Anger in Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum and in Five Texts for Preachers

Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum was the most famous dictionary of quotations in the late Middle Ages. Its main critical expositors, Richard and Mary Rouse, characterized it as one of the most successful reference works for providing medieval preachers with authoritative citations to support the arguments in their sermons. The Rouses highlighted the florilegium’s convenient, searchable format, which organized quotations under alphabetically arranged headings. Recently, Chris Nighman, in examining the manual’s material, has questioned the Rouses’ conclusions about Thomas’s original intention, his audience, and even the suitability of his florilegium for popular preaching. At stake is the use of the Manipulus florum for the study of what teachings were considered preachable and, probably, what was most often preached. In order to test the Rouses’ view and Nighman’s revision, this study compares the ways in which the same topic, namely, anger (ira), is discussed in the Manipulus florum and in a sample of widely-circulated Latin thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century reference works that provided elements for the composition of sermons: William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis, the Distinctiones Mauritii, the Liber Pharetrae, Bartholomew of Pisa’s De documenta antiquorum, and Peter of Limoges’s Tractatus moralis de oculo. Many widely copied model sermons and even a few transcripts of preached sermons survive, especially those of accomplished preachers. However, the more humble preaching manuals are likely to provide a better indication of commonly preached content than more polished sermons that may never actually have been preached.