy-covered wall.