The historian of twelfth-century preaching finds the “prodigious success”[1] of St. Anselm’s sermon on the Assumption not even faintly echoed in the flat record. The same disappointment awaits any one who shall turn from the fame of John Bunyan’s preaching to his printed sermons. In both cases the reputation is more convincing than the record. The testimony leaves no doubt that the preacher was eloquent; but his eloquence has not been preserved. The seventeenth-century record and the medieval, though in different directions, are alike insufficient.[2] Even when we have on the page before us the very sentences—and often we have something less, or even something different, we lack something of the eloquence. For the difficulty of transmission is so fundamental that it thwarts even the records of our own day. Oratory is typically the energizing of a message by a speaker for a specific audience. Its style depends on all three. In varying degrees all three enter into its composition. The occasion becomes part of the message. Between speaker and audience there is mutual response. Therefore of all the arts oratory is the most perishable. But the history of oratory, though often baffling, is not hopeless. So perishable that it can never be quite recaptured, oratory may be so charged that even through imperfect record much often transpires. For any given period its records not only reveal much of the habit of the time, but conversely can often be so interpreted by that habit as to become really significant. Medieval sermons can thus be related not only to the medieval pedagogy of rhetoric, but to actual habits of composition and of style. In a form of oratory continuous for nearly two thousand years they will show at least what in preparation, composition, utterance, record is typically medieval.