Les sermons sur saint Antoine et le bon usage de la prédication comme "vertu"

Saint Anthony of Padua's activity as a preacher is reknown to have been one of the reasons for his fame of holiness. After having focused on the hagiographical legends on the saint of Lisbon passages referring to preaching as a virtue or a gift of the Holy Grace, the author points out the importance of Iulianus de Speyer's works in the spread of this identification. Passing to sermons, the article passes through a series of ctexts written between about 1250 and 1350. Especially, the author tries to contextualize the sermons referring to saint Anthony's wisdom as preaching within the large and mostly unpublished homiletic production of sermon for the liturgical feast of the Portuguese saint and she seeks to shed light on the identification of recta et fructuosa praedicatio (right and fruitful preaching activity) with saint'Anthony's wisdom (sapientia) or science (scientia). Thus, the persistence of this type of message is revealed within a relatively broad time span -although it's testified only by a selected number of witnesses -, since the Eighties of the thirteenth century onwards. There is also evidence of cross-disciplinary problem, which seems to involve not only the preachers belonging to the Order of Friars Minor, but also those who were called to preach them from outside the Order. Having examinated of the texts, the author proposes three possible reading keys to explain the appearance of preaching on the list of virtues in a more or less explicit way. It may have been originated by a phenomenon linked to the attempted assimilation of contemporary preachers with the model of holiness provided by saint Anthony or by an attempt to create a counterbalance to the increasingly defined vices of the tongue which were supposed to affect preachers' audience, or, again, it may be an indicator of a more general debate on praedicatio as a gift of Holy grace in opposition to those who believed it was the mere result of a studied technique.