SOURCE: Ho, Cynthia. “Corpus Delicti: The Edifying Dead in the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry.” In Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and Anne T. Thayer, pp. 203-18. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d'Études Médiévales, 1998.

In the following essay, Ho discusses Jacques's understanding of the relationship between body and soul, both in life and in death, and examines his views on women as seen in his sermons.

Scholars of medieval literature and history are increasingly turning to the numerous surviving sermon collections of the early thirteenth-century, that moment of the great sermonizing revival, in an effort to gain access to the practical concerns of the age. Among the greats of the preaching friars is Jacobius de Vitriaco, most commonly know as Jacques de Vitry, a student of Peter the Chanter¹. In...