The boundaries of sin and communal identity: Muslim and Christian preaching and the transmission of cultural identity in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb (12th to 15th centuries) (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Portugal, Spain)

Among scholars of Medieval Christianity, it is virtually a cliché to say that the sermon functioned as a “mass medium” of the communication and transmission of culture within society. Despite fulfilling a comparable role in Islam, scholars have yet to explain the cultural impact of medieval Muslim sermons. This dissertation argues that the sermon and the preaching event have unique properties that enable them to serve as vectors of culture in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb, Muslim and Christian preachers employed sermons to transmit the myths and values that shaped the identities of their communities and to redefine the boundaries that separated them. The main interrogatives of this dissertation are to explain why this role was conferred upon the sermon and how sermons construct communal identity.; The primary source materials for the study of Muslim preaching include unedited manuscripts of anonymous Andalusian sermonaries and of well-known preachers such as Ibn Marzuq and Ibn `Abbad of Ronda. These sources were gathered during archival research conducted in Rabat and Madrid from 1999 to 2000. The Christian primary sources consist of the edited sermonaries of St. Vincent Ferrer and an anonymous fourteenth-century Dominican preacher, and the treatises of San Pedro Pascual.; The method of analysis is interdisciplinary, combining history of religions, culture, and communications methods. Bourdieu's notion of institutions and performatives, Bell's theories of ritual, Oberoi and Lincoln's social readings of myth, and J. Z. Smith's idea of a “myth/ritual mode” help to elucidate the ritualization of the preaching event and explain the meaning and functions of mythic and ritual invocation in sermon texts. Following the methods of communication theorists, I subject the sermons to a structural analysis to illustrate that meaning is embedded in and emerges from the manner in which the distinct homiletic elements are composed. My comparison of medieval Muslim and Christian preaching concludes that the affective power of sermons resides in their respective rhetorical traditions—distinct, but equally characterized by a reliance on mimetic authority—and in the confluence between mythic invocation, ritualization, and social praxis that characterizes the preaching event.