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Nils-Lennart Johannesson
University of Stockholm
Email: Nils-Lennart dot Johannesson at english dot su dot se
Homily xxii of the twelfth-century Middle English homily collection Ormulum by the Augustinian canon Orm deals with the calling of the first disciples. In the account given in Matthew 4:18–22, we are told how first Peter and Andrew, then James and John, are made to leave their nets where they have been fishing in the sea of Galilee in order to follow Jesus and become fishers of men. Much play is made in the Latin homiletic literature of the use of nets in fishing as metaphors for preaching and conversion.
Orm, however, takes his text for Homily xxii from John 1:35–51, where the story is told differently: John the Baptist saw Jesus walking past and said, “This is the Lamb of God”, whereupon two of his disciples left him and followed Jesus. One of these was Andrew, who then brought his brother Simon to Jesus. The next day Jesus called Philip, who was from the city of Bethsaida, just like Andrew and Simon. Philip then tells Nathanael that they have found him of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
No mention is here made of anybody’s occupation, only of their home town ( Bethsaida, ‘the house of the hunters’). Consequently, Orm plays down the role of ‘fishers of men’ and instead discusses the disciples as ‘hunters for men’s souls’. The only nets occurring in Orm’s exposition and forming the source domain for his metaphor spelless nett (‘net of preaching’) are hunting nets for catching deer, not fishing nets.
In his exposition of the name of Bethsaida in Homily xxii Orm develops an extended ‘hunting’ metaphor representing successful preaching, taking the interpretation of Bethsaida, ‘house of the hunters’, as his point of departure. The metaphor involves ‘hunting’ [hunntenn] and ‘chasing’ [slætenn] as well as ‘catching’ [lacchenn], ‘net’ [nett] and ‘hounds’ [hundess, racchess].
This paper will discuss the possible impact of this extended metaphor on a contemporary audience in the light of other representations of hunting, nets and hounds in medieval literature and art.