“Vidimus enim stellam eius in oriente et venimus adorare eum”: Attending to the Sign in a Late Medieval English Sermon on the Epiphany

This paper examines an Epiphanic theory of attentio from late medieval England, exemplified in a sermon of fourteenth-century Franciscan friar-poet William Herebert. Because, Herebert suggests, 1) attentio enables one to serve God, and 2) “no one can come to the Father except through [Jesus],” 3) attentio is a contemplative mediator, immanently Christological. Herebert tracks the verbal logic of his thema to the virtues Augustine ascribes to good teachers—attention, good will, and docility: to come is a sign of docility, to adore is a sign of good will, to see is a sign of attentio. This makes attentio a sign of the Epiphanic object, just as the Epiphanic object is a sign of the incarnate Word. Collapsing the middle terms, Herebert finds that attentio is a sign of Christ. Eucharistically, attending to the sign transforms it into the signified. I apply this theory of attention to Herebert’s extant devotional lyrics.