“Recte Perficitur”: Sermons to the Jews and the Rhetoric of Conversion (1572-1585)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the rhetoric of Jewish conversion during the institutionalization of the Roman Catholic practice of preaching to the Jews under Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585). Focusing primarily on the sermon volumes of two preachers to the Jews, this study considers how the sermons to the Jews, the papacy, and an English priest framed the mission to the Jews and Jewish conversion. I argue that both the official rhetoric emanating from the papal pronouncements and the rhetoric in the practice of preaching to the Jews (i.e. the sermons) demonstrate that orthopraxy was the ultimate goal of the enterprise and the Church’s measure of the campaign’s success. The first half of the dissertation serves to contextualize this practice of preaching to the Jews both historically and in scholarship. A detailed historiographical essay demonstrates the development of scholarship and the themes and sources that have governed the discussion of the predica coattiva (“forced sermons”) in Rome. Through this historiography, I begin to revise the narrative for the establishment of the late cinqucento predica coattiva, pointing towards features that have been neglected and misrepresented in previous scholarship. A close reading of the papal bulls sanctioning the practice and the 1581 manuscript Roma Sancta reframes the nature of the proselytization of the Jews under Gregory XIII. These texts demonstrate a reform of the language regarding Jewish mission and a focus on the only aspects of proselytization and conversion in the hands of the Church and the preacher. This rhetoric reflects the importance of recte perficere (“right accomplishment”). The second half of this study focuses on the rhetoric of Jewish conversion conveyed in the sermon volumes of Evangelista Marcellino and Faustino Tasso, two Franciscans. An analysis of Tasso’s volume is introduced to scholarship for the first time here. The publication of these volumes of full text sermons to the Jews, the first of their kind, makes them an important source for the practice of preaching to the Jews and provides the best glimpse of the language utilized by preachers to the Jews. While current scholarship tends to focus on the proofs for the truth of Christianity as the content of sermons, I expand my examination to explore the way in which the preachers framed their series and their appeals to the Jews to convert. Close readings of the text demonstrate how Marcellino and Tasso viewed their role as a preacher to the Jews in an economy of salvation that ultimately depended upon God’s grace rather than persuasive arguments. In their focus on the importance of hearing the truth as the impetus for conversion, Marcellino and Tasso reveal that orthopraxy is to continually preach to the Jews. For the preacher, perseverance is the ultimate measure of success.