The Liturgical Text as Authority in Pelbartus de Themeswar’s Sermon for the Feast of Saint Francis

The present paper focuses on the relationship between liturgy and sermon-literature. Despite the fact that theoretical summaries do not mention it, there was a common practice that can be observed in the case of the sermon-literature of the Middle Ages and thus that of Pelbartus de Themeswar, namely that the liturgical texts are used as authorities supporting the teachings within the sermon, which explain and express the faith of the Church with a legitimacy similar to other prestigious references. We can observe the operation of the proverb-like theological principle lex orandi lex credendi behind this practice, according to which liturgy is also a source of faith, and in some cases it expresses the faith of the Church even more perfectly than the somewhat abstract manifestations of theology. Pelbartus chooses this particular way of reference in sermon 74 in the summer part of the Pomerium de sanctis, in which he contemplates on the stigmatization of St Francis. The liturgical authorities employed by Pelbartus de Themeswar in his sermons are meant to prove the authenticity of Francis’s stigmata and that they are not the invention of Pelbartus. We can find the parallels of the method in the sermons of Robertus Cracciolus and Osualdus de Lasko, where these liturgical citations appear with particular emphasis on their authority-function.

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