Stimme und Schrift in der Predigt  des Nikolaus von Kues

Volker Mertens

doi:10.1515/mial-2014-0009

Article

Stimme und Schrift in der Predigt des Nikolaus von Kues

Volker Mertens

Published/Copyright: May 7, 2014

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From the journal Das Mittelalter Volume 19 Issue 1

Abstract

Nicholas of Cusa was renowned for his preaching in the vernacular. However‚ all his sermons, with the exceptions of XXIV and LXXVI, are transmitted in Latin. They reflect different stages on the way to the delivered sermon: a concept, an outline or a fully formulated text, which may have been written before or after the actual speech in order to preserve it for a second use. The actual sermon was an event joining visual and aural dimensions which are not preserved in the written texts. The preacher often employed exempla to enliven his speech. This essay focuses on the German sermons XXIV, an interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, and LXXVI which is a reportatio, a transcript of the speech reworked for preservation in a manuscript. In the four surviving manuscripts the actual preaching of Cusa is evoked by super- or subscriptions and certain textual traits, in order to add the aura and dignity of the spoken sermon to the teaching. Thus the sermon preserves some dimensions of the ‘voice’ of the preacher. Cusa’s style of preaching can be reconstructed as sober and concise, didactic but not without compelling verbal sequences.

Keywords: Preacher; the Lord’s Prayer; catechesis; Bernardin von Siena; exempla.

Published Online: 2014-5-7

Published in Print: 2014-5-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/mial-2014-0009

Keywords for this article

Preacher; the Lord’s Prayer; catechesis; Bernardin von Siena; exempla.