The Language of Preaching in the Catalan-Speaking Lands

This study focuses on the discussion that took place in 1636 between Alexandre Ros, under the pseudonym of Juan Gómez Adrín, and Diego Cisteller regarding which language should be used in liturgical preaching in the Archdiocese of Tarragona (Catalonia). Adrín supported preaching in Spanish whereas Cisteller defended the use of Catalan. I place this discussion in the context of the ‘Theory of the Primitive Castilian’, which argued that Spanish was one of the seventy-two Babelian languages and that Catalan was simply a deformation of Spanish. I argue that the best opposition to this linguistic fusion of Spanish and Catalan appears in the interpretation of the preaching of Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), since he was supposed to have preached exclusively in Catalan everywhere he visited. Yet in Saint Vincent Ferrer’s festivities we find at least one example of ‘bivalency’ by which Catalan and Spanish are considered to be the same language. While this bivalency could have supported the fusion of the two languages and the ‘Theory of the Primitive Castilian’, it could have also questioned the superiority and even the objective existence of Spanish.