Preaching, Emotion, and the Aristotelian Turn

Chapter 7 explores the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric on the emotional work of preaching. Many manuscripts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (and a good proportion of manuscripts of De regimine principum) belonged to clerical institutions; some of the most interesting responses to Aristotelian rhetoric are left to us by readers who were actively engaged in preaching. The many medieval artes praedicandi offer nothing like Aristotle’s Rhetoric in terms of teaching emotional appeal. The preachers who encountered the Rhetoric would find that it voiced the theory behind what was already lodged in their practice but which the preceptive traditions they had inherited did not articulate. It affirmed, in theoretical terms, what no medieval art of preaching articulated so systematically: the behavioral psychology of emotion and the strategies for appealing to emotions through argument. This chapter gives particular attention to three preachers who used the Rhetoric in their own practice: Thomas Eborall of London, Engelbert of Admont, and Mathias of Linköping (confessor to Birgitta of Sweden). Finally, the chapter explores the impact of the Rhetoric on an anonymous fifteenth-century pastoral reader who composed a short English verse on “Piers the Plowman” which he left in a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric next to the section on amicitia; it considers how this preacher brought together the emotional concerns of English poetry (the broad Piers Plowman phenomenon) and the theory of emotion in the Rhetoric.