Ode to Titivillus: Apathy and the Transformative Potentialities of "Sloth" in Late Medieval England

Abstract:This essay examines the ways in which an anonymous fifteenth-century preacher addressed issues of apathy among his congregations, preserved in the English sermon cycle known as Jacob's Well. Through the preacher's expositions of the sin of sloth—and the dramatic exempla that accompany such passages—I argue that the text encapsulates an anxiety over apathy among the preacher's (fictionalized or real) lay audiences. The essay complicates the idea that laypeople in late medieval England believed homogeneously in the religious teachings delivered from the pulpit. Indeed, Jacob's Well is read here as an example of a preacher grappling with the difficulties of managing a congregation made up of diverse experiences and intensities of faith, in which religious indifference had the potential to be deep-rooted. I argue that the medieval Church's conceptualization of "sloth" belies a concern over lay apathy, understood as a potentially subversive mode of unbelief, rather than lay ignorance.