Preaching the Sins of the Ladies: Nicole Bozon's “Char d'Orgueil”

Summary

An important strategy in the method of early Franciscan preachers and poets was to evoke understanding of vice and virtue through concrete and visible examples. In sermons and catechetical texts, Franciscans used stories and poetry full of lively images to describe sin and show it in action; in this way, the Friars Minor provided literary performance of the vices and virtues for the purpose of correcting the sins of lay society. Indeed our understanding today of what “sinful” behavior was for medieval people is greatly enhanced by the depiction and enactment of specific vices in Franciscan literature. The works of Nicole Bozon, a latethirteenth- century English Franciscan preacher and poet, provide us with a rich display of the performance of sin and goodness: from moralized exempla, to verse proverbs, to saints’ lives and sermons, Bozon's œuvre presents moral teaching infused with vivid imagery and dramatic presentation to communicate the circumstances of sin and the necessity for contrition. In his verse satire, the “Char d'Orgueil,” Bozon brings to life the vice of Pride, and gives special attention to a favorite subject of medieval moralists: the dress and social behavior of women.

In the 140 alexandrine quatrains of the “Char d'Orgueil,” Bozon creates an allegorical picture to demonstrate how a single vice like Pride can engender a multitude of sins: what Bozon calls the “matire de se confesser” (the stuff of confession). Bozon describes, item by item, all the parts of a carriage which Pride, the queen of sin and daughter of Lucifer, had made for herself:

La reigne de pecché est estreite de haut lignage, La fille est Lucifer ke cheit de haut estage; Si est appelé Orguil, dame de graunt age, Ele se ad fet un char de mult grant custage. 1–4

(The queen of sin is descended from a lofty lineage; she is the daughter of Lucifer, who fell from a high place. She is called Pride, this lady of great maturity; she has made for herself a most costly carriage.)

Pride's role as the queen of sin in the “Char d'Orgueil” is of significance to the social status of Bozon's public and the kind of sins found in the picture of Pride. Of the seven deadly sins, avarice was generally favored over pride by the Franciscans and Dominicans who, working mainly in urban settings, were typically more concerned with greed in the emerging mercantile economy.