“Paris Masters, Reform Preaching and Crusade Recruiting in Urban Contexts”
Jessalyn Bird

Reformers and penance preachers involved in the development of pastoral care and new forms of religious life commonly used their offices as crusade preachers and legates to target the vices which they felt hindered the success of the crusades through legislation, disciplinary actions and preaching geared to produce mass and individual conversion. Paris-trained moralists and their regular religious colleagues viewed cities as cesspits seething with usury, dishonest business practices, prostitution, heresy and anticlericalism exacerbated by jurisdictional quarrels between communes and ecclesiastics and presented various forms of participation in the reforming crusade as antidotes to vice and exceptionally merciful penances.  Their techniques and messages produced dramatic results and were occasionally appropriated by lay audiences, including the leaders of the pueri of 1212 and the Pastoreaux. Reformers' use of group pressure and/or mob violence against recalcitrant offenders and their calls to demonstrate public penance through spectacular displays of contrition, taking the cross, public processions or longer pilgrimages demonstrate the interpenetration of the penitential and legal fora which characterized public penances and inquisitions against clerical abuses and heresy.  Moreover, Paris masters developed penitential preaching into a learned and transmissible technique intended to transmit moral and doctrinal instruction to the laity and encourage lay participation in penitential practices.  As they joined the mendicant orders in large numbers, they influenced the style and content of the friars’ preaching, ensuring that penitential revivalism remained an enduring feature of civic life.