ABSTRACT
One Saint Cordelia’s day (October 22) in the late fourteenth century, Dominican Johannes Tauler delivered a sermon on Jesus’s Parable of the Wedding Banquet, a feast the King of Heaven prepares for his son (Matthew 22:1-14). From its references to the bride of Christ and external information about Tauler’s service preaching to the seven Dominican women’s communities and the dozens of beguinages around Strasbourg, this sermon is presumed to have been preached to a community of women religious or novices preparing for profession. But Tauler, even in the Adelhausen manuscript, does not equate the bride with a celibate woman, much less a Dominican nun, and this sermon also appears in manuscripts owned by lay families and every early print edition of Tauler’s German works. In each surviving copy, Tauler uses explicitly gender-inclusive wording to represent the bride’s transformation into a “nuwen menschen der nach Christo gebildet ist” [new person fashioned after the image of Christ], explaining that the bride is remade after the image of Christ through marriage, just as Christ takes on the appearance of humanity through incarnation. Tauler unequivocally asserts that Christ is a spouse to every soul from the instant of creation to the end of the universe, a perspective that first emerged in the late thirteenth century among mendicant friars and beguines offering catechetical instruction in urban communities. Their surviving texts addressed a universal community of brides for whom marriage to Christ
1 “der brútegoůme daz ist unser herre Jhesus Christus. Die brut daz sin wir: din und min sele, wir alle sin geruffet und geladen, und alle ding sint bereit zů male in der vereinunge Gotz mit der minnender selen, mit sinre brut.” All translations are my own from Vetter’s edition of Freiburg University Library MS 41, against which I have compared Conrad Kachelofen’s 1498 print edition. Johannes Tauler, Predigten, ed. Ferdinand Vetter (Dublin: Weidmann, 1968), 431-3. Vetter’s manuscript came into possession of the Dominican convent of Adelhausen no later than 1410, and may have been copied there as early as 1359. It is one of two extant manuscripts dating to Tauler’s own lifetime. According to the Freiburg catalog records, the manuscript was first owned by a lay family, and also contains an ownership note on 144v: “Diß buch höret Ketrinen von Hall vnd Gretlin von Hall ze Friburg” [this book belongs to Ketrin and Gretlin von Hall of Freiburg]. The Kachelofen edition only modernizes spelling. Johannes Tauler and Rulman Merswin, Sermon des gross gelarten in gnade erlauchten doctoris Johannis Thauleri predigerr ordens, weisende auff den nehesten waren wegk, yn geiste czu wandern durch uberschwebenden syn, vnour acte
was the only path to human salvation and the key to understanding the history of creation. As I shall explain, Tauler’s exegesis related depictions of union between Christ and the bride to teach an anthropology of the human soul. Reconsidering the marriage between Christ and the soul within that theological framework recasts seemingly erotic depictions of union to Christ as explanations of creation and salvation. This theological message has been obscured by the invention of the category of “bridal mysticism” and the subsequent experiential-erotic discourse to which some medieval authors-especially women-have been subjected.
