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ABSTRACT
The Good Thief mentioned in Luke 23. 29–43 is an extreme example of the benefits of conversion. Yet he was not presented as an archetype of the penitent sinner; rather, that role was reserved for Mary Magdalene. This article studies the very few cases where the Good Thief, or St Dismas as he was also known, was discussed in medieval sermons. It also endeavours to explain the reasons why he was not considered a suitable role model for the penitent sinner. The discussion revolves around the contradictory requirements of the preachers. On one hand, they wanted to avoid driving sinners to despair by encouraging them to convert even if at the very end of life. On the other hand, they needed to emphasize the need to do penance now rather than postpone it for an uncertain future. This latter need was considered more important and that proved to be a crucial argument against using the Good Thief as an exemplary figure in the sermons.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 On the various names given to the Good Thief in early apocryphal literature, see B. M. Metzger, New Testament Studies: Philological, Versional, and Patristic, New Testament Tools and Studies, 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1980), pp. 33–38.
2 All the English language Bible texts in this article are taken from the King James Bible.
3 B.M. Kienzle, ‘Introduction’, in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons: Proceedings of the International Symposium (Kalamazoo, May 4–7, 1995), organised by the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society (IMSSS) ed. by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and others, Textes et études du Moyen Âge, 5 (Louvain-La-Neuve: FIDEM, 1996), pp. xi–xx (p. xii). See also George Ferzoco, ‘Sermon Literatures Concerning Medieval Saints’, in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. by Kienzle and others, pp. 103–25 (pp. 104–05); Anne T. Thayer, ‘Intercessors, Examples and Rewards: The Roles of the Saints in the Penitential Themes of Representative Late Medieval Sermon Collections’, in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. by Kienzle and others, pp. 339–54 (p. 347); André Vauchez, ‘Santi mirabili e santi imitabili: le nuove funzioni dell’agiografia negli ultimi secoli del medioevo’, in André Vauchez, Santi, profeti e visionary: Il soprannaturale nel medioevo (Bologna: Mulino, 2000), pp. 57–68.
4 David d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 50–51.
5 Kate Ludwig Jansen, The Making of Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 203–04. One could add one important figure to Jansen’s list, namely the prodigal son. Using the story of the prodigal son to explain the different stages of the penitential process or indeed, using him as an exemplary penitent, was a common topic in the sermons for the Saturday after the second Sunday of Lent. See Pietro Delcorno, In the Mirror of the Prodigal Son: The Pastoral Uses of a Biblical Narrative (c. 1200–1550), Commentaria, 9 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), passim. On the role of Magdalene, see also Katherine L. Jansen, ‘Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 21 (1995), 1–25; Clare M. Kudera, ‘Models of Monastic Devotion in Peter of Celle’s Sermons for the Feast of Mary Magdalene’, in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. by Kienzle and others, pp. 67–84; Anne T. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 83-91. On the history and diffusion of the cult of Magdalene, see Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident des origines à la fin du moyen âge (Paris: Clavreuil, 1959).
6 Kara Ann Morrow, ’Disputation in Stone: Jews Imagined on the St. Stephen Portal of Paris Cathedral’, in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. by Mitchell B. Merback, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, 37 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 63–86 (p. 65).
7 St Dismas’s cult developed mainly in southern Italy and in Valencia. It was not known in the German lands before the sixteenth century; see Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaction Books, 1999), p. 224.
8 Johannes Baptist Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen sermones des Mittelalters, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, 43, 11 vols (Münster: Aschendorffsce Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969–90), iii (1971), 23, no. 258; vi (1975), 258, no. 33 and 418, no. 36; viii (1978), 561, no. 124.
9 Schneyer, Repertorium, ii (1970), 317, no. 450.
10 Charles Muniere, ‘Introduction’, in Gviberti Tornacensis De morte, De septem verbis Domini in crvce, ed. by Charles Munier, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 242 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 177–78. There was another manuscript in Cologne, but it was destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War.
11 Schneyer, Repertorium, ii (1970), 317, no. 449; vi (1975), 515, no. 12.
12 Anonymous, Sermo in Dominica Passionis. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 14953, fols 29r–31r.
13 Anonymous, Sermo in Dominica Passionis, fol. 30r.
14 Anonymous, Sermo in Dominica Passionis, fol. 30r.
15 Anonymous, Sermo in Dominica Passionis, fol. 30v.
16 Jacopo da Varazze, Sermones de tempore, Dominica in septuagesima, sermo tertius (Deventer: Richard Paffraet, 1483), fol. e7v.
17 Jacopo da Varazze, Sermones de tempore. Dominica in septuagesima, sermo tertius, fol. e8v: ‘Quinto ponitur penitentium magna consolatio cum dicitur “Sic erunt novissimi primi”. Sepe enim illi qui penitentiam tarde veniunt citius demunerantur quam illi que tempestive vemiunt, quia citius de corpore exiviunt. Citius enim latro est remuneratus quam Petrus’ [‘The fifth is the great consolation of those who do penance of which it is said: “So the last shall be first”. For it is so that often those who come to penance late are remunerated faster because they leave their [earthly] bodies more quickly. The thief was remunerated more quickly than Peter’].
18 Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, ed. by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Firenze: Sismel, 1998), p. 336.
19 Giordano da Pisa, Quaresimale Fiorentino 1305–1306, ed. by Carlo Delcorno (Firenze: Sansoni, 1974), p. 74.
20 Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. by Siegfried Wenzel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 463. Fasciculus morum is an early fourteenth-century preacher’s handbook on the seven capital sins and their opposing virtues, apparently of Franciscan authorship. It survives in twenty-eight known manuscripts, almost all of them in England or of English origin. Each sin and each virtue cover one chapter. Chapters include basic theological information on the vice or virtue in question and a collection of exemplum stories to be used when preaching on that sin or virtue; see ‘Introduction’, in Fasciculus morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzel, pp. 1-23.
21 L. Kretzenbacher, ‘St Dismas, der rechte Schächer. Legenden, Kultstätten und Verehrungsformen in Innerösterreich’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereinis für Steiermark, 42 (1951), 119–39 (pp. 119–20); Z. Izydorczyk, ‘Introduction’, in The Medieval Gospels of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, ed. by Zbigniew Izydorczyk, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 158 (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 1–19 (pp. 6–9); Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, p. 24. On the history of the Syriac Gospel of Infancy, see The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation, ed. by J. K. Elliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 100–01; I Vangeli apocrifi, ed. by Marcello Craveri (Torino: Einaudi, 1990), pp. 113–14.
22 Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, p. 221.
23 Guilielmi Peraldi, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum, tomus II (Paris: Rodulphus Clutius, 1629), p. 205.
24 Janet Robson, ‘Judas and the Franciscans: Perfidy Pictured in Lorenzetti’s Passion Cycle at Assisi’, The Art Bulletin, 86 (2004), 31–57 (p. 32).
25 Peraldi, Summae virtutum, ii, 182–97.
26 Peraldi, Summae virtutum, ii, 286.
27 Liber exemplorum ad usum praedicantium, ed. by A. G. Little, British Society for Franciscan Studies, 1 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1908), pp. 62–67. As the name indicates, Liber exemplorum was a collection of exemplum stories meant for preaching. The author was an anonymous English Franciscan friar. Based upon the internal evidence gathered from the text, Liber exemplorum was written between 1270 and 1279. It survives in just one manuscript; ‘Introduction’, in Liber exemplorum ad usum praedicantium, ed. by Little, pp. v–ix.
28 Le Speculum laicorum: Edition d’une collection d’exempla, composée en Angleterre à la fin du xiiie siècle, ed. by J. Th. Welter (Paris: Picard, 1914), pp. 28–32. Speculum laicorum was an exemplum collection meant to be used by the preachers. It was written by an anonymous English Franciscan friar towards the end of the thirteenth century. It survives in sixteen manuscripts, all located in the British Isles; ‘Introduction’, in Le Speculum laicorum, ed. by Welter, pp. iii–xviii.
29 Fasciculus morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzl, pp. 483–91.
30 See Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales. FF Communications, 204 (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1981), nos 4075–78.
31 It seems that Nicholas was friar at the convent at King’s Lynn but nothing else is known of him; see Holly Johnson, The Grammar of Good Friday: Macaronic Sermons of Late Medieval England, Sermo, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), p. 375.
32 Quoted in Johnson, The Grammar of Good Friday, pp. 422–23.
33 Sermoni del B. Bernardino da Feltre nella redazione di Fr. Bernardino Bulgarino da Brescia: Il quaresimale di Pavia del 1493, ed. by P. Carlo da Milano, Biblioteca di Testi Medievali, 12 (Milano: Vita e pensiero, 1940), p. 102.
34 M. de Kroon, ‘Pseudo-Augustin im Mittelalter: Entwurf eines Forschungsberichts’, Augustiniana, 22 (1972), 511–30 (pp. 521–22); Carlo Delcorno, ‘Nuovi studi sull’ «exemplum»: Rassegna’, Lettere Italiane, 46 (1994), 459–97 (p. 496).
35 Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 129.
36 Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Reformation, pp. 59–60.
37 See for example Tubach, Index exemplorum, nos 232, 1492, 1501, 4405, 5131, and 5137.
38 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 139.
39 Guibert de Tournai, De septem verbis Domini in cruce, Sermo iv. See Gviberti Tornacensis De morte, De septem verbis Domini in crvce, p. 236.
40 Guibert de Tournai, De septem verbis Domini in cruce, Sermo iv. See Gviberti Tornacensis De morte, De septem verbis Domini in crvce, pp. 242–44. The quote is on p. 242.
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Jussi Hanska
Jussi Hanska ([email protected]) is a university lecturer in the didactics of History and the Social Sciences at the Tampere University, Finland and the member of Trivium – Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies.