Late
Medieval and Early Modern Preaching for Unpopular Cults: The Case of Pope
Celestine V
George Ferzoco
University of Bristol
Canonization
bulls provided material for bishops and priests throughout Christendom to
preach on relevant feast days for new saints, and material from these bulls can
be found in sermons. However, not all saints were canonized equally: some had
cults that exploded onto the devotional scene, whereas others faltered or
failed to attract devotees. One signifier of a ‘failed’ saint’s cult is the
comparative paucity of sermons related to him or her. We have well over a
thousand different sermons, from the late medieval and early modern periods,
dedicated to Francis of Assisi, whereas it is difficult to find any at all
dedicated to the feasts of saints such as Peter of the Morrone, more commonly
as Pope Celestine the Fifth. Commonly held by modern readers of Dante to be the
person identified as ‘he who through cowardice made the great refusal’, we find
a majority – but far from a unanimity -- of medieval commentators to have been
sympathetic to the figure of an austere holy man who, after sixty years as a
hermit, was elected pope only to become the sole person ever to resign that
position voluntarily. Strikingly, almost no sermons dedicated to him have
survived. This paper will endeavor to explain and illustrate this homiletic
curiosity.
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