After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England 9782503534022, 9782503542546

Table of contents :
Front Matter (“Contents”, “List of Illustrations”, “Foreword”, “List of Abbreviations”, “List of Contributors”), p. i

Free Access

Chichele’s Church: Vernacular Theology in England after Thomas Arundel, p. 3
Vincent Gillespie
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2001


After Arundel: The Closing or the Opening of the English Mind?, p. 43
Jeremy Catto
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2002


Censorship or Cultural Change? Reformation and Renaissance in the Spirituality of Late Medieval England, p. 55
Michael G. Sargent
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2003


Vernacular Theology / Theological Vernacular: A Game of Two Halves?, p. 73
Ian Johnson
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2004


Orthodoxy’s Image Trouble: Images in and after Arundel’s Constitutions, p. 91
James Simpson
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2005


Censorship and Cultural Continuity: Love’s Mirror, the Pore Caitif, and Religious Experience before and after Arundel, p. 115
Christopher G. Bradley
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2006


Voice after Arundel, p. 133
David Lawton
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2007


Conciliarism and Heresy in England, p. 155
Alexander Russell
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2008


‘Let Them Praise Him in Church’: Orthodox Reform at Salisbury Cathedral in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century, p. 167
David Lepine
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2009


London after Arundel: Learned Rectors and the Strategies of Orthodox Reform, p. 187
Sheila Lindenbaum
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2010


Common Libraries in Fifteenth-Century England: An Episcopal Benefaction, p. 209
James Willoughby
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2011


Religion, Humanism, and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum, p. 225
Daniel Wakelin
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2012


Staging Advice in Oxford, New College, MS 288: On Thomas Chaundler and Thomas Bekynton, p. 245
Andrew Cole
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2013


Reconstructing the Mixed Life in Reginald Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun, p. 267
Allan F. Westphall
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2014


Vernacular Authority and the Rhetoric of Sciences in Pecock’s The Folewer to the Donet and in The Court of Sapience, p. 285
Tamás Karáth
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2015


‘This holy tyme’: Present Sense in the Digby Lyrics, p. 307
Helen Barr
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2016


English Devotions for a Noble Household: The Long Passion in Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience, p. 325
Susanna Fein
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2017


Lydgate’s Retraction and ‘his resorte to his religyoun’, p. 343
W. H. E. Sweet
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2018


Devotional Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England, p. 363
Stephen Kelly, Ryan Perry
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2019


Canons and Catechisms: The Austin Canons of South-East England and Sacerdos parochialis, p. 381
Niamh Pattwell
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2020


‘Þat þine opun dedis be a trewe book’: Reading around Arundel’s Constitutions, p. 395
Amanda Moss
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2021


Gender, Confession, and Authority: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 in the Fifteenth Century, p. 415
Jennifer N. Brown
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2022


Dressing up a ‘galaunt’: Traditional Piety and Fashionable Politics in Peter Idley’s ‘translacions’ of Mannyng and Lydgate, p. 429
Matthew Giancarlo
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2023


Richard Methley and the Translation of Vernacular Religious Writing into Latin, p. 449
Laura Saetveit Miles
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2024


Saints’ Lives and the Literary after Arundel, p. 469
Catherine Sanok
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2025


Hagiography after Arundel: Expounding the Trinity, p. 487
Karen A. Winstead
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2026


Proliferation and Purification: The Use of Books for Nuns after Arundel, p. 503
C. Annette Grisé
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2027


After Arundel but before Luther: The First Half-Century of Print, p. 523
Susan Powell
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2028


Wyclif, Arundel, and the Long Fifteenth Century, p. 545
Kantik Ghosh
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2029


‘A clerke schulde have it of kinde for to kepe counsell’, p. 563
Nicholas Watson
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2030


Back Matter (“Bibliography”, “Index Nominum”, “Index of Manuscripts”), p. 591

Citation preview

A FTER A RUNDEL

MEDIEVAL CHURCH STUDIES

Volume 21

AFTER ARUNDEL Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England

Edited by

Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh

H

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data After Arundel : religious writing in fifteenth-century England. -- (Medieval church studies ; v. 21) 1. Devotional literature, English (Middle)--History and criticism. 2. Christian literature, English (Middle)-History and criticism. 3. Christian life--England-History--Middle Ages, 600-1500--Sources. 4. Church history--15th century--Sources. I. Series II. Gillespie, Vincent, 1954- III. Ghosh, Kantik, 1967820.9'3823'09024-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503534022

© 2011, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form of by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2011/0095/194 ISBN: 978-2-503-53402-2 Printed on acid-free paper

C ONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Foreword

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

List of Contributors

xvii

Part I. Opening Salvoes Chichele’s Church: Vernacular Theology in England after Thomas Arundel

3

VINCENT GILLESPIE

After Arundel: The Closing or the Opening of the English Mind?

43

JEREMY CATTO

Censorship or Cultural Change? Reformation and Renaissance in the Spirituality of Late Medieval England MICHAEL G. SARGENT

55

Vernacular Theology / Theological Vernacular: A Game of Two Halves?

73

IAN JOHNSON

Part II. Discerning the Discourse: Language, Image, and Spirituality Orthodoxy’s Image Trouble: Images in and after Arundel’s Constitutions

91

JAMES SIMPSON

Censorship and Cultural Continuity: Love’s Mirror, the Pore Caitif, and Religious Experience before and after Arundel CHRISTOPHER G. BRADLEY

115

Voice after Arundel

133

DAVID LAWTON

Part III. The Dynamics of Orthodox Reform Conciliarism and Heresy in England

155

ALEXANDER RUSSELL

‘Let Them Praise Him in Church’: Orthodox Reform at Salisbury Cathedral in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century

167

DAVID LEPINE

London after Arundel: Learned Rectors and the Strategies of Orthodox Reform

187

SHEILA LINDENBAUM

Common Libraries in Fifteenth-Century England: An Episcopal Benefaction

209

JAMES WILLOUGHBY

Part IV. Ecclesiastical Humanism Religion, Humanism, and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum

225

DANIEL WAKELIN

Staging Advice in Oxford, New College, MS 288: On Thomas Chaundler and Thomas Bekynton ANDREW COLE

245

Part V. Reginald Pecock Reconstructing the Mixed Life in Reginald Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun 267 ALLAN F. WESTPHALL Vernacular Authority and the Rhetoric of Sciences in Pecock’s The Folewer 285 to the Donet and in The Court of Sapience TAMÁS KARÁTH

Part VI. Literary Self-Consciousness and Literary History ‘This holy tyme’: Present Sense in the Digby Lyrics

307

HELEN BARR

English Devotions for a Noble Household: The Long Passion in Audelay’s 325 Counsel of Conscience SUSANNA FEIN

Lydgate’s Retraction and ‘his resorte to his religyoun’ W. H. E. SWEET

343

Part VII. The Codex as an Instrument of Reform Devotional Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England

363

STEPHEN KELLY AND RYAN PERRY

Canons and Catechisms: The Austin Canons of South-East England and Sacerdos parochialis

381

NIAMH PATTWELL

‘Þat þine opun dedis be a trewe book’: Reading around Arundel’s Constitutions 395 AMANDA MOSS

Part VIII. Translation Gender, Confession, and Authority: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 in the Fifteenth Century JENNIFER N. BROWN

415

Dressing up a ‘galaunt’: Traditional Piety and Fashionable Politics in Peter 429 Idley’s ‘translacions’ of Mannyng and Lydgate MATTHEW GIANCARLO

Richard Methley and the Translation of Vernacular Religious Writing into Latin

449

LAURA SAETVEIT MILES

Part IX. Acting Holy Saints’ Lives and the Literary after Arundel

469

CATHERINE SANOK

Hagiography after Arundel: Expounding the Trinity KAREN A. WINSTEAD

487

Proliferation and Purification: The Use of Books for Nuns after Arundel C. ANNETTE GRISÉ

503

Part X. From Script to Print After Arundel but before Luther: The First Half-Century of Print

523

SUSAN POWELL

Part XI. Closing Reflections and Responses Wyclif, Arundel, and the Long Fifteenth Century

545

KANTIK GHOSH

‘A clerke schulde have it of kinde for to kepe counsell’

563

NICHOLAS WATSON

Bibliography

591

Index Nominum

643

Index of Manuscripts

655

L IST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover image. ‘Thomas Arundel’, from Jean Creton, Histoire du roy Richard II, London, British Library, MS Harley 1319, fol. 12r. c. 1405. Reproduced by permission © The British Library Board. Figure 1, p. 100. Augustine, City of God, frontispiece, Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr. 22912, fol. 2v . Early fifteenth century. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Figure 2, p. 108. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim encounters Idolatry and she shows him the carpenter worshipping an image he has made’, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 65v . c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board. Figure 3, p. 109. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim’s defence of images: the high altar and its “calendar’”, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 68r. c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board.

F OREWORD

T

o mark the six-hundredth anniversary of the formal promulgation in 1409 of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s now notorious provincial constitutions deriving from the 1407 Council of Oxford, a conference was held in the university that had been the focus of the Archbishop’s anger and concern at the spread of heterodox thought. The conference met in St John’s College between 16 and 18 April 2009. It was sponsored by the Faculty of English Language and Literature, with generous support from the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library, and the British Academy. Some graduate bursaries were supplied by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, and underwriting was offered by the Oxford Faculty of History. Over one hundred and twenty delegates attended, and the three days saw thirty-three papers and four plenary lectures delivered. The purpose of the meeting was to allow scholars of later-medieval religious writing in England the opportunity to reflect on recent developments in the study of this period since the ‘religious turn’ of the 1990s; to explore the impact of emerging knowledge about English religious institutions in the fifteenth century; and to examine whether a new consensus might be emerging on the main themes and trends in the production and use of religious texts composed, copied, and circulated during this generally less well-examined period of literary and social history. 1409 has become fetishized as a watershed date since Nicholas Watson’s hugely influential 1995 Speculum article suggested that the Arundel decrees brought about a significant reorientation of the production and reception of vernacular books of religion. The conference sought to think beyond the totemic force of that date in the scholarship of the last fifteen years, and to explore if there were alternative historiographical trajectories and sociological models that spoke more eloquently or persuasively to the evidence as seen by researchers in the field.

xii

Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh

That no single such model emerged from the meeting, or emerges from these papers, is hardly surprising, and is to be welcomed as a sign of the intellectual health of a field that is being tilled with new vigour, fresh insights, and an increasing armoury of scholarly weapons. Although stopping short of the Catholic positivism of Eamon Duffy’s 1992 The Stripping of the Altars (itself a valuable corrective to the Protestant Reformation historiography of A. G. Dickens and others), the conference probably heard more about the vitality and confidence of English religious life (and the texts that supported it) in the fifteenth century than has been altogether fashionable in some strands of scholarly thought since Watson’s article. But other speakers felt that the trauma of Lollardy and the impact of John Wyclif and Thomas Arundel still resonated in the texts and contexts that they sought to explore. Some speakers felt that the new vectors of change in English religious life were international (such as the Conciliar Movement), or antedated Arundel altogether (such as the reforms at Salisbury in the 1380s). Others identified the movement of orthodox reform as an idiomatically English response to a panEuropean crisis manifesting itself most eloquently in the Great Schism, or resonating in changes in intellectual attitude in Europe’s universities. Others, again, felt that developing lay literacy, or greater availability of texts in translation, or significant developments in new forms of association (such as guilds), or new institutions (such as colleges and chantries) deserved more recognition as agents for change. What all the papers at the conference, and in this book, seemed to agree on was that England’s religious life in the fifteenth century was a site worthy of sustained, subtle, systematic, and searching analysis. Delegates and speakers showed in their contributions a highly nuanced understanding of the sociology of their texts and the mobile synergies of their contexts. So, what emerges is a portrait of latemedieval English religious theory and praxis that complicates any attempt to present the period as either quivering in post-traumatic stress, or basking in the autumn sunshine of an uncritical and self-satisfied hierarchy’s failure to engage with undoubted European and domestic crises in ecclesiology, pastoral theology, anti-clericalism, and lay spiritual emancipation. This book remains, therefore, as dialogic and questingly curious as the conference that gave rise to it. After Arundel means not just because of Arundel, or despite Arundel; it also asks what models and taxonomies will be needed to move beyond Arundel as a fixed star in the firmament of (especially literary) scholarship in the period, and to supply the next phase of scholarly exploration of this still often dark continent of religious attitudes and writing with new tools, new technical vocabularies, and new

FOREWORD

xiii

directions of travel. We see this book as a point of departure, not a port of arrival. There is still a lot of work to do After Arundel. As always in the best scholarly endeavours, the conference and this book are the work of many hands, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge the help and support of friends and colleagues. The meeting was organised by a planning committee of Helen Barr, Santha Bhattacharji, Mishtooni Bose, Kantik Ghosh, Vincent Gillespie, Annie Sutherland, and John Watts. Sterling support was provided by the staff of the English Faculty Office, especially Katie MacCurrach and Charlotte Heavens. Mishtooni Bose also curated the linked exhibition of manuscripts on show in the Bodleian Library during and after the meeting, and Richard Ovenden and Martin Kauffmann in Bodleian Special Collections were willing supporters. Wilma Minty of the Bodleian helped in the organisation of the plenary in Convocation House, and the reception in the Divinity School, a room begun in 1428 and finished in 1488, whose stones took shape during the very period that we were discussing. Our graduate helpers, Alex da Costa, Zoe Hopkins, and Rebecca Marsland were tirelessly efficient. We are indebted to the News International Fund of the Faculty of English for support towards the preparation of this book for the press, to Dr Olivia Robinson for her careful editorial ministrations to each of the chapters as they came in, and to Sebastian Langdell for his careful work on the indices. We are grateful to Dr Simon Forde and the series editors at Brepols for their faith in this volume. Vincent Gillespie Kantik Ghosh August 2010

A BBREVIATIONS

BRUC

A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963)

BRUO

A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–59)

EETS

The Early English Text Society (1864–)

O. S.

Original Series (1864–)

E. S.

Extra Series (1867–1920)

S. S.

Supplementary Series (1970–)

Hudson, PR

Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)

HUO

The History of the University of Oxford II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. by Jeremy I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

IMEV

Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by Carleton Brown and R. H. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press for The Index Society, 1943); with Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by R. H. Robbins and John Cutler (Lexington: University of

xvi

Abbreviations

Kentucky Press, 1965). Numbers transferred to and corrected in A New Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (London: British Library, 2005) MED

Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Hans Kurath and S. M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1952–)

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

PL

Patrologiae cursus completus: series Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–55 and 1862–65)

STC

A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd edn revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and K. E. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91)

Watson, ‘Censorship’

Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64

Wilkins, Concilia

Concilia Magnae Brittaniae et Hiberniae, ed. by David Wilkins, 3 vols (London: Gosling, 1737)

L IST OF C ONTRIBUTORS

Helen Barr is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. Christopher Bradley is Lecturer in the Department of English and Postgraduate Research Fellow in the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Jennifer N. Brown is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, New York. Jeremy Catto is an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Andrew Cole is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. Susanna Fein is Professor of English, and Coordinator of the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Program at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Kantik Ghosh is Stirling-Boyd Fellow and Tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. Matthew Giancarlo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. Vincent Gillespie is the J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford.

xviii

List of Contributors

C. Annette Grisé is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Ian Johnson is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of English at the University of St Andrews and a member of the St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Tamás Karáth is a Lecturer at the Institute of English of Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Piliscsaba, Hungary. Stephen Kelly is a Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast. David Lawton is Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis, and Executive Director of the New Chaucer Society. David Lepine is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History at Exeter University. Sheila Lindenbaum taught in the English department at Indiana University, where she was also director of the Medieval Studies Institute. She now lives in London. Laura Saetveit Miles is as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Amanda Moss was awarded her doctorate in English Literature at Royal Holloway College, University of London, in 2009. Niamh Pattwell is a Lecturer in Middle English Language and Literature at University College Dublin. Ryan Perry is a Lecturer in Later Medieval Literature at the University of Kent. Sue Powell has a Chair in Medieval Texts and Culture at the University of Salford.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xix

Alex Russell completed his doctorate at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2011, and is currently Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick. Catherine Sanok is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Michael Sargent is a Professor in the English Department of Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. James Simpson is the Douglas P. and Katherine P. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. W. H. E. Sweet completed his doctorate on Lydgate and Scottish Lydgateans at St John’s College, Oxford, in 2009. Daniel Wakelin is the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of Oxford. Nicholas Watson is Professor of English at Harvard University. Allan F. Westphall is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Geographies of Orthodoxy research project and works in the School of English, University of St Andrews. James Willoughby is a Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. Karen A. Winstead is Professor of English at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

Part I Opening Salvoes

C HICHELE’S C HURCH : V ERNACULAR T HEOLOGY IN E NGLAND AFTER T HOMAS A RUNDEL Vincent Gillespie

T

hree written recollections of moments of political pageantry that carry embedded within them important religious resonances. First, Adam Usk, whose position at the margins of English political life and European religious life gave him an interesting if highly coloured perspective on the Lancastrian regime. In his Latin chronicle, he reports the 1416 visit of the Emperor Sigismund to England: Sigismund, king of Hungary and of the Romans, after that he had striven for a year long in the general council at Constance for the unity of the church […] and after that he had visited the kings of Castile and of all Spain on behalf of the same unity, came through the realms of France into England for the stablishing of peace between those two kingdoms. But, after that he had abode in London at the great cost of the realm, the business being thwarted by the cunning of the French, he returned again to the council of Constance.1

The visit included his solemn investiture into the Order of the Garter on 24 May 1416 (an event presided over by Henry Beaufort), and the signing of the Treaty of Canterbury on 15 August, after which the emperor left and ‘With his own hands sent forth scrolls to be scattered abroad in public places’. The Latin verses reported on these scrolls were also recorded in Elmham’s Liber metricus, the Gesta Henrici Quinti, and in Capgrave’s De illustribus Henricis, and are translated into Middle English by Capgrave in his Chronicle:

1

The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. by Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. xciii; The Chronicle of Adam of Usk AD 1377–1421, trans. by Edward Maunde Thompson (Felinfach: Llanerch, 1990), p. 184.

4

Vincent Gillespie Sone after that the emperour went oute of Ynglond and in his goyng he mad his servauntis for to throwe billis in the way, in which was writyn swech sentens: Farewel, with glorious victory Blessid Inglond, ful of melody. Thou may be cleped of angel nature, Thou servist God with so bysy cure We leve with the this praising, Whech we schal evir sey and sing.2

The incorporation of the verses into so many Latin and vernacular records suggests that this was considered to be a moment of great symbolic power and significance. Sigismund, the hammer of schismatic popes, and energetic stage manager of the great ecumenical council currently in session at Konstanz, was giving his public and visible approval to the English king, lately embellished by the ‘glorious victory’ of Agincourt, to the English people, and, most visibly and strongly, to the English church. Indeed the bill places much more emphasis on the religious stature of the English (even rehashing the old Gregorian pun on Angels and Angles) than on the king’s political or military prowess, despite the fact that one purpose of the visit was in fact to confirm an alliance against the French. But an important plank of Henry’s public image was for him to be seen, in Lydgate’s words, as ‘protectour and diffence […] off Christus spouse douhtir of Syoun’.3 Syon was of course, the name chosen for one of a planned network of three new religious houses founded by King Henry V in 1415, soon after his accession (the others were the Charterhouse of Jesus of Bethlehem and an unachieved foundation of Celestines). The scale and prestige of Henry’s plans for these houses, all intended to nestle close to the royal palace at Sheen, undoubtedly sent signals about the

2 This Middle English version comes from The Chronicle of England by John Capgrave, ed. by Francis Charles Hingeston, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi Scriptores (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), p. 314. 3

A Defence of Holy Church, ll. 5–7, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part I, ed. by Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, E. S. 107 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1911), pp. 30–31. The most perceptive and sensitive guide to this historical material is Jeremy Catto: see, for example, Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. by Gerald L. Harriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 97–115; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, in HUO, II, pp. 175–261; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, in HUO, II, pp. 263–80; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the Fifteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Association, Sixth Series, 17 (2007), 83–99.

CHICHELE’S CHURCH

5

ambition and purposefulness of the new king.4 But his choice of orders to occupy those houses sent a more subtle and significant signal: the king was making a clean break with the monastic past, and in particular with the politically and religiously troubled years of the last two kings, his father Henry IV, and the king he had usurped in 1399, Richard II. The Birgittine Clement Maidstone, a local boy who joined the order early in its life after a distinguished career as a liturgist of the Sarum rite, reports in his Latin account of the martyrdom of Archbishop Richard Scrope that the pope would only grant a plenary indulgence to Henry IV for his murder ‘on the condition that he swear [...] that he would build three new monasteries under one of the strictest rules in all Christendom in honour of the three chief feast days, and that he would endow those monasteries without the imposition of any tax on them so that the monks living in them might devote themselves freely to God in their holy offices with peace and quiet in all their hearts’, and notes that Henry IV had died before fulfilling that vow.5 So the internal mythology of the Birgittines had early associated their foundation with Henry V’s desire to make amends for the troubled past and to start anew. Not only was ‘the King’s great work at Sheen’ (as contemporary chronicles described the project) making a political statement of intent (in re-occupying the royal palace at Sheen, semi-derelict since the death of Richard’s queen Anne in 1394), but it also marked a new religious beginning after the troubles with John Wyclif and his followers. No house of Birgittines or Celestines had ever before been founded in Britain. Nor had the Carthusians (‘never reformed because never deformed’) featured prominently in either side’s arguments. None of these orders had therefore been tainted by the in-fighting, self-preservation, and name-calling that had characterized the campaigns run by the orders of friars and the older monastic

4

The standard account of the foundation of Syon is still George James Aungier, The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth, and the Chapelry of Hounslow, Compiled from Public Records, Ancient Manuscripts, Etc (London: Nichols, 1840). More recently, M. B. Tait, ‘The Brigittine Monastery of Syon (Middlesex) with Special Reference to its Monastic Uses’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1975) studied much unprinted manuscript material and explored the spiritual and cultural life of the House. See also Neil Beckett, ‘St Bridget, Henry V and Syon Abbey’, in Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 35.19 (1993), 125–50. 5

James Raine, ‘Miscellanea Relating to the Martyrdom of Archbishop Scrope’, in Historians of the Church of York, ed. by James Raine, Rolls Series, 71, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1886), II, 304–11, available online at ; Stephen K. Wright, ‘Provenance and Manuscript Tradition of the Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi’, Manuscripta, 28 (1984), 92–102.

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orders to defend themselves against, first, the anti-fraternalism of Richard FitzRalph and, then, Wyclif’s increasingly strident calls for clerical disendowment and the abolition of ‘private religions’. So all three orders in the Sheen project could be said to offer a fresh start for Henry and for the English church, and one which might learn some of the lessons provided by Wyclif and Lollardy.6 Hoccleve reports that the Lollards scornfully called Henry ‘prynce of preestes’, and there is no sign that he would have felt uncomfortable with that epithet. Rather, it seems the King, his advisors, and many contemporary commentators thought of him in almost Old Testament terms as representing a vigorous new manifestation of the church militant, a new Solomon.7 The symbolic import of Sigismund’s visit and of his praise of the religious zeal of the English resonate through my second moment of pageantry, described in the famous letter to Henry V from his ‘poor, true, and continual orator’ John Forester, written on 2 February 1417 and recounting Sigismund’s return to Konstanz on 27 January of that year, wearing the livery of the garter bestowed on him the previous May: õour broder, Gracious Pryns, the kyng of Rome, entride the cite of Constaunce with õour lyvere of the coler abowte his necke (a glad syghte to alle õour lyge men to se) […] and he resseyvede õour lordes graciously with reyght god cher, and of alle the worschypful men of õour nation he touchyde thar handys only in alle the grete prees.8

Forester goes on to tell how the bishop of Salisbury (Robert Hallum, effective head of the English nation at Konstanz) raced off to the meeting place of the council and, narrowly beating the cardinal of Cambrai, Pierre d’Ailly, head of the French nation and one of the great intellectual forces behind the Church reform and conciliar movement, to the steps of the pulpit, mounted them and preached a sermon of welcome. Forester’s letter continues with an account of a ‘colation’ held

6

For more on this, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard: Wyclif at Syon in the Fifteenth Century’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. by Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison, Medieval Church Studies, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 131–62. 7

Thomas Hoccleve, Remonstrance against Oldcastle, l. 289, in Selections from Hoccleve ed. by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 68; all subsequent citations from this edition. Lydgate’s Defence of Holy Church also calls on Henry to imitate David and drive out the heretics from his city. 8

Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literæ, et ujuscunque generis acta publica, Inter reges Angliæ, et alios quosvis imperatores, reges, pontifices, principes, vel communitates, 2nd edn, 20 vols (London, 1704), IX , 434–35.

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the following day by Sigismund for the English nation at Konstanz, and his praise for the ‘bretherred’ between himself and Henry V: And he tolde thame so gret worschyp of õowr Ryal person, and sythyn of alle my Lordis õour brethers, and thenne of the governaunce of holy kyrk, dyvyn servise, operaments, and alle stat ther of kepyd, as yoff hit wer in paradys, in comparison to ony place that he evere came inne to for.

The English nation repaid the compliment by inviting Sigismund to a great feast for 152 nobles on Sunday, 31 January, described in full culinary splendour in the German diary of Ulrich von Richtental, city clerk of Konstanz. The feast was in fact a repeat of a similarly lavish occasion held just a week before for all the members of the Council of Konstanz, and hosted by Hallum of Salisbury, Richard Clifford of London and bishops of five other English dioceses. At both occasions, von Richtental reports that the three feasts were separated by dramatic performances of a religious nature: During the banquet there were shows and pantomimes by players in rich and costly raiment. They played Our Lady holding her Son God Our Lord and Joseph standing beside her and three holy kings bringing their tribute. They had prepared a shining gold star that went before the kings on a fine iron wire. They played also King Herod sending after the three kings and slaying the children. All the players wore most costly garments and broad gold and silver girdles and played their parts with great diligence and modesty.9

These pageants, unlike anything else reported in the documents generated by the council, are another indication of the awareness on the part of the English at home and abroad of the importance of creating a good impression of the English church. Von Richtental also reports that on the eve of the feast of St Thomas Becket the English had sent four trumpeters throughout the city, with the king’s arms hanging from the trumpets, before singing vespers in the cathedral ‘with tall candles burning, bells pealing, and sweet English hymns on the organ’, followed the next morning by a solemn high mass concelebrated by Hallum and two other bishops.10 These public displays by the English church represent a defiant assertion of their conformity to the full majesty of the institutional church’s liturgical opulence (in

9

Ulrich von Richental’s Chronicle of the council is translated in The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church, ed. by John Hine Mundy and Kennerly M. Woody, trans. by Louise R. Loomis, Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 63 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 146–48; on the plays, see Andre De Mandach, ‘English “Dramatic” Performances at the Council of Constance, 1417’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 2 (1982), 26–28. 10

The Council of Constance, ed. by Mundy and Woody, pp. 146–47.

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contrast to Lollard ecclesiology), as well as a pointed and even ostentatious display of support for the genre of religious drama, often the target of Lollard criticism. Konstanz was an important shop window for the English church, which felt itself under pressure in the European environment because of the pestiferous, pernicious, and annoyingly persistent heresies of John Wyclif, whose teaching occupied much of the Council’s time in its early months and was definitively condemned in its eighth session in May 1415.11 The examination and condemnation of Jan Hus in June of that year had not made things any easier for the English: in the course of his interrogation, led by Pierre d’Ailly, head of the French nation, Hus had dramatically exclaimed ‘if Wyclif had disseminated some errors, let the English see to that’.12 The English were potentially on the back foot diplomatically and theologically, a situation not helped by the continuing rumblings of the Oldcastle case at home. So the victory at Agincourt and the special favour shown to England, and to the English church, by Sigismund were welcome signs of acceptance to be grappled to the collective consciousness and exploited for all they were worth. The English representatives at Konstanz kept a remarkably high profile for a relatively small delegation, and English church leaders performed prominent symbolic functions in the central actions of the council. Richard Clifford, bishop of London, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham tells us, proposed in conclave the election of Odo of Colonna as the new Pope Martin V, and placed the fisherman’s ring on his finger after his election, while William Hulles, the prior of St John of Clerkenwell, held the papal tiara at his coronation

11

Conciliarism and Papalism, ed. by J. H. Burns and Thomas M. Izbicki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) offers a useful overview of the conciliar movement; see also Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Konstanz, 1414–1418, 2 vols (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1991). Many church historians tend to see the conciliar movement as a missed opportunity, which fizzled out and produced no policies of lasting value. But the active role played by the English delegates at the first two meetings meant that, after a period of relative isolation because of the Schism (when England supported the Roman candidates against their opponents supported by the French) and the continuing effects of the Hundred Years War, the leading figures in the English church could meet, talk to, and learn from their continental colleagues. On Anglo-Roman relations during this period, see Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362–1420: Portrait of an Expatriate Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Margaret Harvey, England, Rome, and the Papacy, 1417–1464: The Study of a Relationship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Margaret Harvey, Solutions to the Schism: A Study of Some English Attitudes, 1378 to 1409, Kirchengeschichtliche Quellen und Studien, 12 (St Ottilien: EOS, 1983). 12

C. M. D. Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, 1378–1460: The Conciliar Response to the Great Schism (London: Arnold, 1977), pp. 87–92 (p. 91).

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service.13 English bishops regularly sat as members of the heresy proceedings against Hus and Jerome of Prague (Jeroným Pražský), and several members of the English nation delivered Latin sermons before the Council, some of which have survived.14 The alliance and brotherly connection between Henry V and Sigismund became the stuff of English legend. My third moment of pageantry occurs in Lydgate’s verses on the coronation of Henry VI in 1429, which construct themselves around two sets of paired monarchs: St Edward the Confessor and St Louis of France represent the conjoint kingdoms manifested in the bloodline of the new king, but the other paired monarchs, Sigismund and Henry V, are deployed as totems of powerful and effective leadership of church and state. The sotiltees between the courses of the coronation banquet, for example, provided an opportunity comparable to that exploited by the English bishops at Konstanz, to make eloquent political statements through the medium of pageantry, but also to invoke and exploit the intertextual archive of regal and ecclesial mythology built up during the short but epic reign of the new king’s father: Ageinst miscreauntes themperour Sigismound Hath shewid his myght which is imperial Sithen Henry Vth so noble a knyght was founde For Cristes cause in actis martial; Cherisshyng the Chirch Lollardes had a falle, To give ensaumple to kynges that succede And to his braunche in especiall While he doth regne to love God and drede.15

13 Thomas Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. by David Preest, with introduction and notes by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 421–22. 14

These sermons, and those delivered by carefully selected preachers at the start of domestic convocations of the province of Canterbury, invariably address the need for urgent church reform and renewal under the banner of orthodoxy. Chris L. Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”: Richard Fleming’s Reform Sermon at the Council of Constance’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000), 1–36; Chris L. Nighman, ‘Reform and Humanism in the Sermons of Richard Fleming at the Council of Constance (1417)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1996); T. E. Morrissey, ‘“Surge Illuminare”: A Lost Address by Richard Fleming at the Council of Constance (Clm 28433)’, Annuarium historiae conciliorum, 22 (1990–91), 86–130. A sermon by Englishman Geoffrey Schale is printed in Adolar Zumkeller, ‘Unbekannte Konstanzer Konzilspredigten’, Analecta Augustinianum, 33 (1970), 5–74 (pp. 29–44). Henry Abingdon’s sermon is paraphrased by Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford’, p. 259. 15

The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, pp. 623–24. For relevant recent work on John Lydgate, see, for example, James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English

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The two kings are again linked in Lydgate’s ballade for the coronation: And þat þou mayst beo resemblable founde Heretykes and Lollardes for to oppresse Lych emperour, worthy Sygesmound, And as þy fader, floure of hye prowesse, At þe gynnyng of his royal noblesse Woyded al Cokil fer oute of Syon, Crystes spouse sette in stabulnesse Outraying foreyns þat cam from Babylon.16

Lydgate also invokes a train of Roman emperors (Trajan, Tiberius, Gratian, Justinian) as models for the young king, especially encouraging him to cherish the church like Constantine. That invocation of a Roman, imperial past is also part of the self-presentation engendered out of the English church’s need for historical redefinition. It is powerfully deployed in Thomas Polton’s fascinating defence of the integrity of the English as a distinct nation (that is, a group or confederation of delegates from geographically or culturally affiliated countries) at the Council of Konstanz in March 1417, a defence that followed hard on the heels of the entertainments and pageantry shown by the English nation to Sigismund in January of that year. Polton’s defence goes far beyond the internal operation of the Council to embrace not just European politics but also the English church’s growing ability to think of itself as an Ecclesia Anglicana, in a perhaps deliberate reengagement with the idealisms of Bede’s history of the early English church.17

Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350– 1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 34–67; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Shannon Gayk, ‘Images of Pity: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Lyrics’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 28 (2006), 175–203; and the essays in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. by Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 16 17

The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, pp. 627–28.

For a slightly abbreviated translation of Polton’s fascinating speech, which prefigures (and perhaps supplies) many of the claims made by Henry VIII’s ministers during the break with Rome, see Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, pp. 110–26 (subsequent references in the text are by page to this version); J.-P. Genet, ‘English Nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Constance’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 28 (1984), 60–78. Another version of d’Ailly’s attack and Polton’s defence is found in the diary of Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre, translated in The Council of Constance, ed. by Mundy and Woody, pp. 314–24 and 335–49 (subsequent references by page to this version). Bede was certainly being read by this generation of English churchmen, as Richard Ullerston, a key policy advisor, refers to possessing a copy written ‘in the most ancient English’.

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Polton, an Oxford Bachelor of Civil Law from the 1390s and later bishop of Hereford under Chichele, was responding to a calculated and detailed attack masterminded by Pierre d’Ailly against the claim by the English to form a distinct grouping or nation at the council, instead of being part of the wider ‘German’ nation as they had in the past. The French claimed that the English church, consisting of only two provinces, was tiny in proportion to other nations (which covered much larger geographical areas). Moreover they stressed the sanctity of the French monarchy and pointedly asserted ‘the length of time since [France] received the faith of Christ, from which it has never deviated as compared with the kingdom of England’ (p. 119). In his reply, Polton, referring to himself as speaking on behalf of the English nation ‘also known as the British nation’ (p. 111, Bede again), argues that England is superior in the antiquity of its faith, dignity, and honour, and at least equal in all the divine gifts of regal power and numbers and wealth of clergy and people. The royal house had emerged during the second age of the world and enjoyed an unbroken continuity. Once more drawing on a Bedan view of the conversion of England, Polton argues that many saints and pilgrims had been born in England, most notably St Helena (daughter of old king Coel) and her son Constantine the Great, ‘born in the royal city of York’, so that the power, influence, and riches of the Roman church, and the religious enlightenment it had brought to the world might be attributed directly to the blessed realm of the English (p. 118). The conversion of the Empire, the endowment of the church, the building of St Peter’s, and the finding of the true cross were all the consequence of the act of an English man and woman. Moreover, Polton argues, using the Glastonbury legends, Joseph of Arimathea came to England with twelve companions, ‘and converted the people to the faith’ (p. 119).18 This means that England was Christian long before St Denis converted France. Furthermore: that puissant English royal house never strayed from the obedience of the church of Rome, but until this day has always fought for it in exemplary Christian fashion. Several sheets of paper would not be enough to particularize the other prerogatives and gifts of that glorious line. (p. 118)

In a remarkable move, with interesting implications for our understanding of vernacularity, Polton even argues that Anglia (vel Britannia) enjoys greater linguistic diversity than the Gallic nation:

18

On the political advantages of this legend, see James P. Carley, ‘A Grave Event: Henry V, Glastonbury Abbey and Joseph of Arimathea’s Bones’, in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. by James P. Carley, Arthurian Studies, 44 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), pp. 285–302.

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Vincent Gillespie The Gallic nation speaks in the main one language, understood as a whole or at least in part by the vulgar throughout the entire extent of the nation. But the renowned nation of England or Britain includes within and under itself five languages or nations no one of which is understood by the rest, namely English, which the English and Scots share alike, Welsh, Irish, Gascon and Cornish. (Fillastre’s Diary, p. 344)

It is hard to know how far Polton’s tongue was in his cheek in all of this, though the argument for linguistic diversity also echoes similar observations made by Bede. But it is interesting to see him ransacking the past for a sense of a distinctive English contribution to spirituality and church history, and to see him embracing Britain as a multilingual construct, bound together by the lingua franca of church Latin. Ecclesia Anglicana vel Brittania may in some senses have been re-born at Konstanz. 19 Polton’s speech is, of course, part of that turn to propaganda in the Lancastrian regime so well documented and explored by Paul Strohm and others in the domestic political sphere, and in connection with heresy.20 But it has been much less fully explored in connection with the local English iteration of the panEuropean process of reformation of the institutional church in head and members that was the publicly expressed purpose of the Council of Konstanz.21 The potential impact of that European process on English spirituality and on the English church’s conception of its mission, status and identity, has, I believe, been

19

This nationalistic language is also found in some fourteenth-century sermons by reformminded preachers such as Thomas Brinton: see Andrea Ruddick, ‘National Sentiment and Religious Vocabulary in Fourteenth-Century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60 (2009), 1–18. Cf. the use of Augustine of Canterbury in the London alliterative poem St Erkenwald in Jennifer L. Sisk, ‘The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St Erkenwald’, English Literary History, 74 (2007), 89–115. 20

For example, Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Jennifer Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 21

Thomas Gascoigne’s Liber veritatum bristles with references to discussions at the various fifteenth-century councils, especially in relation to heresy, but also in regard to the orthodox reform of pastoral care: Loci e Libro veritatum: Passages Selected from Gascoigne’s Theological Dictionary, Illustrating the Condition of Church and State, 1403–1458, ed. by James Edwin Thorold Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881). On the European reformist orthodoxy with which English bishops would have come into contact at the councils, see, for example, Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. by Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

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masked by the focus in recent years on the impact of the decrees of Thomas Arundel issued in 1409 but drafted at the Council of Oxford in 1407.22 Arundel’s decrees cast a long shadow across the following decades and encourage a sense that the role of the vernacular in innovatory religious writing was diminished, and its advocates cowed and anxious. But it was left to his long-serving successor, Henry Chichele, archbishop from 1414 until 1443, surrounded by a new cadre of bishops and intellectuals, to shape and develop the distinctive features of English spirituality in the first half of the fifteenth century.23 Thomas Arundel died on 14 February 1414, only eleven months after the accession of Henry V in March 1413. Henry Chichele had intellectual and ecclesiastical horizons that were broader than those of Arundel. At one of the first meetings of the Convocation of Canterbury after his election, Chichele promised to blow away the ‘pulvis negligentiae’ (‘the dust of neglect’) from the feet of the English church.24 This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the achievements of his predecessor, though it may contain more than a (dust) mite of truth. Chichele, an Oxford Doctor of Canon and Civil Law, was part of that generation of career clerics and bishops who had trained in Oxford 22

Chichele’s church has tended to be overshadowed by an emphasis in recent scholarship on the 1409 decrees of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, in the wake of Watson, ‘Censorship’. Many subsequent users of Watson’s argument have failed to be as subtle and nuanced in their interpretations as he is. For a critique of this emphasis, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, in Middle English, ed. by Paul Strohm, Oxford Twenty-first Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 401–20, and, in the narrower context of visionary texts, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 23

See also Gerald L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461, The New Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), especially chapters 9 and 10; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Eamon Duffy, ‘Religious Belief’, in A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 293–339; Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 24

The detailed legislation of Chichele’s early years is contained in Records of Convocation, ed. by Gerald Lewis Bray (Woodbridge: Boydell in association with the Church of England Record Society, 2005), V : Canterbury 1414–1443. For this comment, see p. 33. For interlocking (and occasionally overlapping) discussions of these issues, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution, and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England’, in Opening the Middle English Lives of Christ, ed. by Ian Johnson and Allan Westphall (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming); and ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. by Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–93.

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alongside Wyclif or the next generation of his intellectual supporters.25 That generation shared more common ground with the Wyclivisiti than Arundel’s, and their analysis of the state of the institutional church would have frequently overlapped, even if they disagreed about the necessary remedies.26 Chichele had been blooded on the European stage at the Council of Pisa, and he had also served on diplomatic missions to the papal curia. Indeed, the eventual promulgation of Arundel’s decrees in 1409, after their drafting in Oxford in 1407, may well owe something to the activities and experiences of the English nation at the Council of Pisa that year. Chichele’s marked and damaged, perhaps even mildly traumatized, generation of church leaders had a real if pragmatic and politically aware agenda for reform. It was Chichele who between 1414 and 1416 standardized and regularized the English liturgy on the model of the Sarum rite, and who oversaw some of the new liturgical feasts designed to foster and direct orthodox lay piety.27 It was Chichele who, in 1415, enacted the king’s will that the national and regional saints George and David, Cedd, Winifred, and John of Beverley should be raised in liturgical stature in the wake of Agincourt alongside that of Thomas Becket, foreshadowing the ‘national unity in regional diversity’ argument that Thomas Polton would formally make at Konstanz in his 1417 speech.28 This fostering of hagiography and reinvigoration of liturgy are part of a sustained attempt to mark the English church under Henry and Chichele as decisively different from Lollardy in its orthodoxy

25

For an outline of Chichele’s biography and career (and that of many of the ecclesiasts mentioned here), see the relevant entries in ODNB. Ernest F. Jacob, Archbishop Henry Chichele (London: Nelson, 1967) is still a useful introduction. 26

This ideological common ground has been repeatedly emphasized by Jeremy Catto. See, for example, his seminal chapters in the HUO (n. 3 above), and Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Fellows and Helpers: The Religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif’, in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life, ed. by Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 11 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), pp. 141–61. 27

Sherry L. Reames, ‘Lectionary Revision in Sarum Breviaries and the Origins of the Early Printed Editions’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 9 (2006), 95–115, identifies a distinctive ‘Chichele group’ of books, suggesting that the initiative came from close to him. On the liturgical changes, see Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and Richard W. Pfaff, Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). 28

On this legislation, see Records of Convocation, pp. 18–22. See also The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, ed. by Ernest F. Jacob, 4 vols, Canterbury and York Society, 42 and 45–47 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937–47).

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and full participation in the life of the universal church. Indeed, hagiography is one of the most sprightly genres of vernacular textual production in the fifteenth century.29 To approve of saints and the efficacy of their prayers was one very clear way of marking out the orthodox from the heterodox. Lydgate’s occasional poems and verses for public tabulae often work to fuel popular national or local pride in the achievements of the English church. Particularly notable are his prayers to Thomas Becket and his legend of St George and St Augustine at Compton, the latter staging a recreation of the Bedan view of the primitive years of English Christianity, and presenting Augustine of Canterbury as the kind of clerical ideal that the conciliar age English bishops sought to foster: His liff was lyk his predicacioun As he tauht, sothely so he wrouhte: By his moost holy conuersacioun Into this lond the feith of crist he brouhte.30

The turn to history required by these acts of public self-definition can, I think, be seen as part of a change in the way the English church thought, wrote, and expressed itself. Because it took place most publicly, in the context of an ecumenical council of the Church, that conversion process was thought through and acted out largely in Latin, of course, and in the semi-juridical context of the sessions of the Council, or in the equally rhetorically charged context of sermons delivered before the assembled delegates. Indeed, the English case for church reform had been most powerfully articulated in a document produced in 1414 in preparation for Konstanz by the University of Oxford, the Articuli concernantes reformationem universalis ecclesiae editi per universitatem Oxoniensem.31 Up until his death in 1417, the English case was led and enforced by Robert Hallum, pugnacious bishop of Salisbury and previous chancellor of Oxford

29

For a very useful starting point, see the discussion by Oliver S. Pickering, ‘Saints’ Lives’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 249–70; and for excellent further reading Karen A. Winstead, ‘Saintly Exemplarity’, in Middle English, ed. by Strohm, pp. 335–51. 30

Legend of St Austin at Compton, ll. 77–80: The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part I, p. 195. Lydgate’s Life of St Edmund, written for Henry VI in 1434, clearly figures Henry V’s religious orthodoxy in his portrait of the Anglo-Saxon royal martyr (‘Lollards that tyme fond in him no comfort / To holichirche he was so strong a wal’ [ll. 934–35]); John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund, ed. by Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards, Middle English Texts, 41(Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), p. 61. 31

The articles are edited in Wilkins, Concilia, III, 360–65.

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University. The English position supported that of Sigismund, which was that the church must undertake a thoroughgoing reform of itself before it could credibly elect a new pope. Hallum’s surviving and reported sermons from 1415 stress the support of Henry V for the union of the church and for its reform in head and members. Complaining in a sermon preached in December 1415 that the luminous serenity of the church had become eclipsed, Hallum preached on a text ‘Erunt signa in sole et luna’ (There will be signs in the sun and moon, Luke 21) found ‘in the Gospel of the present Sunday according to the use and observance of the English church’. He argued that the spiritual sun of the church, that is the pope, along with the bishops and prelates (perhaps an interesting glimpse of his view of collegiate power), should stand for and hold to an extension of clear-sightedness (claritas) and justice, holy life and honest conversation, sound preaching and teaching, and, above all, contempt for avarice, like bright lights in the midst of clouds, and like a full moon in those days.32 After Hallum’s death, intellectual leadership passed to Richard Flemyng, an Oxford scripture professor, future bishop of Lincoln and founder in the 1420s of the anti-heretical Lincoln College, Oxford. Sermons preached by Fleming in 1417 pursued a reform agenda that he argued had been needed since the time of the Council of Pisa in 1409 (perhaps significantly, the same year that Arundel’s famous constitutions were finally promulgated after their drafting at the Council of Oxford in 1407): Ad sanctificationem nempe seu reformacionem ecclesie vocavit nos Dominus in Pisano concilio. Sed voce corvina utebamur, dicentes et promittentes: ‘cras, cras et reformabimur’. (Beyond doubt, the Lord called us at the Council of Pisa to the sanctification or reformation of the Church. Yet we have been using the voice of the crow, saying and promising: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, we shall be reformed.)33

Flemyng’s allusion to Pisa is, I think, telling. Many of the main players in the English delegation at Konstanz, and in those of Chichele’s administration at home, had also been active at Pisa or in the preparations for it. Many of that same cohort went on to be members of Henry VI’s minority council or active participants in the heresy trials of the 1420s, another way in which the conciliar age impacted on the timbre of English spirituality after 1409. Indeed, the Oxford petitions for reform produced in 1414 were largely based on an earlier document drafted at the request 32

Edited in Heinrich Finke, Acta concilii Constanciensis, 4 vols (Münster: Regensbergsche, 1896–1928), II, 423–25. 33

Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”’, pp. 21–22.

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of Robert Hallum in 1408 by Richard Ullerston, an Oxford academic with connections to Wyclif’s own college, Queen’s (as had many of that reforming cadre and as, according to legend, had been the future Henry V in c. 1398), and to the diocese of Salisbury.34 These petitiones called for widespread reform of the church militant on issues such as simony, the appropriation of benefices, exemptions, plurality of benefices, the abuse of privileges, clerical apostasy, and the holding of secular office.35 Most of these had been on Wyclif’s own reform agenda. Hallum had originally presented Ullerston’s petitions to the Council of Pisa in 1409, so while the main concern of that Council was the unity of the church and the healing of the schism (which, in fact, it made worse by inadvertently electing a third pope), reformation was already firmly on the agenda of the thinkers within the English church. Oxford, of course, felt that it had been tainted and weakened by the Wyclif saga, so it was notably energetic in stressing its orthodoxies and its appetite for reform. Arundel’s decrees had put the university on notice in no uncertain terms, using what became the imagistic commonplaces of the reform movement: the infected vineyard and the damaged city wall (imagery given new currency by, and perhaps largely borrowed from, the prophecies of Birgitta of Sweden): The gracious university of Oxford, which like a luxuriant vine was accustomed to extend its fruitful branches as a many-layered covering to the honour of God and the shelter of his church, is now partly turned to wild vines and produces bitter grapes […] and our province is soiled with diverse and barren doctrines and is stained with the new and damnable name of Lollardy, to no small scandal to the same university and extending to foreign and remote parts, and leading to maximum disgust in the same; and furthermore to the scandal of the English church, which by its virtuous teaching was accustomed to be defended as by an

34 Margaret Harvey, ‘English Views on the Reforms to Be Undertaken in the General Councils 1400–1418’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1963); Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430’. Ullerston (see ODNB), a central policy maker in this reforming cadre, is best known for his role in the Oxford debate about Bible translation around 1400 (see below). Many of Chichele’s bishops and confidants have a common background in Oxford, especially Queen’s College, and in the diocese of Salisbury, where Chichele’s orthodox reform movement may perhaps have begun under the pioneering deanship of Thomas Montague (1382–1404) at the General Chapter of 1387 (see David Lepine’s essay in this volume). Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury 1407–17, had similar connections to Oxford and Salisbury before his leadership of the English delegation at Konstanz. 35

The Petitiones are edited in Hermann von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium de universali ecclesiæ reformatione, unione, et fide, 6 vols (Frankfurt, 1700), I, 1126–70.

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Vincent Gillespie unassailable wall and is now split and divided stones, and unless it is more swiftly helped according to the truth it will be irretrievably doomed.36

This theme of the shame of Oxford (our sun, as the preacher calls it) is also found in the macaronic sermons of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649, composed by a reform-minded Benedictine monk sometime before 1422: Sicut hec vniuersitatis fuit olim verus fons fidei et virtutis sic reputatur iam a chef […] hereticorum et lollardorum. Isto modo mater noster scandalizatur. Non est meum verbum est communis clamor in patria. ( Just as this university was once the true fount of faith and virtue now it is regarded as a major […] of heretics and Lollards. In this way our mother is scandalized. This is not my word, it is the common cry in the country.)37

Polton had cited the antiquity and eminence of Oxford in his defence of the English nation, and Richard Flemyng used one of his 1417 Konstanz sermons to argue for the need for peace and concord not just between France and England but between ‘illa duo mundi illuminaria’, the universities of Oxford and Paris.38 The effective influence of Oxford on Konstanz can be measured by comparing the Oxford articuli with the concordats issued by Martin V at the end of the Council to each of the nations, and in particular by noting the extent to which the headings and wording of the Concordat with the English nation echo those of Ullerston’s Petiticiones and their reworking in the 1414 articuli. The Concordat’s provisions on restricting the proliferation of indulgences in England, for example, are more specific and more generous than those found in the concordats with the other nations.39

36

Constitution 11, Wilkins, Concilia, II, 314–19 (this translation by Sarah James). See also the version in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. by Josiah Pratt, 4th edn, 8 vols (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), III, 242–48 (p. 246). The vineyard imagery, historically commonplace in the lexis of Church reform, is also found in the prologue to Birgitta’s Regula salvatoris; see Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard’, for more discussion. The imagery is also prominent in the documents of the fifteenth-century Church councils. 37

Sermon 8 is entirely on the subject of Oxford’s fall from eminence and virtue. A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England: Oxford, Ms Bodley 649, ed. by Patrick J. Horner, Studies and Texts, 153 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006), p. 213. See also Robert N. Swanson, Universities, Academics and the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 38

Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”’, p. 30.

39

Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1082.

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The nature of the reforms called for by Ullerston in 1408 and in the 1414 Oxford articuli show that, conscious as it was of the dangers of Lollardy, a vocal, influential, and soon to be powerful segment within the university remained persuaded that many of the criticisms of the church and the calls for reform made by Wyclif himself, particularly in his earlier work, remained valid and needed addressing. The leaders of the English church in the first half of the fifteenth century were not just scarred by the institutional instability brought about by schism and heresy, in particular by Lollardy, at home.40 They were also intellectually and professionally persuaded of the correctness of Wyclif’s diagnosis that the cause of schism and heresy lay in the corruption of the institutional church. Another English sermon at Konstanz, preached by Geoffrey Schale in 1417, called for a return to the values and ideals of the apostolic church. Using the head and members analogy, Schale, an Augustinian hermit, argues that the Church must reconstruct a Pauline model of itself, with prophets ‘ad futura praedicandum’ (for the preaching of the future), pastors ‘ad curam animarum’ (for the care of souls), doctors or teachers ‘ad informandum populum’ (for the instruction of the people), all working ‘ad consummationem sanctorum, id est perfectionem fidelium in fide et moribus instruendorum et aedificationem spiritualem corporis Christi mystici quod est ecclesia’ (for the fulfilment of saints, that is, the perfection of the faithful by instruction in faith and morals, and the spiritual construction of the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church).41 In one of his sermons, Richard Fleming calls for a proper valuing of scholarship and scriptural learning among the episcopate, noting that although many learned doctors and professors are present at the Council ‘ultra duos prelatos in sacra theologia doctores non video’ (I do not see more than two members of the episcopate who are doctors of theology).42 No doubt some of this was special pleading from an academic, but it does seem to reflect a wider recognition among the English episcopacy of the need to reinforce sana doctrina by the promotion and strategic placing of theologically trained scholars in positions of influence inside English dioceses, and Oxford successfully lobbied Chichele for a mechanism for the promotion of graduates in the same year that Fleming’s sermons were preached at Konstanz.43 Another Oxford academic, Henry Abingdon, in a surviving sermon to 40

The continuing engagement of Chichele’s bishops with the battle against heresy is documented by Ian Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 41

Zumkeller, ‘Unbekannte Konstanzer Konzilspredigten’, p. 39.

42

Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”’, p. 29.

43

Records of Convocation, pp. 64–67, 70–74. The idea for a scheme to promote recent graduates to parish posts was also presented by the English nation at Konstanz as a remedy for the

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the Council delivered in October 1417, explicitly quoted the Oxford reform programme of 1414, and argued that ‘true prelates before everything else took care of doctrina, the craft of instructing the people in religion’. Doctrina was an art, he argued, that no cleric in authority should scorn to learn ‘though too many, immersed in lawsuits and the “lucrative sciences”, cared little for the science of morals and the struggle for heresy’.44 The phrase ‘lucrative sciences’ comes from Robert Grosseteste, the reforming thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln, who was a favourite authority of Wycliffite critics of the institutional church, and who was systematically and energetically reclaimed by the orthodox reformers of the early fifteenth century as an example of episcopal zeal and idealism. Indeed, one of the many ways in which these utterances at Konstanz are shadowed by the repressed memory of Wyclif is the way that they share his respect and admiration for the pastoral teachings of Robert Grosseteste (another former Oxford academic) whose own sermon at the papal curia was used extensively by Wyclif and the orthodox reformers alike. Indeed, his own pastoral constitutions for Lincoln diocese, promulgated in 1239, fed directly into Pecham’s provincial decrees in the 1280s and therefore into Arundel’s constitutions in 1409.45 With his high-minded zeal for the importance of the care of souls, and his epigrammatic ability to stress the need for properly disciplined and carefully trained priests, Grosseteste was a hero to both wings of the reform movement. His own pastoral handbook, the Templum dei, enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in early fifteenth-century English clerical miscellanies. Flemyng and other preachers at Konstanz claim him proudly as a son of Oxford, and there is a

decline in good preachers available to instruct the faithful and to combat heresy: Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1076. 44 45

Quoted by Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430’, p. 259.

F. A. C. Mantello, ‘“Optima Epistola”: A Critical Edition and Translation of Letter 128 of Bishop Robert Grosseteste’, in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. by J. Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 277–301; Servus Gieben, ‘Robert Grosseteste at the Papal Curia, Lyons, 1250: Edition of the Documents’, Collectanea Franciscana, 41 (1971), 340–93; James McEvoy, ‘Robertus Grossatesta Lincolniensis: An Essay in Historiography, Medieval and Modern’, in Robert Grosseteste and the Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition, ed. by Maura O’Carroll (Roma: Instituto storico dei Cappuccini, 2003), pp. 21–102 (pp. 58–68); on Thomas Gascoigne’s use of Grosseteste, see R. M. Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Monograph 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2006), pp. 5–7 and 116–25. I am indebted to Dr John Flood of the University of Groningen for his invaluable help with this reference.

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similarity in the way that his reform programme emerged from a group of Oxonian academic reformers who then became reforming bishops under Henry III, and the way that Oxford manoeuvred to position itself as the home of orthodox reform under Henry V and the Oxonian Henry Chichele.46 Arundel’s decrees certainly marked a sharp change of institutional direction for the English church. But they happened against a background of continuing selfanalysis at Oxford (such as the debate on bible translation in which Ullerston was a key player) and within monasticism, especially the Benedictines. It is arguable that the English church under Chichele came to adopt pastoral positions that reflect those of Richard Ullerston more closely than those of his opponents in the Oxford translation debate of 1401.47 The real story about vernacular theology in the fifteenth century is that, in the end, John Wyclif had more impact on the language and attitudes of the English church in the fifteenth century than his arch enemy Thomas Arundel. One example: the Ullerston-influenced Oxford articuli of 1414 contained a section on ‘de anglicatione librorum’ (concerning the Englishing of books) which complained that inept and incompetent translation into the vernacular was hindering and misleading the ‘simplices idiotas’, and asked the king to legislate to order the confiscation of books in English until proper scholarly translations were available. This probably reflected the aspiration in chapter 6 of Arundel’s decrees for a university-based system of examination and distribution of such texts through exemplars held by university stationers.48 The Oxford articuli argue only for a deferral of translation, not a prohibition of it, and in calling for proper scholarly translations to be made under orthodox clerical supervision, in effect concede the cautious case for the transmission of theological

46

Templum dei, ed. by Joseph W. Goering and F. A. C. Mantello (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). 47 The various works of Margaret Harvey and Jeremy Catto cited in this paper map out this terrain very clearly. For a summary, and some parallel discussion, see Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’; and Vincent Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume One: To 1500, ed. by Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 234–83. There is more specific discussion of the Nachleben of Wyclif in Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard’, on which subject see now, definitively, Anne Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 48

‘[Q]uod libri et tractatus novelli ab ortu schismatis Anglicati confiscari valeant et eorum possessoribus subtrahi, donec per sciolos non suspectos ipsorum in linguam maternam translatio approbatur’ (that new books and tracts Englished since the beginning of the schism should be confiscated and taken away from their possessors, until, through junior scholars not suspected, a translation into their mother tongue be approved), Wilkins, Concilia, III, 365.

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materials in the vernacular outlined by Ullerston in 1401.49 So the issue of translation and the status of the vernacular was never far away from the intellectual agenda in the decade after Arundel’s decrees. This has, perhaps, been masked by the perception that there was a turn to Latin in the English church, born from a desire to protect the ‘privetees’ of theology and to stifle foolish and unlearned tittle-tattle, especially about controversial institutional issues like pluralism, provision, simony, and tithes. However, this move probably also reflects a stated desire to drive up the educational attainments of the clergy, especially through the campaign to encourage and promote university graduates to the cure of souls, and to improve the in-service training of clerics. It is striking and perhaps surprising to record how many new Latin pastoral manuals are produced in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, many of which also contain vernacular or macaronic elements in a subordinate mnemonic role. The Speculum christiani, surviving in sixty complete manuscripts, many alongside copies of episcopal decrees or other pastoral legislation, was probably produced in Lincolnshire in the first two decades of the fifteenth century, though the first securely dateable manuscript copy comes from 1425.50 It has established patterns of ownership and use in the northern province of York, including priests attached to York minster, and offers an interesting perspective on orthodox pastoralia in the

49

On the Oxford bible translation debate and Ullerston’s role in it, see Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, which draws heavily on earlier work, such as Anne Hudson, ‘The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401’, English Historical Review, 90 (1975), 1–18, repr. in Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London: Hambledon, 1985), pp. 67–84. Key Latin texts remain unedited. In particular, the fullest form of Ullerston’s determinacio exists in a still unedited manuscript, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Vindobonensis Palatinus 4133, fols 195r–297v . I am grateful to Prof. Anne Hudson for permission to consult her transcription of this text. The arguments of Butler and Palmer, and a vernacular version of Ullerston’s tract have been edited by Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920); and by Curt Bühler, ‘A Lollard Tract: On Translating the Bible into English’, Medium Ævum, 7 (1938), 167–83. A new edition of the major vernacular tracts in favour of Bible translation is available as The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate, ed. by Mary Dove (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2010). 50 Speculum Christiani, ed. by Gustaf Holmstedt, EETS, O. S. 182 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1933), with all subsequent references to this edition; Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Evolution of the Speculum Christiani’, in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. by Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 39–62; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Chapter and Worse: An Episode in the Regional Transmission of the Speculum Christiani’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 14 (2008), 86–111.

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immediate aftermath of Wyclif. Some of its popularity no doubt comes from its decision to incorporate and address the Pecham decree on Ignorantia sacerdotum, which Arundel’s decrees had established as a baseline and indeed a parameter for lay catechesis, and which those decrees had required to ‘be made available in the separate parish churches of our province of Canterbury within three months of the publication’ of the decrees. The Speculum opens with a canonical distinction between preaching and teaching (very similar, in fact, to the one used by Margery Kempe in her own defence): Magna differencia est inter predicacionem et doctrinam. Predicacio est, ubi est convocacio sive populi invitacio in diebus festivis in ecclesiis seu in aliis certis locis et temporibus ad hoc deputatis, et pertinet ad eos qui ordinati sunt ad hoc et iurisdictionem et auctoritatem habent, et non ad alios. Informare autem et docere potest unusquisque fratrem suum in omni loco et tempore oportuno, si videatur sibi expedite, quia hoc est Elemosina, ad quam quilibet tenetur. (p. 3, ll. 4–11)

This is rendered by the later Middle English translation of the whole work as: A grete differens es be-twene prechynge and techynge. Prechynge es in a place where es clepynge to-gedyr or foluynge of pepyl in holy dayes in chyrches or other[r] certeyn places and tymes ordeyned ther-to. And it longeth to hem that been ordeynede ther-to, the whych haue iurediccion and auctorite, and to noon othyr. Techynge es that eche body may enforme and teche hys brothyr in euery place and in conable tyme, os he seeth that it be spedful. For this es a gostly almesdede, to whych euery man es bounde that hath cunnynge. (p. 2, ll. 5–13)

And the work ends with the Gregorian aphorism that ‘Nullum sacrificium ita placet deo sicut zelus animarum’ (No sacrifice pleases God as much as a zeal for souls). In between, it covers the catechetic syllabus and provides a compendium of pastoral instruction, replaying for a new generation of parish priests many of the mnemonic aphorisms about the nature of sacerdotal life that had been generated in the thirteenth-century canonical reinforcement of that century’s new emphases in pastoral theology. Its eighth section or tabula is an anthology of exhortations and patristic citations about the priestly life, covering many of the same issues attacked by the Lollards and addressed by the councils, and including a lengthy citation of Grosseteste (p. 173). In a final act of self-justification, which probably sounded innocuous enough when it was drafted perhaps around 1400–1405, but felt slightly different when read after 1409, the Speculum argues that the production and circulation of such texts is an act of charity and spiritual almsgiving:

24

Vincent Gillespie Magnum enim meritum est illi & multum premium habebit in futuro, qui scribit uel scribere facit doctrinam sanam ea intencione ut ipse querat in ea quomodo sancte uiuat & ut alii eam habeant ut per eam edificentur. Hoc certissime scito quod tot premia pre aliis habebis quot anime per te salue fiant (p. 241, ll. 1–5). Grete meryte is to hym, and he schal haue myche mede in tyme to come, that wryteõ or dooõ to write holsom doctrine for that entente that he may lyue holily ther-by, and also that other men mowe be edifyede ther-by. Knowe that certenly that thou schalt haue so many medes bi-forne other as many soules as be sauede by the (p. 240, ll. 1–6).

This is supported by a citation from the fashionable (if still contestable) revelations of Birgitta, calling for the conversion of others as one of the primary responsibilities of all Christians: Legitur in libro beate Brigide quod amici dei non debent attediari in seruicio dei, set laborare ut homo malus sit melior & homo bonus ueniat ad perfectori. Nam quicumque uoluntatem haberet sibilandi in aures omnium transiencium quod Iesus Christus esset uere dei filius & faciendo conaretur quantum posset ad aliorum conuersionem licet nulli uel pauci conuerterentur nihilominus eandem mercedem optineret ac si omnes conuerterentur (p. 241, ll. 7–14). It is red in the lyfe of seynt Bride that frendes of god owen not to be wery in godes seruice; bot labours that the wicked man be amendede and the gude may come to more perfyte thynges. For who-so-euer hath wil to soune in mennes eerys that Criste Ihesus were truly goddes [sone] and desyre wyth gud seele in doynge what he may to true conuersyon of other, althoue now or fewe be conuertede, nertheles heschal haue the same mede as if al were turnede and conuertede to god (p. 240, ll. 6–15).

I do not think it at all accidental that the dissemination of this text was at its height between 1420 and 1460. Some of this turning back to Latin probably also reflects the greater European perspective of a growing number of English churchmen.51 The sustained exposure

51

The standard discussion of early fifteenth-century English humanism has for many years been Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, Medium Ævum Monographs 4, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967); 4th edn edited and prepared for electronic publication by David Rundle and Anthony John Lappin, available online at . Exciting new work is now under way, stressing the importance of episcopal humanism to the developments in England: see, for example, James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c. 1350–1440 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Andrew Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, in Middle English, ed. by Strohm (2007), pp. 421–37; Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and the essays by Cole and Wakelin in the present volume.

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of English bishops, abbots, and academics to their colleagues from other European countries may have impacted both on the sense of common purpose felt by the English nation with their co-adjutors in the rest of the Church Militant and on their awareness of the distinctiveness of the English church and its spiritual and institutional history. Although the process of book lending, book borrowing, and book buying is much better documented at the later Council of Basel (described by Lehmann as a veritable entrepôt of books), it is likely that similar horizonwidening encounters took place at Pisa and Konstanz, after a period of relative isolationism for the English church during the schism.52 One of the English delegates at Pisa and Konstanz, the Benedictine Thomas Spofforth (some of whose reformist-minded vernacular sermons survive, full of the buzzwords of the new ecclesial lexis), perhaps carried his copy of Rolle’s Latin Incendium amoris to Konstanz.53 It was at Konstanz that Nicholas Bubwith probably acquired a translation into Latin of Dante’s Commedia, made by an Italian delegate at the Council.54 Surviving copies of the acta of Konstanz made by, or for, Englishmen often contain copies of the two great reform treatises of Pierre d’Ailly and the works of that other French reformer Jean Gerson.55 Similarly, the library at Syon was stocked from early on with advanced reformist writings by d’Ailly, Gerson, Nicholas of Clamanges, the controversial Speculum aureum of Petrus Wysz ‘de reformatione triplicis erroris in ecclesia’ (sometimes attributed to an Englishman),

52

Paul Joachim Georg Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters: Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Aufsätze (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1941), I, 253–80. On the musical impact of the cultural encounters at Konstanz, see Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music (1380–1500) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 106–24 (part I. 3: ‘The Council of Constance’). 53

Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm. 5. 37. See The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. by Margaret Deanesly (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915), pp. 8–9, 51–54. On Spofforth’s vernacular sermons, see Four Middle English Sermons: Edited from British Library Ms Harley 2268, ed. by Veronica M. O’Mara, Middle English Texts, 33 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002); A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ed. by Veronica M. O’Mara and Suzanne Paul, 4 vols, Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), II, 1210–23. 54

David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 139–80 (chap. 3, ‘Dante in Somerset’). 55

C. M. D. Crowder, ‘Constance Acta in English Libraries’, in Das Konzil von Konstanz; Beiträge zu seiner Geschichte und Theologie, ed. by A. Franzen and W. Müller (Freiburg: Herder, 1964), pp. 477–517. Thomas Polton’s copy of the complete Acta (written by a French scribe) survives as London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero E. v.

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and others.56 New ideas flowed into the English church, and its sense of its historical anchorage was reinforced by the two greatest texts of institutional selfdefinition produced in this period: the Carmelite Thomas Netter’s Doctrinale fidei antiquitatum ecclesiae catholicae (1427), a systematic reply to Wyclif and Lollardy by appeal to the precedents and history of the English and the universal church, and William Lyndwood’s Provinciale (by 1429), a codification of English episcopal legislation for the province of Canterbury by one of Chichele’s right-hand men.57 Works like this created a sense of historical antiquity and doctrinal stability that was much needed in Chichele’s church. When we try and calibrate more carefully and subtly the fate of vernacular theology after Arundel, we need to pay careful attention to this Latin, European, and conciliar stratum in the output of religious books. But that pan-European Latin perspective served to give depth and resonance to a continuing institutional exploitation of the catechetic and doctrinal potential of the vernacular. The reformist Zeitgeist of Chichele’s church was most nobly embodied in the spiritual idealisms of Syon Abbey,58 probably a centre of orthodox translation into the vernacular, and manifests itself elsewhere through the peppery correctness and patristic scholarship of Thomas Gascoigne at Oxford;59 or the

56

See the indexes in Syon Abbey, ed. by Vincent Gillespie, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 9 (London: British Library in association with the British Academy, 2001). 57

On Netter, see ODNB, and now Thomas Netter of Walden: Carmelite, Diplomat and Theologian (c. 1372–1430), ed. by Johan Bergstrom-Allen and Richard Copsey, Carmel in Britain, 4 (Aylesford: St Albert’s Press, 2009), which reproduces an early printed text of the Doctrinale on CDRom. On Netter’s use of the lexis of orthodox reform, see Mishtooni Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’, New Medieval Literatures, 7 (2005), 73–99. On Lyndwood, see ODNB; Brian E. Ferme, ‘The Provinciale of William Lyndwood: The Sources, Contents and Influence’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1987); Brian E. Ferme, Canon Law in Medieval England: A Study of William Lyndwood’s ‘Provinciale’ with Particular Reference to Testamentary Law, Studia et textus historiae juris canonici, 8 (Rome: LAS, 1996) and C. R. Cheney, Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 158–84. 58

See, for example, the discussion of good and bad priests in part 5 of The Orcherd of Syon, a fifteenth-century reworking of Catherine of Siena’s reformist Dialogo, composed in the Schism years; The Orcherd of Syon, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson and Gabriel M. Liegey, EETS, O. S. 258 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1966). The brothers of Syon also had in their martyrology a series of added marginal exhortations to the priestly life that reveal a high-minded seriousness: Vincent Gillespie, ‘“Hid Divinite”: The Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. by E. A. Jones (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 189–206. 59

On his energetic and enthusiastic bibliographical scholarship, see Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship.

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theological conservatism of colleges such as Pembroke Hall at Cambridge and the avowedly anti-Lollard Lincoln College at Oxford; or in the preaching and educational activities of the powerful rectors of London city; or through the clerical in-service training provided by institutions such as Whittington College in London (praised by Gascoigne for its sound life, teaching, and learning);60 or even in the eccentric excesses of one of that college’s early masters, Reginald Pecock.61 Pecock was, for example, co-founder in the 1440s with John Somerset of the socially, spiritually, and textually well-connected Guild of All Angels ‘iuxta Syon’. This guild, which also featured John Colop as one of its members, was almost certainly the intermediary for the passage of works of vernacular theology from Syon into the London mercantile common-profit books.62 The common

60

On links between Lydgate, John Carpenter (the Common Clerk of London) and civic piety, see Amy Appleford, ‘The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38 (2008), 285–314; Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); see also Nicole R. Rice, ‘Profitable Devotions: Bodley Ms 423, Guildhall Ms 7114, and a Sixteenth-Century London Pewterer’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 10 (2007), 173–81. 61

Important new work is being done on the religious life of fifteenth-century London. See, for example, Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon, 1994); A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 284–309; Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Christopher M. Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1985), pp. 13–37; Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education in Fifteenth-Century London’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays on Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. by John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 219–45; and the essays in London and the Kingdom: Essays in Honour of Caroline M. Barron, ed. by M. P. Davies and Andrew Prescott, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 16 (Donington: Tyas, 2008). The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580: Papers Given at the Archaeology of Reformation Conference, February 2001, ed. by David R . M. Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003) contains useful essays on London libraries and parochial and guild devotional life. Sheila Lindenbaum’s essay in this volume on London rectors, and James Willoughby’s on public libraries in the capital and elsewhere will greatly add to our understanding. 62

Wendy Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books: Aspects of Book Ownership and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century London’, Medium Ævum, 61

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profit book in London, Lambeth Palace, MS 472, which collects and extracts paramystical texts by Hilton exactly parallels the contents of a manuscript once at Syon (original class mark M.26). The All Angels guild, led by Pecock and Somerset, was probably an important interface between the Latin, highly orthodox, and austere world of Syon and the lay, mercantile audience for vernacular theology among the elites of the city of London. The post-Konstanz public message of the universal church ostensibly remained the same timeless call to repentance. It was the local delivery medium — in particular the clergy and the institutional church in England — that needed reform and renewal. The reformation in head and members envisaged by Konstanz was locally to be manifested as a conversion of the English clergy. Unlike Arundel’s decrees, which impacted directly on lay experience, this conversion was more esoteric, but potentially more radical. Much of the debate about reform and policy at Konstanz was, of course, conducted at a high level of generality and abstraction. The sermons of the English nation are elliptical and allusive, weaving networks of commonplaces into skeins of patristic and scriptural proof texts. The hard bargaining and often harder words that must have occupied the negotiating sessions are scarcely recorded in the surviving documents. But in a way that generality, that official blandness, and the idealism that characterizes both the preparatory documents and the Council’s official acta should not blind us to the highly specialized literary competence of that audience to read behind the rhetoric and to decode the issues and the ideals that are being explored in such contexts. The Latin sermons delivered by Englishmen at Konstanz and at Pavia-Siena (1423–24) establish a vocabulary of orthodox reform that spills over into vernacular poetry and Latin theology.63 The church as a ship needing careful

(1992), 261–74; Wendy Scase, Reginald Pecock, in Authors of the Middle Ages, Vol. III: nos 7–11, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), pp. 75–146; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Walter Hilton at Syon Abbey’, in ‘Stand up to Godwards’: Essays in Mystical and Monastic Theology in Honour of the Reverend John Clark on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 204 (2002), pp. 9–61; Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘The Cult of Angels in Late FifteenthCentury England: An Hours of the Guardian Angel Presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville’, in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. by Lesley Smith and Jane Taylor (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 230–65. The documents relating to the guild are edited by Aungier, Syon Abbey, pp. 459–64 (translated on pp. 215–20). 63

As a sampler of recent work on the religious writing of this period, see the essays in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison; and Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

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steering, the need for rebuilding Syon, the imperative to guard and maintain the walls of the vineyard are all themes that recur in these sermons, just as they do in the English vernacular poetry of the time.64 John Lydgate’s A Defence of Holy Church is a deliberate checklist of the lexis of the episcopal reform project.65 The poem Lo He that Can be Cristes Clerc plays with these same images in its punning allusions to Oldcastle’s destabilizing activities: An old castel, and not repaired. With wast walles and wowes wide... (33–35) An old castel draw al done, Hit is ful hard to rere hit newe... (57–58) That castel is not for a kynge There the walles ben overthrowe. (65–66)66

The king’s important role as a peacemaker in the church is echoed in several of the Latin sermons given by Englishmen at Konstanz. And the extraordinary macaronic sermons in Bodley MS 649, also apparently aimed at a clerical audience, contain many passages in praise of Henry V, figured in one sermon dateable to 1421/22 as a master mariner who has led the embattled ship of state in safe waters after the dangers and struggles of previous times: Nostra navis was so feble, so litel oure emnys set of us. Nostra navis was so hurled and burlid inter ventos et freta quod erat in grandi periculo et sepe in puncto pereundi […] Nostra navis fuit in tanto periculo quod nisi noster graciosus rex set honde on þe raþer and stirid nostrum navem tempestivius, nostra navis had schaplich to go al to wrek. […] In isto mari prosperitatis our maistur mariner oure worthi prince hath sailet many wyntur […] Suus amor figitur in deo et bonitate. Suum attentum est ut dicitur destruere vicia, nutrire virtutes, fortificare fidem, manutenere ecclesiam at augmentare honorem dei. […] Sic ipse augmentavit cultum dei per fundacionem locorum sacrorum et destruccionem Lollardorum. […] Ideo magister marinarius oure sovereyn lord qui stirrid totam navem per suam prudenciam, graciam et virtutem, desiringe ex corde nostrum omnium wele et

64 The vineyard imagery has Biblical origins of course, and could easily be collocated for liturgical purposes: see, for example, Isaiah 5. 1–7 (which describes the rebuilding of the ruined vineyard); Psalm 79 (which echoes this imagery); Matthew 21. 33–43 (where Christ clearly responds to these earlier texts in his parable). The ship imagery is also found in part 7 of The Orcherd of Syon, as well as in many sermons and lyrics. 65 66

The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part I, pp. 30–35.

London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian B. xvi, fols 2v –3r , in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. by James M. Dean, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), consulted online at .

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Vincent Gillespie honorem, besied him per magna media reparare þe brekkes nostre navis and rere up aõen nostrum spiritum ad deum.67

The rudder by which this newly spruce ship of state and the church is to be steered is, inevitably, ‘predicacio et doctrina’. The new mood placed huge stress on the probity of the priesthood and the shift to preaching and oral confession as the most extensive media of vernacular instruction and edification. An impeccably orthodox, traditional, and widely attested verse expressing the clerical ideal was included in Speculum christiani, showing how the English church was reaching back to a feared-lost golden age of clerical uprightness and commitment: Sacerdos debet esse sanctus / a peccatis segregatus Rector non raptor / dispensator non dissipator Pius in iudicio / iustus in consilio Verax in sermone / humilis in congregacione Paciens in aduersitate / benignus in prosperitate Diues in virtutibus / miles in bonis actibus Sobrius in choro / castus in thoro Sapiens in confessione / securus in predicacione. (p. 231, ll. 9–14) [not laid out as verse]

Securus in predicacione: one important aspect of the conversion of the English church was the new emphasis on preaching as the primary medium of scriptural instruction and exposition in the wake of Arundel’s cautions about the dangers of written vernacular translations of scripture.68 This placed new stress on the quality of that preaching. The style of English sermons changed, and their importance was enhanced, both in parochial practice and in English pastoral theory. Thomas Gascoigne — himself much obsessed with high-quality preaching — reports in his 67

Sermon 25: A Macaronic Sermon Collection, ed. by Horner, pp. 521–23. Attention had previously been drawn to the importance of these sermons by Roy M. Haines, Ecclesia Anglicana: Studies in the English Church of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), and in other articles; see also Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 68

Helen Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The fifteenthcentury vernacular tract What the Church Betokeneth, a small-scale pastoral manual (drawing on the Speculum ecclesiae and Durandus) which circulates with the hagiographical collection Gilte legende (a translation of the Legenda aurea made c. 1438), describes preachers as the roof, roof beams, and bells of the allegorical church building: Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of the ‘Gilte Legende’, ed. by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell, EETS, O. S. 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2000), pp. 85–128.

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notebooks that Richard Flemyng introduced a new form of preaching to Oxford that moved away from scholastic distinction towards a clearer and more easily digested form of exposition, and we can see that return to a homiletic style in use in his own Konstanz sermons, and in Gacoigne’s own fascinating later sermon Super septem flumina Babilonis.69 This new style was typified by the preaching at Syon. The brethren were enjoined by Christ in one of Birgitta’s revelations that their sermons had to use simple and few words, founded on the reading of Scripture; they must avoid verbal pyrotechnics and complexities, and should pay careful attention to the needs and capacities of their audience. Sunday sermons should expound the Gospel, using Christ’s own words, those of his mother, and of the saints, as well as the Vitae patrum, and miracula sanctorum. They should address the Creed and provide remedies against temptations and vices. Above all, they should avoid dullness and going over the heads of the audience, remembering that Mary was ‘simplicissima’, Peter was an ‘ydiota’ and St Francis ‘rusticus’, but together they have done more for the good of souls than many ‘magistri eloquentes’.70 It is not accidental that those sections of the Book of Margery Kempe describing events that are broadly dateable to the years 1414 to 1418 — that is, the precise years in which the Council of Konstanz sat — are full of references to Margery’s hunger for good preaching, her praise for traditional clerical values and ideals, and her sorrow at being excluded from some sermons:71

69 Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 183; the Super flumina Babilonis sermon is found at pp. 53–99. 70

Den Heliga Birgittas Reuelaciones extrauagantes, ed. by Lennart Hollman, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, ser. 2 (Latinska skrifter), 5 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1956), chap. 23, p. 133, which glosses and expands on chap. 15 of the Regula Salvatoris: Den Heliga Birgitta: Opera Minora I: Regula Salvatoris, ed. by Sten Eklund, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, ser. 2 (Latinska skrifter), 8.1 (Lund: Berlingska, 1975), p. 121. The preaching office of the Syon brethren has been studied by Susan Powell, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 31 (2000), 229–67; see also Susan Powell, ‘Cox Ms 39: A Rare Survival of Sermons Preached at Syon Abbey?’, Medieval Sermon Studies, 52 (2008), 42–62; and Susan Powell, ‘Syon, Caxton and the Festial’, Birgittiana, 2 (1996), 187–207, which discusses Syon’s possible involvement with printed sermons. 71

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Hope Emily Allen and Sanford B. Meech, EETS, O. S. 212 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1940), identified in text by book and chapter to facilitate comparison with The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000).

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Vincent Gillespie On a tyme as þe forseyd creatur was in contemplacyon, sche hungryd ryth sor aftyr Goddys word & seyd, ‘Alas, Lord, as many clerkys as þu hast in þis world, þat þu ne woldyyst sendyn me on of hen þat myth fulfillyn my sowle wyth þi word wyth redyng of Holy Scriptur, for alle þe clerkys þat prechyn may not fulfillyn, for me thynkyth þat my sowle is euyr a-lych hungry. Õyf I had gold i-now, I wolde õeuyn euery day a noble for to haue euery day a sermown, for þi word is mor worthy to me þan all þe good in þis world’. (I, 58)

Margery visited Konstanz on her 1414 pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when the city would have been in the throes of preparations for the opening of the Council in the autumn of that year, and claims to have talked to an unidentified English papal legate there. Structurally the two sections dealing particularly with her need for good-quality pastoral care (chapters 23 to 25 and, particularly, 56 to 60 of Book I) are pivotal in establishing her own orthodox teaching authority and demonstrating her struggle against disruptive elements in the church (particularly friars, whose status as preachers and confessors remained a hot topic of debate during this period). Chapters 56 to 60 follow on immediately after her receipt from Henry Chichele of a letter authorizing her to be confessed and to receive communion at will, which must have happened late in 1417 or early in 1418, exactly when the English hierarchy was restating the ideals of the priestly office so strikingly and challengingly articulated by Margery Kempe: Beheldyng how fast þe pepyl cam rennyng to heryn þe sermown, sche had gret joy in hir sowle, thynkyng in her mende, ‘A, Lord Ihesu, I trowe, and þu wer here to prechyn þin owyn persone, þe pepyl xulde han gret joy to heryn þe. I prey þe Lorde, make þi holy word to sattelyn in her sowlys as I wolde, þat it xulde don in myn, & as many mict be turnyd be hys voys as xulde ben be thy voys õyf þu prechedist thy-selfe’. (I, 61)

To be an alter Christus is a pretty daunting job description and person specification. Christ’s words to Margery about the career development of a vicar who came to her for advice could have been drawn from any number of English episcopal documents of the period 1414 to 1422, or indeed any number of sermons or documents emanating from Konstanz: Bydde þe vykary kepyn stylle hys cure & hys benefyce & don hys diligence in prechyng & techyng of hem hys owyn persone and sumtyme procuryn oþer to teche hem my lawys and comawndmentys so þat þer be no defawte in hys parte. (I, 23)

The English church is negotiating a new understanding of its teaching role in these conciliar years. These same sections report her delight in being read to by her priest, and the great worth he drew from those books when he moved into ‘gret cur of sowle’ later in his career. ‘Thus, thorw heryng of holy bokys & thorw heryng of holy sermownys, sche euyr encresyd in contemplacyon & holy meditacyon’ (I, 59): Margery is a paradigm of the new, orally instructed laity envisaged by the English

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episcopacy at this period, though she often encounters severe shortcomings in the local implementation of that policy.72 Indeed the difficulty of implementing these models of clerical idealism is playfully hinted at in one contemporary satirical version of the difference between sacerdotal ideal and reality, found in a firstquarter copy of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307): Trvsty \ seldom/to their frendys vniust\/ Gladd for to help \ no Crysten creator/ Wyllng to greve \ settyng all þeir ioy and lust/ Only in þe plesour of god \ havyng no cvre/ Who is most riche \ with them þey wyl be sewer/ Wher nede is \ gevyng neyther reward ne Fee/ Vnresonably \ thus lyve prestys parde/73

Cura animarum and cibus animarum went hand in hand, as texts like the Speculum christiani begin to articulate. A sacerdotal conversation is underway in search of a new paradigm of priestly life. This conversation was taking place between clerics, legislators, and members of the executive, and largely taking place in the heavily coded discourses of canon and civil law. It is in the context of this search for a new paradigm that we ought to be reading the religious texts of John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, John Audelay, and the poet of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102, all of whom reveal assumptions about vernacular theology that often engage respectfully and seriously with the institutional critique initiated by Wyclif, while seeking to reinforce the centrality of the priesthood. Lydgate offers scathing criticism of clerical covetousness in the Troy Book (see, for example, Book IV, ll. 5846–5867): For douteles, õif þe sentuarie Be pollut founde in conuersacioun Naked and bare of deuocioun And þat þe shynyng of her parfit liõt I-turned by by derknes vn-to myõt Vn-to what place shal men ferþer go To take ensaumple what hen ouõte do.

Digby 102’s poems are insistent on the sacramental power of the priest, but (or even ‘therefore’) also fiercely critical of clerical abuses and failings. Their criticism

72

For example, during her interrogation by Henry Bowet in Yorkshire, she criticizes the liturgical and pastoral negligence of parish priests: I, 52. 73

IMEV 3809; printed in Secular Lyrics of the 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. by R . H. Robbins, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 101.

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of careless curates is linked to passionate denunciation of usury, simony ‘and holy chirche rebel to goddis sawe’ (XIV, p. 63).74 Sometimes its poems verge on a Lollard ecclesiology (‘the folk is cherche’) (VIII, p. 32): There as gadryng of goode men ys, Is holychyrche of flesch and bones. (XXIII, p. 103)

Several Digby poems (e.g. XXI, XXIII), describe priests as ‘lanterns of light’, perhaps reflecting Lollard diction (a popular Lollard compilation had this title), as does John Audelay in his The Counsel of Consciens (‘thai are the lanternys of lyf the leud men to light’ (2, p. 12)).75 In applying the great and unchanging truths of moral complaint to the particular (though obliquely invoked) circumstances of their own age, the Digby poems oscillate between a declamatory and satirical standpoint that seems fired by contemporary zeal and perhaps by allusion to contemporary events, and a more routine and unfocused invocation of moral generalization. The other works in that manuscript (an incomplete C-text of Piers Plowman, Richard Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms, the Debate of the Body and Soul, and the Lessons of the Dirige) suggest its affinity with traditional collections of moral and penitential verse. Yet all these texts also have the potential to carry substantial political freight. The poems, probably all by the same person, obsess on the themes of truth and trouthe betrayed; on the power of ‘glosers’ and flatterers to pervert true doctrine and good legislation; on the need for Reason, Will, and Conscience to work together; on the tensions between Wit and Will; on the role of money and Meed; on the need for religion and sound doctrine (the author was probably a cleric himself); on the merits of keeping quiet and listening attentively (a major

74

References are to Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, ed. by J. Kail, EETS, O. S. 124 (London: Kegan Paul for the Early English Text Society, 1904), but readers should now use The Digby Poems: A New Edition of the Lyrics, ed. by Helen Barr, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), which offers important new considerations on their links to the orthodox reform movement, and argues that the poems are by the same reform-minded Benedictine responsible for the macaronic sermons in MS Bodley 649. Even if they are not by the same man, they share many of the images, commonplaces, and proverbial emphases found in the vernacular reformist writings of this period. 75 The Poems of John Audelay, ed. by Ella Keats Whiting, EETS, O. S. 184 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1931); subsequent citations are from this edition, but see now John the Blind Audelay: Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms Douce 302), ed. by Susanna Fein, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009); My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. by Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009). See also Fein’s essay in the present volume.

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and perhaps newly prominent theme); and, more satirically, on the need to learn duplicity and double-talk to survive in public life. These themes are reminiscent of those commonly found in Piers Plowman and in what has been called ‘the Piers Plowman tradition’, and all those poems can profitably be studied in the context of this kind of moral verse. Indeed, the Digby poet’s apparent links with the church, law, and government in Westminster and London place him firmly in the milieu that provided the main readership of Langland’s poem.76 More significantly, however, this is precisely the same audience of clerics, legislators, and executives who were, in Latin, having the debate about the reform of the church in head and members. The prose moralizations in Hoccleve’s Series explicitly read their antecedent fables in terms of broad issues of contemporary ecclesiastical reform, religious observance, and clerical idealism.77 The lexis of all these writers reflects a consciously fostered aureation as part of a self-aware turn to a Latinate English vernacular, perhaps in the face of Lollard calls for a wholesale ‘simple’ translation of religious materials. The membrane between the registers and lexis of clerical Latin and those of the English vernacular seems to have become increasingly permeable in the early fifteenth century. Aureation created a lexical and stylistic bridge between the Latin language of formal theology and the vulgar tongue of vernacularity. Metonymic of this process, Syon Abbey, royal flagship of the orthodox reform movement, emulated the example of its mother house at Vadstena, to become a notable centre of vernacular translation of Latin religious texts.78 Far from eschewing vernacular theology, these

76 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Moral and Penitential Lyrics’, in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. by Thomas G. Duncan (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 68–95. On Langland’s fifteenthcentury London readership, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles, and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427’, New Medieval Literatures, (1997), 60–83. 77

Conveniently now available in ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Roger Ellis, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). For a discussion of Hoccleve in the context of reform orthodoxy, see Sebastian J. Langdell, ‘“What World Is This? How Vndirstande Am I?”: A Reappraisal of Poetic Authority in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’, Medium Ævum, 78 (2009), 281–99. See also Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, chap. 3, pp. 88–129. 78

On Vadstena as a centre of translation, see Lars Wollin, ‘The Monastery of Vadstena: Investigating the Great Translation Workshop in Medieval Scandinavia’, in The Medieval Translator 2, ed. by Roger Ellis (London: Centre for Medieval Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1991), pp. 65–88. On Syon, see Susan Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’, in Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena, ed. by Claes Gejrot, Sara

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writers of Chichele’s generation created for it a whole new high-style register, seeking to reclaim the vernacular for orthodoxy, and to make it fit for precise and nuanced theological thought, just as Ullerston had said they should do in his defence of translation in the Oxford debate. Pecock’s linguistic innovations, though hardly nimble, are of a piece with this attitude to aureate diction.79 John Audelay provides some exhortations to reform in a sequence of poems, completed by 1426, and suggestively named by him The Counsel of Conscience in what I believe is a deliberate play on the reforming Council of Konstanz.80 For all their conventional satirical weight, the exhortations might usefully be explored in the light of the themes of the English nation’s writings at the Council of Konstanz and of episcopal policy at home. James Simpson’s recent re-reading of the Marcolf and Solomon poem shows how Audelay is pitching his poem in terms of the reform conversation between clerics and the executive (though I think Solomon here is Henry V and not Henry IV as Simpson suggests), and this is further signalled by the Latin headnotes to each stanza that express exactly the bracing scriptural, patristic, or canonical idealism found at Konstanz and in other utterances from the English church.81 His criticism of clerical ignorance, echoing the renewed

Risberg, and Mia Åkestam, Konferenser 73 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien och antikvitets akademien, 2010), pp. 50–70; C. Annette Grisé, ‘“Moche profitable unto religious persones, gathered by a brother of Syon”: Syon Abbey and English Books’, in Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion c. 1400–1700, ed. by E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 129–54. 79

The role of aureation as a lexical manifestation of reform orthodoxy has not yet been fully considered. For some preliminary discussion, see Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, pp. 234–39, 254, but I intend to address the subject at more length in ‘Translation after Arundel: Chichele and the Birth of Aureate Diction’, originally given at The Medieval Translator conference in Lausanne, summer 2007. Important recent discussions include Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’, pp. 840–46; Roger Ellis, ‘Figures of English Translation, 1382–1407’, in Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. by Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, c. 2001), pp. 7–47; Fiona Somerset, ‘Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston’s Determinacio, Arundel’s Constitutiones’, in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 145–57. 80

The essays in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, edited by Susanna Fein, give an excellent sense of the conservative theological issues and the reformist nature of poems that make up The Counsel of Conscience, as does her essay in this volume. 81

Poem 2 of the sequence in The Poems of John Audelay, ed. by Keating, pp. 10–46, which runs to over 1000 lines. See also James Simpson, ‘Saving Satire after Arundel’s Constitutions: John Audelay’s “Marcol and Solomon”’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and

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prominence given to Pecham’s Ignorantia sacerdotum in Arundel’s 1409 decrees, is immediately followed by a call for graduates to be promoted to benefices, paralleling the petition from Oxford to Arundel in 1402 and to the Convocation of Canterbury in 1417, and which had been debated at Konstanz at the request of the English nation. In the final poem of The Counsel of Conscience, Audelay offers the sequence of poems as a compendium of spiritual instruction, also calling it a ladder of heaven: Fore al þat is nedful to bode and soule Here in þis boke þen may õe se. (Poem 18, p. 133)

But Audelay also employs a Hocclevian notion of recovery from sickness to dramatize the potential and the imperative for personal and national spiritual recovery: Fore as I lay seke in my dremyng Me þoõt a mon to me con say ‘Let be þi slouþ and þi slomeryng Haue mynd on God boþ nyõt and day; Behold and se a reuful array. Al þe word on foyre brenyng Warne þe pepul now I þe pray Þai louyn here God ouer al þyng; Aryse anon and awake. (Poem 18, p. 134)

The call to arise (surgite) occurs repeatedly in the Latin and vernacular writings of the conciliar period. One of Flemyng’s Konstanz sermons was on the theme Surge illuminare Jerusalem (‘Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you’). For Flemyng (as for many vernacular writers) Jerusalem stands for the macrocosm of the church and the microcosm of the human soul ‘que est templum dei’ (which is the temple of God), and the ship of the church has been buffeted by heresy and error ‘sicut maris fluctus’ (as by the buffeting of the waves).82 Audelay has a sense of national history and of the historic mission and identity of the English church which is more than mere rehashing of auctoritates and precedents, but rather urges a return to a simpler and purer faith:

Hutchison, pp. 387–404; Derek Pearsall, ‘Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 138–52. For the underlying Latin satirical tradition, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 82

Morrissey, ‘Surge Illuminare’, esp. p. 121. The MS Bodley 649 sermons regularly use this imagery.

38

Vincent Gillespie Takys fayre ensampyle be õour faders þat were õou before Hou þai worschypd hole cherche hyly to Godys honore. (Poem 2, p. 19)

Such stylish obliquity relies for much of its effect on an audience competent to detect the subtle nuances that are being inflected on the surface of conventional sentiments and commonplace moral teachings. In the writings of Thomas Hoccleve (d. 1426), writing, like the author of the Digby 102 poems, for a literary coterie of fellow civil servants, holders of public office, book lovers, and scribes in Westminster and the City of London, we see that obliquity being deployed in more playful and virtuosic forms. Many of his poems can be read in the light of the changing domestic ecclesiastical mood, with which he seems to have been closely in touch, perhaps through professional circles. The Regiment of Princes, the Male Regle and the Remonstrance against Oldcastle (with its calls to Oldcastle to ‘torne again’ and ‘retourne’) have been widely discussed in this light.83 Like Audelay, Hoccleve enacts a call to return to an older, purer, idealized English Church: Oure fadres olde and modres lyued wel And taghte hir children as hemslef taght were Of holy chirche. And axid nat a del […] Our fadres medled nothing of swich gere. Þat oghte been a good mirour to vs. (Remonstrance, ll. 153–60)

But the concern with reform is endemic through his works, and not only in the most obvious places. There is, for example, an undated Ballade, made ‘au tresnoble roy H. le quint (que dieu pardoint) et au tres honourable conpagnie du Iarter’ (to the most noble king Henry V (may God pardon him) and to the most honourable company of the Garter). Seymour argues that this was made for the meeting of the Garter in 1414, though he also acknowledges that by far the highest profile meeting was that in 1416 at which Sigismund was invested with the regalia of the order. Just as Lydgate will later encourage Henry VI to emulate Justinian and Constantine, so Hoccleve exhorts Henry V to copy Justinian and, in particular, Constantine: O lige lord, þat han eek the liknesse Of Constantyn, th’ensaumple and the mirour To princes alle, in loue and buxumnesse

83

Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001); Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship; Stephen Rozenski, ‘“Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour”: Hoccleve’s Amplification of the Imagery and Intimacy of Henry Suso’s Ars Moriendi’, Parergon, 25 (2008), 1–16; Langdell, ‘A Reappraisal of Poetic Authority’.

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To holy chirche, o verray sustenour, And piler of our feith and werreyour Ageyn the heresies bittir galle, Do foorth, do foorth, continue your socour Holde vp Crystes baner let it nat falle. (ll. 9–16)84

My own preference for the 1416 date for this ballade is based partly on a general sense that it gives of Henry having been on the throne for a while (‘continue your sucour’, ‘This yle or this had been but hethenesse, / Nad been of your feith the force and vigour’), and more specifically on two linguistic moments in this slight, but eloquently conventional poem. The first occurs at the end of the third stanza: But ay we truste in yow, our protectour. On your constance we awayten alle. (ll. 23–24)

In this the last line, there is surely a concealed play on the location of the still sitting ecumenical Council, on which the hopes of Christian Europe are waiting, especially as ‘constance’ in this kind of nominal form is only attested by the MED in one instance before Chaucer, and is most widely and richly attested in texts later than Hoccleve. The second moment is in the next stanza, where Hoccleve, calling for an end to the idle disputation among laypeople on matters of faith, addresses his plea to ‘our worthy kyng and Cristen emperour’, which may have been framed to embrace Henry and Sigismund in a single address and as co-workers in a common cause. There are, I think, strong grounds for suspecting that Hoccleve had a weather eye on the events unfolding at Konstanz. In a widely disseminated letter dated 30 October 1413, Sigismund had summoned the Council to meet on All Saints’ Day (1 November) 1414, though in the event the first session was delayed for a few days to allow straggling delegations to arrive. In many monastic and religious contexts, All Saints was viewed as a propitious date for new beginnings.85 For Hoccleve it certainly marked a new beginning in his personal fortunes, for he tells us in his Compleinte, which forms the first part of the Series, that he recovered his disordered wits on All Saints’ Day. John Burrow has argued that the series was begun in 1419–20.86 Hoccleve reports: 84

Selections from Hoccleve, p. 59.

85

This is one reason why Gawain leaves on his quest after this feast in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 86

J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages, Series 4 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994); J. A. Burrow, ‘Thomas Hoccleve: Some Redatings’, Review of English Studies, 46 (1995), 366–72; Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. by John A. Burrow, EETS, O. S. 313 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1999).

40

Vincent Gillespie But alþouõ the substaunce of my memorie Wente to pleie as for a certain space, Õit the lorde of vertue, the kyng of glorie Of his hiõe myõt and his benigne grace, Made it for to retourne into the place Whens it cam, wiche at Alle Halwemesse Was fiue õeere, neither more ne lesse. (My Compleinte, ll. 50–56)87

If Burrow’s dating (and indeed Hoccleve’s) is reliable, then Hoccleve recovered his wits on the very day that marked the symbolic opening of the Council of Konstanz, whose mission was to reform the Church in head and members and to create new unity and peace in the body ecclesial by purging it of error and waywardness.88 Celebrating the new harmony between mind and body in his own life, Hoccleve thanks God for the ‘good and gracious reconsiliacioun’ made between his wits and himself, since which time they have lived in accord, although his friends and neighbours refuse to believe that he has been fully cured. Personal conversion may be figuring national conversion here. The Series can be read on one level as a coded and allusive account of the English church’s return from sickness with the beginning of the Council at Konstanz and its determination to reform in head and members. It is another of Hoccleve’s mirrors, permitting him to adopt postures and pull faces that fit the mood and style of the times, allowing him, as he does in the ballade translated from the French for Archbishop Chichele’s brother Robert, to ask God to ‘graunt pardon of our stynkyng errour’ (l. 152), while playing with Konstanz themes in asking for ‘vnioun’ between God, described as ‘Avctour of pees and concord’ (l. 67) and his soul (and not in the mystical sense).89 When Hoccleve’s Friend asks at the end of the Fabula de quadam imperatrice romana, ‘Wher is the moralizynge Y yow preye / Bycome heerof?’, the question can

87

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, p. 116. All subsequent references are to this edition. 88

I am grateful to my former student David Watt, now of the University of Manitoba, for first drawing my attention to this possibility during work on his dissertation. His forthcoming study Among the Prees: Thomas Hoccleve, The Series, and Fifteenth-Century London’s Social and Textual Practice is eagerly awaited. Recent work on Hoccleve’s scribal career suggests that in reality his absence through sickness may have been in 1416 rather than 1414: Linne R . Mooney, ‘Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007), 293–340. But this does not, of course, in any way preclude the possibility that Hoccleve may have artfully contrived the coincidence between the account of his return to mental and spiritual health and the opening of the Council of Konstanz. 89

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, pp. 82–86.

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be more widely applied to the self-effacing allusiveness of Hoccleve’s poetry. But the prose moralizations throughout the Series explicitly read their antecedent fables in terms of broad issues of ecclesiastical reform, religious observance, and clerical idealism, and are themselves susceptible to a further moralization where the general issues can be layered over contemporary events and personalities. The moralization of the Fabula de quadam muliere mala asserts the value of penance and the eucharist, precisely the two sacraments most repeatedly assailed by the Lollards, offering no forgiveness for heretics and schismatics, and echoing the language of the Konstanz reform sermons in its call to ‘Ryse vp fro thy synne, ryse vp, for al to longe haast thow slept in the lappe of carnalitee’.90 In the schematization of the story of Jereslaus’s wife, the emperor and his brother invite comparison with the fraternal relationship between Henry V and Sigismund, and the romance fable sufferings and torments of the wife are wrenched (perhaps self-consciously uncomfortably) into an elaborate allegory of orthodox ecclesiology: The soule þat is wel beloued of God, and vnto Cryst weddid and oned, wole not forsake God and consente to synne, wherfore the wrecchid flessh despoilith often and robbith the soule of hir clothes (þat is to seyn, goode vertues) and hir hongith on an ook (þat is to seyn, worldly delyt and delectacioun) by the heeres (þat is to seyn, by wikkid concupiscences and desirs) til the erl (þat is to seyn, the prechour or discreet confessour) hunte in the foreste of this world with vertuous sarmonynge and precheynge, yeuynge conseil and reed to do goode and vertuous deedes, berkynge (þat is to seyn, pronouncynge the wordes of holy scripture). And thus the discreet confessour or prechour ledith the lady (þat is to meene, the soule) vnto the hows of holy chirche for to teche and norisshe the maiden (þat is to seyn, to hele the conscience with the wirkes of mercy).91

I am even tempted to suggest that the initially missing moralization at the end of Jereslaus’s wife is intended as a hermeneutic satire on the Wycliffite stress on discovering the literal sense alone: Thomas, it is wel vnto my lykyng, But is there aght þat thow purposist seye More on this tale? ‘Nay, my freend, nothing’. ‘Thomas, heer is a greet substance aweye’. (ll. 960–63)92

In an anti-Lollard sacramental pun typical of the time, substance has been mislaid and attention has been mistakenly focused on the accident or vehicle, just as the substance of the Church’s mission has been lost in incidentals. Like the self-

90

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, p. 254.

91

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, p. 189.

92

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, pp. 187–88.

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reforming English church in the wake of Wyclif, Hoccleve hoped that, after his recovery from illness, he would now be considered a safe pair of hands. I suspect that what he thought he was doing in the Series was, in fact, very deliberately preaching to the converted.93 The vernacular moral poetry of the conciliar period is part of a broad European spectrum of traditional re-assertions of orthodox teaching, and a local reflection of the English church’s subtly nuanced but radical self-appraisal in the wake of Wyclif.94 Chichele’s church was to be a very different animal from Thomas Arundel’s: certainly more European, perhaps more confident, more flamboyantly liturgical, passionately interested in orthodox reform, and in the exploitation of the vernacular as a medium of orthodox, but still imaginative and inventive, texts suitable for the growing lay audience for vernacular books of religion.

93

David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 761–99, presents a remarkably prescient argument that benefits from re-reading in the light of our developing understanding of English reformist orthodoxy. 94

For a provocative and insightful overview of the ecclesiastical history of this period, see John Van Engen, ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, Church History, 77 (2008), 257–84.

A FTER A RUNDEL: T HE C LOSING OR THE O PENING OF THE E NGLISH M IND ? Jeremy Catto

A

fter Arundel: that the phrase can be plausibly used is a tribute to the defining influence, in current historiography, of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s primacy on the course of English history. It marks the high tide of initiative on the part of Lollard preachers and their latter-day patron Sir John Oldcastle. After Arundel’s death on 19 February 1414, only a few weeks after the abortive Lollard rising, the ebbing of the radical preachers’ influence on public life is hard to miss, whatever the imprint of their teaching on more secretive congregations in the following generation.1 Some historians have gone further and seen Arundel as the architect of ‘orthodox reform’, a constructive programme on the part of the English church and government, in response to the challenge of Wyclif and his followers, to renew the religious life of the nation through the traditional sacraments, ceremonies, and doctrines of Catholic Christianity.2 None has yet been so rash as to attribute to him personally the palpable broadening of the insular cultural tradition in the succeeding three decades, under the influence of French literary and artistic models, as thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen participated in Henry V’s imperial project — though Arundel himself and many

1

On which see Maureen Jurkowski, ‘Lollard Book Producers in London in 1414’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 201–26. 2

Harriss, Shaping the Nation, pp. 317–19; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Shaping the Mixed Life: Thomas Arundel’s Reformation’, in Image, Text and Church: Essays for Margaret Aston, ed. by Linda Clark, Maureen Jurkowski, and Colin Richmond (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), pp. 94–108 (pp. 104–05).

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leading figures of his generation, including some of the ‘Lollard knights’, had anticipated fifteenth-century patterns of European cultural contacts. ‘After Arundel’ can be interpreted in a broad sense as well as in terms of the archbishop’s narrower efforts to weed out the Lollard evangelists. All the same, the negative effects of Arundel’s measures, and especially his Constitutions as issued definitively in 1409, on the English cultural and intellectual world have been much in evidence in recent scholarship. Admittedly, it would be difficult not to agree with Anne Hudson that they had little effect on the independent beliefs of his spiritual subjects; they seemed merely to anger both Lollard preachers and orthodox evangelists resentful of the restrictions on their popular preaching.3 However, much larger claims have been made for the stultifying public consequences of these measures of apparent censorship. Herbert Workman had already made them in 1926, and they have more recently been enlarged by Nicholas Watson.4 This is a bold claim, but to all appearances a plausible explanation for the undoubted sparseness of theological and other works originating in the English universities after 1409. The case seems stronger in that in other European universities, where the Constitutions did not apply, theological books and tracts continued to be produced, notably by masters of Paris. In the English academic world, the vigorous cut and thrust of debate before the Constitutions is succeeded, to all appearance, by silence. A claim of intellectual decline, or aridity, needs to be put into the widest possible cultural framework, and in this case, outside the traditional sources of learned Latin texts in Oxford and Cambridge, there is abundant evidence of vitality on the part of the educated laity and their largely monastic suppliers of spiritual instruction. This evidence consists of a new religious literature both in Latin and in the vernacular, which principally originated in Carthusian houses, and, after their foundation in 1415, especially in the Carthusian house at Sheen with its twin across the Thames, the Birgittine house at Syon. In close literary relation with these works, the elegant texts in English which followed the Ricardian poets and which were read, it seems, by much the same educated lay milieu as the

3

The Works of a Lollard Preacher, ed. by Anne Hudson, EETS, O. S. 317 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2001), Egerton Sermon, pp. 48–50, ll. 1159–62; Dives and Pauper, ed. by Priscilla Heath Barnum, 2 vols in 3 parts, EETS, O. S. 275, 280, 323 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1976–2004), II, 22; Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 34–35, 61. 4

Herbert Workman, John Wyclif, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), Watson, ‘Censorship’.

II,

374–76;

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literature of contemplation, provide further witness to lively minds and sensibilities in the England of the Lancastrian era. Perhaps the flowering of musical composition in England, at the hands of John Dunstable, Leonel Power, and their associates, should be taken into account as well, since the new music accompanied both spiritual texts which had been taken up into the rites of the church, and songs both religious and secular. Literary and intellectual currents in early fifteenthcentury England continued, therefore, to flow vigorously, even if the cut and thrust of philosophical debate in the limited space of the university lecture-room, the medium of Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Fitzralph, and John Wyclif, was no longer in evidence. Within this frame, however, there can be little doubt that the theological exercises and disputations at English universities, which had stimulated countless original solutions to the great philosophical questions of the day from about 1290 to the end of the fourteenth century, no longer stirred up such passionate speculations. We have direct evidence of their character in the Oxford notebooks of John Lawerne OSB, which contain his theological exercises for the doctorate, performed in 1448–49. Though they touch on questions of grace and the nature of the Trinity, Lawerne made no attempt at original speculation. The nature of divine grace and human free will, which had been debated urgently in Oxford a century earlier, was clearly not a living issue in 1449.5 In the absence of stimulus to internal debate, the theologians of the early fifteenth century, insofar as they produced literature of any kind, made compilations of passages of existing works, making, it would seem, a positive fetish of unoriginality. Richard Ullerston, for instance, an Oxford theologian whose capacity for original thought had been amply shown in two lectures of 1401, chose to lecture in 1415 on the Psalter and the cantica sacra, deliberately expounding the teaching of Nicholas of Lyra and Peter of Herentals without adding anything of his own.6 The Doctrinale of Thomas Netter, written in the 1420s, probably in the Carmelite priory in London, is a string of passages from the Latin Fathers, put together to refute the propositions of the Lollard masters by unimpeachable patristic authority, and so to demonstrate how shallow were the roots of Lollard ideas in that rich and sustaining soil. It is immensely long, and even so unfinished: the product of great industry and considerable learning, but a work of scholarship rather than of philosophical thought, in which there was 5

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 692. See Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, 263–80 (pp. 268–69). 6

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 20; on his probable lecture on Herentals see Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, in HUO, II, 175–261 (p. 257).

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room for the evaluation of authorities and brief discussions of the authorship of works such as Ambrose’s De divinis officiis.7 Both Ullerston and Netter avoided philosophical issues they were easily capable of addressing; they do not tell us why. A sermon of Dr Henry Abingdon, the warden of Merton, before the Council of Konstanz in 1415, goes some way to explaining the standpoint of academic theologians. True prelates, he told the fathers, made their first task to master the art of doctrina, the craft of instructing the laity in religion. Moral and pastoral teaching and the refutation of heresy were all part of doctrina; prosecuting lawsuits and practising law, the ‘lucrative science’, he reminded them sternly, were not.8 It was a preoccupation of prelates and preachers of the early fifteenth century who had been participants in the movement for orthodox reform: of Henry Hallum, Philip Repingdon, and Richard Fleming among bishops, and of the prolific preachers William Lichfield and Thomas Gascoigne in the next generation. For the most part they put their faith in preaching. The rather solitary scholar Dr Reginald Pecock, reflecting on a similar project, how to demonstrate the truth of orthodox doctrine to his neighbours — Londoners whom he called Lollards but who were perhaps merely sceptical or anticlerical in disposition — disagreed: he was dubious of the long-term impact of preaching, preferring to project his message in private conversation and argument.9 These views contributed to his ultimate downfall; but he shared with the preachers the aim of communicating orthodox doctrine, his version of which, to judge from his few surviving tracts in English, was original only in its rearrangement of older theology under different headings. The proposition that theology was a practical, not a speculative science, on which the art of doctrina was founded, had gradually prevailed in the fourteenth century. It had been justified by numerous theologians: Richard FitzRalph had famously dismissed speculative theologians as frogs and toads, croaking in the swamp; Wyclif himself had contrasted their intellectual constructs with the light of biblical truth. For

7 Thomas Netter, Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei, ed. by B. Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice, 1757–59), 293–94. On Netter see Hudson, PR, pp. 50–55 and D. Dubois, ‘Thomas Netter of Walden O.C., c.1372–1430’ (unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1978).

II,

8

Henry Abingdon, sermon on Sitis repleti fructu iustitiae in Monimenta medii aevi ex bibliotheca regia hanoverana, ed. by Christian W. F. Walch, 2 vols (Göttingen: sumptibus Bossigelianis, 1757–64), I, fasc. 2, pp. 182–205. 9

Wendy Scase, Reginald Pecock, in Authors of the Middle Ages Vol III: nos 7–11, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), pp. 75–146; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘The King’s Government and the Fall of Pecock, 1457–58’ in Rulers and Ruled: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. by Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon, 1995), pp. 201–22.

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Gerson, scripture and the fathers, and not the schoolmen’s ‘useless learning, frivolous and without solidity’, provided a basis for the mystical theology on which he lectured at Paris in 1400. In accord with his teaching, his most prolific successors there, John Capreolus OP and Guillaume de Vaurouillon OFM, who commented on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the natural place for theological speculation, would generally confine themselves to expounding an existing body of theological ideas.10 Their German contemporaries were no more ambitious: absorbed in the Wegestreit, a debate on different methods of teaching the subject, they virtually ignored speculative theology.11 The great scholastic debates seem to have run their course in every European theology faculty by the end of the fourteenth century, to be succeeded by the task of exposition of an older, more biblical and patristic sacred science, on which there might be scholarly controversies on the authenticity of particular texts or items of doctrine, such as the Donation of Constantine or — as Pecock notoriously speculated — the article on Christ’s descent into Hell in the Apostles’ Creed. The theological unoriginality of Ullerston and Netter in England, therefore, accorded with a change of direction in European thought, from metaphysics towards scholarly and historical study of the textual basis of orthodox belief: a new interest which would overflow the confines of theology faculties and lead to the great scholarly editions of the Bible and the church fathers, by Erasmus and others, a century later. It would be perverse, then, to accord the initiative in this slow and broad evolution to Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions for the English church, which at the most, by discouraging speculation on matters of doctrine, nudged the Oxford theologians towards the mainstream. Going with the flow at Pisa and Konstanz with an impressive selection of continental theologians and canon lawyers soon came easily anyway to Oxford masters such as Henry Abingdon. As an English delegate to the Council of Konstanz he was one of the vanguard of university masters, generally in the service of the English government and church but independent in their judgement on numerous issues, who between 1414 and 1418 enjoyed there the invigorating and abrasive 10

Richard FitzRalph, De questionibus Armenorum (Paris, 1512), xix.35; John Wyclif, De veritate sacrae scripturae, ed. by R . Buddensieg, 3 vols (London: Wyclif Society, 1905–07), I, 14, 54; Jean Gerson, letter to Pierre d’Ailly, in Jean Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Palémon Glorieux, 10 vols (Paris: Desclée, 1960–73), II, 23–28 (p. 27); Franciszek Tokarski, ‘Guillaume de Vaurouillon OFM et sa commentaire sur les Sentences de Pierre Lombard’, Mediaevalia Philosophica Polonorum, 29 (1988), 49–119; Guy Bedouelle, Romanus Cessario, and Kevin White, Jean Capreolus en son temps: 1380–1444 (Paris: Cerf, 1997). 11

James H. O verfield, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 49–60.

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company of other European intellectuals. They were followed by a host of graduates into the service of Henry V at home and abroad: theologians, lawyers, and simple masters of arts, they soon monopolized the episcopal bench and the diplomatic service of the crown, and took up most of the seats at the king’s council table which were not occupied by the military nobility. Henry Beaufort, Richard Courtenay, Richard Fleming, Henry Chichele, Philip Morgan, Henry Ware, and John Stafford were only a few of the university masters serving the house of Lancaster who were rewarded with a mitre. Busy as they were in the tasks of government, their pastoral duties, where they can be traced, were not neglected; the expertise of theologians and canon lawyers converged in the promotion of the art of doctrina and the improvement of the parish clergy, in accordance with the decrees of the Council of Konstanz. As Abingdon’s sermon reveals, they were not speculative thinkers, but they had absorbed the dialectic of university training, and their books, where evidence survives, point to broader interests than the apparatus of their professions. If theology in the European universities was now a practical art, and canon law its agreed framework, the civilian servants of the house of Lancaster (like their counterparts in foreign princes’ service) brought its patterns of thought and preoccupations into the wider world of public affairs. A mindset of lively interest in the world around them seems to have united university masters of this generation with the educated laity. The intellectual interests of graduates cannot easily be reconstructed from the literary remains — so far as they exist — of busy servants of the crown; the books of a few of them, notably Henry Chichele and Richard Fleming, are recorded; they indicate a catholic pattern of reading, beyond the demands of their profession.12 Further insight may come from the collections of Thomas Gascoigne, a theologian independent of government service, but involved in affairs as chancellor of Oxford, or commissary, and as a notable preacher in and out of the university. His Liber de veritatibus is a patchwork of passages from the fathers and early medieval theologians, laced with comments on the authors he read, and roughly arranged as a dictionary of themes useful for sermons; frequent comments on contemporary issues, especially ecclesiastical matters, reveal his passionate involvement in the contemporary world. The voracious reading on which it depended was not confined to what he could find in Oxford libraries (which he nevertheless scoured for materials) but ranged though numerous monastic collections and even bookshops; comments on his reading can be found in

12

Neil R. Ker, Records of All Souls College Library, Oxford Bibliographical Society publications, n.s., 16 ([London]: Oxford University Press for the Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1971), pp. 5–17; Emden, BRUO, II, 698, s.n. Richard Flemyng.

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at least a hundred surviving manuscripts. His sense of historical periodization and his book-hunting is reminiscent of Italian contemporaries such as Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolo Niccoli, though his Latin style was entirely innocent of humanist artifices. Gascoigne’s combination of private reading with a public voice was nurtured in the moralizing theology of the English universities and conformed, so far as it can be reconstructed, to the outlook of the London preachers of his time.13 But he shared both his concern with current affairs and his inward disposition with the world of the court. Like many of the nobility, he found inspiration among the brethren and sisters of the Syon community, to whom he left the original of his Liber de veritatibus, and had connections with the Carthusians at Sheen, where John Dygoun copied his Life of St Jerome. Sheen and Syon provided spiritual refreshment to the Lancastrian political world, either through brethren hearing confessions or through the circulation of spiritual literature; many public figures were benefactors of Syon, including the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, Margaret, Duchess of Clarence, Henry Chichele, Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, and numerous London merchants.14 The two houses from the literary point of view belonged to a European network of shared devotional texts, assembled from originals in various vernaculars, typically translated into Latin and sometimes retranslated into another vernacular, a process which is only gradually being mapped. An example is the reception in England by stages of the short tracts now collectively known as the Imitation of Christ between about 1427 and the 1440s, apparently through copyists at Sheen. Their readers were both academic theologians and educated laity, on equal terms. In these establishments, the keepers of the conscience of Henry V and his colleagues, Gascoigne’s more political graduate contemporaries could share equally with the high nobility and the captains of war the spiritual harvest of the Carthusians, just as they co-operated in the direction of public affairs. Several bishops and noblemen shared with Gascoigne a penchant for wide reading, even more evident in the libraries of the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester than in those of learned prelates such as Chichele. It is one sign of the convergence

13

R . M. Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecok’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), 230–62. On Gascoigne see W. Pronger, ‘Thomas Gascoigne’, English Historical Review, 53 (1938), 606–26 and 54 (1939), 20–37, and Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship. His Liber de veritatibus is in Oxford, Lincoln College, MSS Lat. 117 and 118. 14

See Roger Lovatt, ‘The Imitation of Christ in Late Medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 18 (1968), 97–121; Syon’s benefactors are listed in the Martiloge of Syon, London, British Library, MS Additional 22285, fols 70r–71r.

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of the academic world, no longer separated from its social context by a high wall of theological terminology, with the court and metropolitan milieu of the Lancastrians. In this mixed environment, new interests could flourish, especially where foreign contacts could be forged. Arundel himself had been a precursor, employing his leisure in exile in 1397–99 to share literary interests with Coluccio Salutati. Two of the English bishops at Konstanz, Robert Hallum of Salisbury and Nicholas Bubwith of Bath and Wells, had encouraged another bishop, Bertoldo da Serravalle OFM, bishop of Firmano, to translate into Latin and comment on Dante’s Commedia for readers unversed in Italian history. Working at the Roman curia brought others into contact with Italian scholars, notably Dr Adam Moleyns, whose humanist Latin as a result met the most stringent criteria.15 The massive influx of English soldiers and officials into France after 1417 in the wake of Henry V allowed a much broader swathe of the Lancastrian world, lay and clerical, to experience a Parisian court culture in many ways more sophisticated than the native variety. The court of the regent duke of Bedford provided a focus for a fruitful Anglo-French cultural interchange, which was not however all in one direction: his employment of English musicians who had already developed in Henry V’s service the new contenance angloise, notably John Dunstable, profoundly influenced French and Burgundian music in the next generation. But inevitably the English had more to learn and absorb. Among the captains open to Parisian influence, beside Bedford himself, reputed learned among his contemporaries, were the brilliant soldier Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, Sir John Fastolf, Richard Sellyng, the lieutenant of Calais Castle, and Sir Richard Roos, all of them readers of, and some translators of, or contributors to, contemporary French literature. Disciplined to duty in the stern service of Henry V, they shared the inquiring mentality and open-mindedness of the graduate clerisy with whom they daily co-operated in the task of governing the Anglo-French double monarchy. The Parisian court world over which Bedford presided until his death in 1435 had itself been transformed by the deliberate formation of a corpus of classical works in French translation inspired by Charles V (1364–80).16 The Regent

15

Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. by F. Novati, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, 4 vols (Roma: Forzani, 1891–1911), III, 497–501, 618–21. Bertoldo’s work is in London, British Library, MS Egerton 2629. On Moleyns see Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England in the Fifteenth Century, Medium Ævum Monographs, 4, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 80–83. 16

On these works see Daniel Poirion, Littérature française: Le Moyen Âge, 1300–1480 (Paris: Arthaud, 1971), pp. 95–105. On Charles V’s library in Bedford’s possession see Jenny Stratford,

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inherited the royal library, consisting of some 843 volumes in 1424, together with the impressive objets de luxe of the Valois; there he would have found Pierre Bersuire’s translations of Livy, Jacques Bauchant’s of Seneca, Nicholas Oresme’s of Aristotle, together with the Sophilogium, an anthology of ancient poets translated into French as the Archiloge Sophie and Le livre des bonnes meurs; Laurent de Premierfait’s renderings of Cicero and Boccaccio, and Nicholas de Gonesse’s of Valerius Maximus. There too was the French translation of the Bible, begun by Jean de Sy in the 1350s for the house of Valois. The work of translation continued after Charles V’s death, influencing the literary renaissance of his successor’s court, including authors such as Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pisan and, in the Lancastrian era in France, Alain Chartier. Many of the translators had stressed the public utility of their work, which reached numerous readers in the French political world. Political prudence, civic virtue, and philosophic resignation in the face of misfortune were the qualities to be distilled from their pages. They supplied historical models and parallels through which readers could come to terms with the searing recent experience of the Anglo-French wars; the renewal of violent civil conflict after 1400 moved Christine de Pisan to further literary efforts at its reconciliation on the basis of ancient wisdom. In the dark days of civil war and defeat by English arms which followed, the French princes were constantly reminded, if less often persuaded, of the virtues of political restraint and stoicism under the wheel of fortune. For the English occupiers too, the corpus of classical political works in French was potentially a transforming cultural inheritance, not entirely unfamiliar to readers of Chaucer, of course, but offering them a much broader selection of ancient texts. They in their turn would respond creatively to its stimulus. It was, perhaps, characteristic of the atmosphere of Bedford’s court that he and his associates should have turned first to the religious strand in Charles V’s legacy, commissioning English versions of the fourteenth-century Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme and Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the first for Bedford himself and the second for the earl of Salisbury. The translator of at least one of these was the Bury monk John Lydgate, a pivotal figure in the converging clerical and lay cultures of the era.17 Not only a monk but an Oxford student,

‘The Manuscripts of John, Duke of Bedford: Library and Chapel’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by D. Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 329–50. 17

The first work survives in a Caxton print (STC 124026); for manuscripts, see The Pilgrimage of the Soul: A Critical Edition of the Middle English Dream Vision, ed. by Rosemarie Potz McGerr,

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probably of theology, about 1407, he had already enjoyed the patronage of Henry V as prince of Wales, and celebrated in English verse several episodes of his reign. From about 1425 he spent a few years in Paris, apparently in Bedford’s household, and his translations must have been made at that time. His absorption of Parisian culture went further: he seems to have introduced the theme of the danse macabre into England, by translating the verses inscribed on the mural painting in the cemetery of the church of the Innocents in Paris; these verses were later set up in London, on a set of boards in the cloister of the Pardon churchyard at St Paul’s. But his greatest debt to French literature, and perhaps directly to Bedford’s inherited royal library, was his translation of Laurent de Premierfait’s version of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium: his greatest poem, the Fall of Princes, which was commissioned by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Bedford’s brother, about 1430. This massive work, whose influence extended into the sixteenth century, conveyed into English literature the note of melancholic resignation characteristic of the Valois world. Further evidence of the vitalizing influence of Bedford’s court on this generation could be found in Richard Roos’s translation of Alain Chartier’s La belle dame sans merci, and in the numerous ‘plesaunce’ poems sometimes attributed to him, but in any case written under French literary influence.18 The poems ascribed to William de la Pole, earl and later duke of Suffolk, in French and English must have owed something to his experience in Paris in the 1420s, though more perhaps to the influence of his friend Charles, duke of Orléans, his sometime prisoner in England and a similarly bilingual poet.19 These works brought

Garland Medieval Texts, 16 (New York: Garland, 1990). A surviving presentation miniature from a now-lost copy of the second is found in London, British Library, MS Harley 4826. On Lydgate, now taken more seriously as a poet than in the past, see Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. by Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961); John Lydgate, ed. by Scanlon and Simpson, and Andrew Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 107 (2008), 445–71. 18

See Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos c. 1410–1482: Lancastrian Poet (London: Hart-Davis, 1961), where the Roos corpus is greatly exaggerated; and Ashby Kinch, ‘A Naked Roos: Translation and Subjection in the Middle English La belle dame sans merci’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 105 (2006), 415–45. 19

See Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, ed. by John Norton-Smith (London: Scolar, 1979); Derek Pearsall, ‘The Literary Milieu of Charles of Orléans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the Authorship of the Fairfax Sequence’, and A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Translation, Canons and Cultural Capital: Manuscripts and Reception of Charles d’Orléans’s English Poetry’, both in Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. by Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 145–56 and 183–214.

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something of the elegance and sophistication of the Valois court world into Lancastrian England; but the most explicit evidence of its enduring intellectual influence came later, from the East Anglian circle of Sir John Fastolf and from the pens respectively of his Oxford-educated secretary, William Worcester, and his stepson Stephen Scrope. Master of the duke of Bedford’s household in the 1420s, Fastolf had spent the prime of his life in Lancastrian France, where he made a considerable fortune. Retiring to England in 1439, he brought with him a number of French servants and a taste formed in Paris; a few fragments of his elegant appointments at Blickling Hall remain, as do at least one of his manuscripts, a copy of Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea to Hector.20 This ‘Book off Knyghthode, as wele off gostly and spirituell actis of armys for the sowle-hele’ was a handbook of noble conduct taken from ancient authors.21 Together with a similar collection of traditional wisdom attributed to Hermes and other classical figures, the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, it was translated by Scrope, and the two texts had some circulation in the later fifteenth century.22 William Worcester turned Laurent de Premierfait’s Cicero translations into English as Tullius of Friendship and Tullius of Olde Age, which were later printed by Caxton. More creatively, he brought the moral authority of ancient authors to bear on the national disaster of the loss of the English dominions in France, its causes and its possible remedies. His notebooks are full of examples of ancient heroes, vindications of the hope of victory in adversity, and appeals backed by historical precedents and modern military and political papers to the ‘coragious hertis putting forthe theire prowis in dedis of armes’.23 His Boke of Noblesse, originally composed about 1452, is a clear-sighted analysis of the rise and decline of English arms against a background of Greek and Roman history.24 Worcester, even more than Lydgate, exemplifies the fruitful

20

Now in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 570.

21

Stephen Scrope, The Epistle of Othea, Translated from the French text of Christine de Pisan, ed. by Curt F. Bühler, EETS, O. S. 264 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1970), p. 122. 22

On Scrope see Jonathan Hughes, ‘Stephen Scrope and the Circle of Sir John Fastolf’, Medieval Knighthood IV: Papers of the Fifth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1990, ed. by Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), pp. 109–46. 23

On Worcester’s notebooks, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 4, pp. 93–125. 24

K. B. McFarlane, ‘William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey’, in his England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1981), pp. 199–224. For the Boke of Noblesse, see William Worcester, The Boke of Noblesse, ed. by J. G. Nichols (London: Roxburgh Club, 1860).

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conjunction of university book-learning and academic disputation with the sophisticated milieu of the Lancastrian court and government, in which French canons of culture could be imbibed. The generation which came to maturity after Thomas Arundel’s death in 1414 was perhaps the least insular, both in its experience of activity on the European continent and in its creative absorption of foreign literary and cultural influences, since the mid-twelfth century, and was arguably not matched in that respect until the era of Byron and Coleridge. It was an age of libraries, in which new and elegant copies of classical, patristic, scholastic, and contemplative authors were more widely available than ever before. Their readers were equally variegated: scholars, lawyers, soldiers, craftsmen among whom a burgeoning new literature in the vernacular could supplement the vast heritage of Latin learning. Arundel’s generation of university-educated intellectuals had been troubled by moral and spiritual uncertainties, posed by the scandal of the great schism and the challenge of Wyclif and the Lollards; the painful evolution of the lawyer Walter Hilton’s contemplative calling seems to encapsulate the dilemmas of the age. The era of Henry V, by contrast, offered broader horizons to his subjects. Their lively and intelligent response is evident not only in the achievement of English arms in France, but in the emergent literary culture into which the influence of French civilization infused fruitful and abundant life.

C ENSORSHIP OR C ULTURAL C HANGE? R EFORMATION AND R ENAISSANCE IN THE S PIRITUALITY OF L ATE M EDIEVAL E NGLAND Michael G. Sargent

H

ow shall we think of English spirituality after Arundel? Was it as divided into the binary of proto-Catholic and proto-Protestant (or the trinary of proto-Protestant, proto-Anglican, and proto-Roman Catholic) as its historians over the centuries have tended to be? Was heretical dissent stamped out by the mid-fifteenth century, surviving only as feeble embers until it flared up once more in the sixteenth? Was More the lineal descendant of Arundel (or of Chichele)? Was Luther (or was Tyndale) the lineal descendant of Wyclif? I am reminded of the observation with which Herbert Grundmann opened his study of the Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter:1 that because all of the religious movements of the later Middle Ages in continental Europe ended up either as religious orders or as heretical sects, historical treatments of these movements were written either by members or adherents of these orders, or by Protestant historians who considered themselves the heirs of medieval dissent. The result, Grundmann

1

Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, 2nd edn, with the Anhang: Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der religiösen Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), pp. 5–12; Grundmann originally wrote this study as his Habilitationsschrift in 1935. See Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy and Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. by Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 1–5.

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observed, was that scholars tended not to study these movements for what they had in common — and how they differed — as religious movements. Scholarship dealing with the spirituality of England in the long century before the Reformation has had a similar history. Over the years, Protestant and Roman Catholic historical apologists from John Foxe to Eamon Duffy have identified in the church of Thomas Arundel and Henry Chichele, of John Fisher, Thomas More, and the ‘Forty Martyrs’ on the one hand, and in John Wyclif and William Tyndale, in Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer on the other, the harbingers of their own post-medieval mentalities. More recent, secular liberal accounts have reversed the polarity, finding a pre-modern creativity and freedom in late medieval English vernacular theology, and the roots of twentieth-century religious fundamentalism in the sixteenth-century Reformation.2 But they have kept the same Hegelian epistemology, treating historical periods, religious movements, and national identities as if they were ideal essences, having a natural life and development — an evolution, an Entwicklung (literally an unrolling) — of their own. It is with this essentialist historicism, with its tendency to read the present (or the not-so-distant past) into the more distant past, that I disagree. Let me begin by invoking two examples of post-modern historical discourse that I believe would be useful to keep in mind as models for our work: the first derives from the work of the theorist of biological evolution, Stephen Jay Gould; the second from the work of queer theorists of the medieval, Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger. One of Gould’s primary observations is that for most of the period from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, the discourse of biological evolution was captivated by what he terms the ‘iconography of the cone of increasing diversity’ — the tendency to visualize the appearance of new species as a gradual, ineluctable progression moving from the simple and primitive to the complex and superior.3 We may add to Gould’s observation the fact that under the influence of Herbert Spencer, the inventor of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, a teleological emphasis was added to this conceptualization of the evolutionary process, which was then further applied to racial and cultural history, political and

2

See especially James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 3

Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989); see especially the figures on pp. 40–42.

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economic policy, and public morality, (falsely) identified as ‘social Darwinism’.4 The historiographic reflex of this ameliorative view of development, according to which history is seen as the inexorable march of political liberty, was famously described by Herbert Butterfield as The Whig Interpretation of History.5 In its nineteenth-century British form, this kind of historical writing focused on the rise of constitutional government; in its present-day American form, the focus of the narrative has shifted, in a capitalist mirror-image of the materialism of Marxist theory, to the (assumed) inevitable progress of human liberties under the aegis of free enterprise.6 A major part of Gould’s revision of the theory of biological evolution came out of his consideration of the implications of the massive explosion of new life-forms — not just new species, but entire new phyla — of which the fossil record in the early Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia gives evidence. From this consideration Gould developed the concept of punctuated equilibrium: that the fossil record demonstrates long periods of relative stability of species in ecological equilibrium (with a great deal of individual variation within species, but relatively little development of new species) interrupted by events of catastrophic ecological change that destroy the existing species that are best fitted to their current ecological niches; such events are followed by periods of massive diversification that are marked by widespread development of new species (but relatively less individuation within species), which eventually re-establish equilibrium in their new ecological setting.7 Further, Gould points out, stressing the original Darwinian description of natural selection, the development of species is random: no guiding hand lifts life-forms to new and higher levels; rather, new species thrive in a new ecology because they feature adaptations that were at best neutral characteristics 4

See Barry Werth, Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (New York: Random House, 2009). 5

Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931). Note that James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution is a simple inversion of the historical narrative that Butterfield describes: Simpson’s is a narrative of the retrogression of liberty brought about by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, according to which the Reformation turns out unexpectedly to be the source, not of present-day Protestant liberalism, but of closed-minded fundamentalism. Cf. the second sentence of the Introduction, p. 1: ‘If literary history and criticism is, as I believe it should be, ancillary to the complex history of freedoms, then this is a narrative of diminishing liberties’. 6 7

See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992).

See Gould, Wonderful Life; also Gould’s final, full statement, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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beforehand, but which are advantageous now. There is development, but not in a smooth process of gradually, inevitably increasing diversity. There is survival, but without an overriding ‘fittest’: evolution isn’t going anywhere. The second historical model that I would like to invoke here was proposed by Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger in the introduction to their critical anthology, Queering the Middle Ages.8 Burger and Kruger begin with a reference to Lee Edelman’s discussion of a scene in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in which Fanny Hill observes two men having sex. Her attention is drawn to the erection of the man being penetrated: ‘His red-topt ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff, shewed that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before’ — as she describes it, a ‘project of praeposterous pleasure’. Edelman focuses on this, because it signally condenses the disturbance of positionality that is located in and effected by the sodomitical scene; sodomy, that is, gets figured as the literalization of the ‘preposterous’ precisely insofar as it is interpreted as the practice of giving precedence to the posterior and thus as confounding the stability or determinacy of linguistic or erotic positioning.9

Burger and Kruger draw from this an application to historiography that strikes me as particularly apposite in describing the way that modern critics have tended to divide up the literature of late medieval English spirituality into proto-Reformist and proto-Roman Catholic streams, projecting the sixteenth-century Reformation back onto the preceding period. As Burger and Kruger note, Mainstream historicism insists on understanding the ‘flow of time’ as uninterruptedly ‘progressive’. In Walter Benjamin’s formulation, ‘Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history’. Traditional historicism is anything but preposterous; instead, it insists on straight chronologies that privilege a value-based movement of supersession and progress — classical antiquity, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, modernity; pre-, modern, and post-. The preposterous thinking of queer theory might usefully interrupt such teleological sequences and the causal explanations — of decadence and decay, efflorescence, Renaissance, and Enlightenment — that accompany them. [...] In other words, might we need (preposterously) to rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding modernity but as the effect of a

8

Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. xi and xii. 9

Lee Edelman, ‘Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex’, in his Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 173–91 (pp. 183–84); Edelman is citing Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. by Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 157–58.

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certain self-construction of the modern, which gives itself identity by delimiting a ‘before’ that is everything the modern is not?10

The application that I see in a ‘preposterous’ re-thinking of the history of late medieval English spirituality is that we would thus consider it, not as the Entwicklung of a Hegelian Geist of English spirituality according to which the result was the ‘Premature Reformation’ of the fifteenth century,11 or the ‘Stripping of the Altars’ and the ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’ of the sixteenth.12 It is the very idea that there is an impersonal, external, objective history, according to which things may be said to be ‘premature’ — before (or after) their time — with which I am taking 10

Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Burger and Kruger, p. xii, citing from Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263. 11

Hudson, PR. It should be noted that — with the partial exception of the ‘rough outline’ of a ‘curriculum vitae of the Lollard movement’ traced in its opening pages — Hudson’s work is remarkably free of the historiographic weaknesses that I am describing here. 12

The third volume of David Knowles’s Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), of which his Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries is an abridged, illustrated version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), employs throughout the imagery of corruption, effeminacy, and morbity, overlaid with a plangent nostalgia, as is evident in his description even of those he most admires, the Carthusians of London: ‘In Chauncey’s pages [i.e. the account of the torture and death of the Carthusians for refusing to swear to the Act of Succession of 1534 and the ecclesiastical supremacy of Henry VIII as required by the Treason Act of 1535], written when the old age had gone downstream in the cataclysm, there is a poignant, if inarticulate cry to Time to cease his passage: Verweile doch, du bist so schön’ (p. 226 — quoting the fatal phrase upon whose utterance Goethe’s Faust is to be damned, ‘Stay yet a while, thou art so beautiful’). Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Marking the Hours are more historiographically sophisticated, portraying fifteenthcentury English spirituality rather as being in full flower when cut off prematurely by the cupidinous king and his cabal — like Simpson’s, a tragic inversion of the progressivist narrative. On the naïveté of Duffy’s elision of groups of believers of varying degrees of literacy and sophistication, see David Aers, ‘Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars’, Literature and History, 3rd ser. (1994), 90–105. My own objections to Duffy’s argument begin with his portrayal of a fifteenth-century English spirituality in which the works of the two most prominent writers, Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love, can be ignored (Love is mentioned only twice, on pages 62 and 79; Hilton — who died, admittedly, just before the end of the fourteenth century, but whose works circulated widely throughout the fifteenth — is never mentioned at all), while a major part of the narrative depends on the works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, who were virtually unknown during the fifteenth century, and the circulation of books of hours, which only became truly popular in the late fifteenth century and (particularly in print) in the early sixteenth, and which probably influenced the spirituality of Duffy’s paradigmatic ploughman considerably less than Hilton and Love did.

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issue here.13 What I propose, rather, is a ‘preposterous’ history of English spirituality from the late fourteenth century through the early sixteenth, seen in its remarkable complexity and diversity, not ‘headed’ anywhere in particular, with various voices in contention for control of the field of discourse, but with the outcome, at that time, as it happened, undetermined. Equally problematic is the tendency to treat orthodoxy — on its own ideological terms — as always already known, always identical, so that orthodoxy can always be assumed, and heterodoxy must always be defined.14 We spend considerable time asking ‘What was Lollardy?’ because we assume that we already know what orthodoxy was — it always was what it is now. The essentialist privileging of orthodoxy as unproblematic in turn leads to such inversions of perception as that according to which the extended discussion of the ownership and use of manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible versions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Mary Dove’s The First English Bible occurs under the rubric of ‘Censorship’.15 Further, although we may applaud the attention that present-day scholarship is paying to the richness of the ‘grey areas’ between orthodox and heterodox theology in late medieval England, it might be more useful metaphorically to think of late medieval English spirituality — Latin or vernacular — not as black, white, or grey, but as multicoloured. Difference needs not be binary. Attempts to identify the essence of Wycliffite heterodoxy in the past halfcentury have become far more sophisticated than earlier historical treatments that tended to treat Lollardy as Protestantism writ small. It is now recognized that even when both Wycliffite and sixteenth-century Reformist theology disagreed with high medieval Church doctrine, they still differ in important ways from each other: a clear example can be seen through the gaps in James Simpson’s discussion in

13

Although I will admit that I have made use of the idea myself in referring to Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ as representing a ‘Premature Counter-Reformation’; see p. intro. p. 75. Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005). 14

The classic example of this kind of doctrinal history is John Henry, Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Toovey, 1845). 15

Mary Dove, ‘Censorship’, in her The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 37–67. What I find interesting is that Dove does not treat the expanding transmission of the text as a case of expansion and transmission (as would be done, for example, in the case of a text by Chaucer, or Hilton, or Piers Plowman), but as a case of the failure of censorship to achieve its goals — that is, not as a positive thing, but as the negative of a negative: the absence of the absence of the Wycliffite Bible.

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Burning to Read of Miles Coverdale’s remarks on his Lutheran objection to Roman Catholic doctrine on sacramental penance.16 Simpson makes a point of the fact that Coverdale advertises his lack of aversion to the use of the term ‘penance’ (a term that Coverdale says ‘the adversaries of truth’ expect him to abhor), tracking the discussion of the translation of the Greek term metanoia from the New Testament text through Erasmus to Tyndale and More. Surprisingly absent from Simpson’s discussion, however, is any mention of Wycliffite aversion to the use of the term ‘penance’ (as opposed to ‘repentance’), as implying the practice of oral confession.17 That is, although they both disagreed with the orthodox church teaching of their times on the matter of confession and penance, Wycliffites and sixteenth-century reformers disagreed with each other on the basis of their objection: the Lutheran objection was grounded in a rethinking of the theology of repentance that was a consequence of a revision of the place of works in the economy of salvation that was particular to Lutheran and post-Lutheran Reformist thought.18 Coverdale’s advertisement of his willingness to use the term ‘penance’, in contrast to what, he says, was expected of him, thus both alludes to and denies the role of Wycliffism as a precursor to the sixteenth-century Reformation. Tyndale and More, on the other hand, stand at the head of a centuries-long tradition of Roman and Protestant collusion in a narrative according to which the Reformation had no roots in the traditional church of the later Middle Ages.

16

Simpson, Burning to Read, pp. 72–79. My thanks are due to Mr Dan Barnett for his useful observations on this point. 17 18

See Hudson, PR, pp. 294–301.

Something quite similar to Luther’s radical anti-Pelagianism can, in fact, be seen in the thought of other exponents of the Augustinian tradition, such as the fourteenth-century English canon regular Walter Hilton: ‘And þan bigynniþ þe soule for to knowen [God] gostly and brennandly for to lufen him. Þan seeþ þe soule sumwhat of þe kynde of þe blissed godhed of Ihesu, how þat he is al and þat he wirkiþ al, and þat alle gode dedis þat are done and gode þouõtes arn only of him. For he is alle souereyn miõt and alle souereyn soþfastnes and alle souereyn godnes; and þerfore euerilk gode dede is don of him and bi him, and he schal only han þe wurschip and þe þanke for alle gode dedis, and noþinge bot he. For þawõ wrecched men stele his wurschip here for a while, nerþeles at þe last ende schal soþfastnes schewen wel þat Ihesu did al and man did riõt noõt of himself. And þan schal þefes of Goddis gode þat are not acorded with him here in þis liif for here trespas be demyd to þe dede, and Ihesu schal be fully worsciped and þankid of alle blessid creatures for his gracious wirkynge’ (cited from The Scale of Perfection, Book II, chap. 34; London, British Library, MS Harley 6579, fols 112v –113r , as edited by S. S. Hussey (I am currently at work preparing this edition for press with the Early English Text Society)). Hilton has more in common with Luther here than Luther has with Wyclif.

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Among historians, the work of scholars such as K. B. McFarlane, Margaret Aston, and Eamon Duffy has marked a turn to the analysis of social practice rather than strictly intellectual or doctrinal history.19 More recent attempts, particularly by scholars in faculties of languages and literature, to identify just what constituted Lollardy, like the work of Anne Hudson, have based themselves rather in philology and linguistic philosophy. In fact, even the work of McFarlane can already be seen as having a ‘linguistic’ tendency: his focus particularly on the evidence of ‘Lollard wills’ in Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights amounts to asking ‘Was there a Lollard semiotics?’ — a system of signs that could be read societally as demonstrating allegiance to the cause.20 At the same time, McFarlane recognized how intensely problematic it was that Archbishop Arundel left just such a will. It provoked McFarlane to ask: Does anyone think that Arundel was a secret Lollard? Must we therefore conclude that the Lollard wills are a false clue, that the coincidences to which I have drawn attention were pure coincidences and no more? The answers to both these questions, it seems to me, must be ‘no’.21

A Lollard will, it seems, is what a post-modern semiotician would call a floating signifier — despite MacFarlane’s attempt to pin it down. More recently, in her essay, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’, Anne Hudson asked a similar semiotically-based question: can the choice of language in which theological discussion is written function as a presumptive sign of heterodoxy?22 Obviously, it was taken as such by a considerable number of contemporary officials, although we must also note that, with the exception of the copies of ‘a book of our Lady’s Matins in English, [...] the Prick of Conscience [...] and The King of Beeme’, in the possession of Richard Colins of Ginge in Berkshire in the early sixteenth century — an active Lollard proselitizer — there is remarkably little evidence that the possession of non-Wycliffite books in English was used as evidence for more

19

See particularly K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon, 1984); Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (London: Hambledon, 1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars and Marking the Hours. 20

McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, pp. 207–20.

21

McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, p. 219.

22

Anne Hudson, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’, Studies in Church History, 9 (1972), 147–57; repr. in Hudson, Lollards and Their Books, pp. 141–63.

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than prima facie suspicion of heresy.23 In particular, we must note that the oftencited example of John Phip, the sixteenth-century physician of Hughendon, who is reported by Foxe to have averred ‘that he had rather burn his books than that his books should burn him’, should not be taken by itself as demonstrating a generalized fifteenth- and sixteenth-century anxiety about book ownership that extended even to those who were not heretics. Non-heretical books in English owned by people who were not heretics, but which happened to be examined by the authorities, appear to have been returned to their owners without prosecution. Hudson also took a semantic approach to the definition of Wycliffism, asking whether there was such a thing as ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’24 As Jill Havens has pointed out,25 a number of studies have followed this line of investigation, ranging in approach from Matti Peikola’s semantic survey of the use of the phrase ‘trewe men’ to Kantik Ghosh’s analysis of Wycliffite hermeneutics.26 Yet, as Havens has also pointed out, texts occupying the ‘grey area’ between the ‘conservatively Lollard and the radically orthodox’ could be read and copied comfortably by both; Ghosh’s analysis, too, comes up with problematic results — what to do with Nicholas Love’s use of Lollard semantics and Thomas Netter’s of Wycliffite hermeneutics? The use of Wycliffite hermeneutics — the privileging of the literal, historical meaning of scripture — is often remarked upon, but it, too, is problematic. In the first place, the privileging of the literal and historical sense occurs throughout the scholastic tradition generally, and secondly, as Fiona Somerset has demonstrated, ‘Lollard writings display a sophisticated engagement with the terms and possibilities of what they most often call “goostli speche” or “goostli under-

23

Hudson, PR, pp. 166–68, 186–88, 460–64, 467–68, 470–71.

24

Anne Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’, in So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediæval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. by Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Benskin and Samuels, 1981), pp. 15–30; repr. in Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 165–80. 25

Jill C. Havens, ‘Shading the Grey Area: Determining Heresy in Middle English Texts’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 337–52. Havens’s approach is primarily semantic; on pp. 339–40, n. 13, she usefully lists a number of studies that have focused on the identification of a ‘Wycliffite sect vocabulary’. 26

Matti Peikola, Congregation of the Elect: Patterns of Self-Fashioning in English Lollard Writings, Anglicana Turkuensia, 21 (Turku: University of Turku, 2000); Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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standing”’.27 In other words, neither the privileging of the literal meaning nor aversion to allegory is specifically characteristic of Lollardy. Hudson’s observation of the role of vernacularity, if not in the semiotics of Lollardy, then at least in the semiotics of the official reaction to Lollardy, was provocatively extended by Nicholas Watson,28 who argued that the strictures of Archbishop Arundel’s Lambeth Constitutions ushered in a period of fearful selfcensorship that effectively ended the efflorescence of vernacular theology that marked the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth. Watson’s observations have occasioned an examination of the literature of vernacular spirituality in late medieval England that has resulted not only in a greater general understanding of the field, but — as is to be expected — in a more nuanced framing of his observations themselves.29 I have argued, for example, that the literature of Latin and vernacular spirituality in England in the fifteenth century may well demonstrate a polarization into relatively ‘conservative’ orthodox forms such as translations of, and compilations from, thirteenth and fourteenth century contemplative and devotional literature, saints’ lives and sermon collections on one side, and relatively ‘radical’ Wycliffite polemics, including works critical of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the sacraments and in defence of the translation of

27

Fiona Somerset, unpublished paper entitled ‘Lollard Allegory’. I thank Prof. Somerset for allowing me to cite from this piece, which she intends at some point to expand and publish. Much of Somerset’s recent work demonstrates the complexity of fifteenth-century English vernacular spirituality — its inability to resolve itself clearly into the binary polarity of ‘Lollard’ and ‘orthodox’. See her ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, in Text and Controversy, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 375–86. 28

Watson, ‘Censorship’; see also ‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’, in New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), 85–124; ‘The Middle English Mystics’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 539–65; ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 331–52. 29

See Sargent, ‘The Mirror and Vernacular Theology in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, pp. intro. 75–96; ‘Mystical Writings and Dramatic Texts in Late Medieval England’, Religion and Literature, 37 (2005), 77–98; ‘What do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Linne R . Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 205–44; and ‘A Talking of the Love of God and the Tradition of Meditative Writing in the Isadorean Style’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. by Susannah Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 178–93.

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scripture and sermon collections, on the other — although I will have to admit that I am no longer entirely comfortable with the dualism of even that formulation. I would also note that the term ‘vernacular theology’ is as equally anachronistic as ‘medieval English mystics’, and over-determines its content to an even greater extent: specifically, that the exclusion of sermons, saints’ lives, the drama, and Wycliffite writing from the survey of vernacular theological literature appended to ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’ seriously distorts our view of the field. It is hard to imagine that the Lambeth Constitutions were as successful as Watson portrays them in the secondary result of creating an ‘atmosphere of fear’ in which selfcensorship prevented the production of new vernacular theological writings in the fifteenth century when they were so spectacularly unsuccessful in accomplishing their primary aim of curtailing the circulation of the Wycliffite Bible (which, at some 250 surviving manuscript copies, is far and away the most ‘popular’ work written in Middle English). Furthermore, when translation and compilation played so great a role in the writings of vernacular spirituality in England in the fifteenth century (if the restriction of translation was a primary object of the constitutions), then why was it original works, not translations, that (it is claimed) ceased to be written? Lastly, we must also note that our view of the manuscript circulation of fifteenth-century literature is foreshortened by the fact that many of the works produced in this period had less than the quarter-to-half-century in circulation that it normally took for a text to achieve large-scale manuscript transmission, before the production of vernacular books in England made the transition to print.30 Although Watson was right to focus on vernacularity, we must also remember that English was not the only vernacular of England in the later Middle Ages, and that the relationship between the vernacular and Latin was so complex that Latin can never be completely left out of the picture. Among the most important works of vernacular theology in French, for example, were Guillaume Deguileville’s trilogy of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the Pèlerinage de l’âme, and the Pèlerinage de Jesus Christ.31 All but the Jesus Christ were translated into English over the course of the fifteenth century (the need for an English meditation on the life of Christ being supplied by other works). The Vie was translated both into English verse, in a version attributed to John Lydgate, composed in the late 1420s and dedicated to Thomas Montacute, earl of Salisbury, and into prose, as The 30 31

See Sargent, ‘What do the Numbers Mean?’

See Guillaume de Digulleville: Les Pèlerinages allégoriques: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 5-8 octobre 2006, ed. by Frédérique Duval and Fabienne Pomel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

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Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhood. The Âme was translated into English prose as The Pilgrimage of the Soul — as well as into French prose (and that version further translated into Latin) by Jean Gallopes in the mid-1420s, for John, duke of Bedford.32 Nor should we forget the medieval Welsh tradition of contemplative and devotional writings represented by, for instance, the Llyfr Ancr Llanddewibrefi.33 What all of this suggests to me is the problem that Michel Foucault demonstrated in his discussion of intellectual history in The Archaeology of Knowledge:34 intellectual history tends to infinite regression. There is always someone else, earlier or elsewhere, who can be identified as an antecedent or a parallel — intellectual movements always turn out to have no beginnings, or to be surrounded by immense ‘grey areas’, rather than borders. What Foucault’s archaeological approach offers is the observation that shifting relationships of power in society both cause and reflect shifts in discursive formulations. It is in these terms, in his essay ‘What is an Author’,35 that he notes that Freud and Marx are ‘authors’ insofar as, whether one agrees with them or not, the discourse that one uses to discuss psychology, in the one case, or political economy, in the other, is changed by the fact of their writing. I would observe that John Wyclif is equally an author in this sense, because — whether his contemporaries agreed with him or not — his is the name that identifies a particularly important node of change in the discourse of late medieval English spirituality. 32

Galopes, who was dean of the collegiate church of Saint-Louis de la Saussaie in the diocese of Évreux, also translated the Meditationes vitae Christi into French, in a version dedicated to Henry V and Bedford. See Josephine E. Houghton, ‘The Works of Guillaume Deguileville in Late Medieval England: Transmission, Reception and Context, with Special Reference to “Piers Plowman”’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2007); Sargent, ‘Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and the Politics of Vernacular Translation in Late Medieval England’, in The Medieval Translator / Traduire au moyen âge: Lost in Translation?, ed. by Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead, The Medieval Translator, 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 205–21. 33 See Idris Llewelyn Foster, The Book of the Anchorite: Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture 1949 (London: British Academy, 1952); The Elucidarium and Other Tracts in Welsh, from Llyvyr agkyr Llandewivrevi, ed. by J. Morris-Jones and John Rhys, Anecdota Oxoniensa Mediaeval and Modern Series, 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894; repr. AMS Press, 1989). 34

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972); originally published in French as L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 35

Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); originally published in the Bulletin de la Société française de la philosophie, 63 (1969), 73–104.

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I am invoking Foucault here particularly as a theoretician of the relations of discourse and power, because his work as a historian of discursive formations, especially in The History of Sexuality,36 has left the impression in many readers of the power of discursive hegemony as somehow ineluctable. I would focus rather on the ways in which the totality of diverse uses of discourse within a culture — even within and in reaction to a hegemony — constitute a constant renegotiation of power. What interests me is the ways in which the hermeneutics that determined what constituted knowledge of scripture, and the public sense of who was entitled to deploy those hermeneutics, changed — and that the cultural node around which that change took place came to be identified with the name of the author, John Wyclif. To invoke another model of cultural relations, we may note with Pierre Bourdieu that the knowledge of scripture was a particularly potent form of cultural capital in late medieval England, but that in the period from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth, the habitus governing access to the text of scripture — the unspoken, self-perpetuating set of cultural practices that determined who had access to that capital, what cultural investments justified that access, and the purposes for which it was culturally acceptable to deploy that access — changed.37 Bourdieu, like Foucault, is much better at describing systems in stasis, but I am interested in the possibility of looking at what happened before, during, and after Arundel in terms of the negotiation of power-relations within the habitus of late medieval English society. The result of this kind of socio-cultural analysis of the spirituality of late medieval England is to de-essentialize the discourse: instead of examining texts to determine whether they are orthodox or heterodox — black or white (or grey) — we can look at them in terms of the many different kinds of work that they do in the cultural economy in which they are situated. Equally, we can ask questions of the kind that the queer theoretician Judith Butler has posed with increasing precision and sophistication over the past twenty years, with regard to the

36

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, 3 vols (New York: Viking, 1979–90); Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–84). 37

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), first published as Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Genève: Droz, 1972); The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), first published as Le Sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), first published as La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979).

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performativity of gender:38 are there acts, expressions and gestures that — under certain societal conditions — are constitutive of identity as a Lollard; is there a Lollard performativity? Such performative gestures might range from breaking up a statue of St Catherine to make a fire to cook one’s pottage to expressing sympathy with ‘victims of persecution’. Further, is there something equivalent to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the Epistemology of the Closet:39 is there a policing of the boundaries of the socially acceptable? Is there such a thing as Lollard panic? Again, these should not be binary questions: we should not ask only whether a text is performative of Lollardy or of orthodoxy — we should ask what other roles were available to be constructed, negotiated, enacted, embodied. Finally, we might also speak of a Lollard deconstruction of Latin medieval scriptural hermeneutics that demonstrates the fundamental instability of a shifting system of levels of explication upon which was erected a superstructure of fixed and determined meaning. Monastic interpretation of scripture, after all, was characterized by an exuberant multiplication of meaning in the text, the truth of any particular reading being guaranteed not by the method by which it was reached, but by its agreement with an interpretative tradition presumed to be always already in place, and by the membership of the writer and reader in an interpretive community. In parallel with Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, ‘The Purloined Letter’,40 we may observe that the meaning of scripture is hidden in the medieval Latin interpretive tradition until you look for it in the gloss (where, of course, it is hidden in plain sight). Lollard reading of the ‘plain’, ‘open’, and ‘reasonable’ meaning of scripture, on the other hand, returned the gloss to its authoritative centre — in the (vernacular) text of scripture itself.

*** I would not begin a history of English spirituality in the later medieval period with Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409 any more than I would attribute the

38

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 39

Eve Kofovsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 40

Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); originally published in French as ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, Tel Quel, 26 (1966), 10–41.

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encyclopaedic works of vernacular theology of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries simply to Archbishop Pecham’s Constitutions of 1281.41 In fact, I would be wary of attributing large-scale social change directly to the actions of ‘historical individuals’, no matter how influential in the eyes of their contemporaries.42 I would propose rather that there was a confluence of several major cultural changes, some with roots in the relatively distant past, and with divergent origins (e.g. scholastic privileging of the literal and historical senses of scripture; centralization of political power in royal, imperial, and papal hands — and contestation of that power by the aristocracy and the rural and urban wealthy; population growth and the rise of the urban capitalist economy; rising rates of literacy, particularly among women; changing gender relations — including relations of men and women, celibacy and marriage). If it is important to locate a ‘tipping point’ in the general socio-cultural effect of these long-term changes, then I would rather locate it in their conjunction, occurring as it did in the context of the catastrophic population disruptions that followed the Great Death of 1348/49.43 To invoke Stephen Jay Gould’s model of punctuated equilibrium, the plague represents a radical destabilization of the habitus that governed the political economy of social and religious life and spirituality, in the aftermath of which a large number of social changes already under way, but not yet dominant, began to manifest themselves in remarkable new ways.44 Nor would I characterize the spirituality of late medieval England on the basis only of its vernacular literature in English: a full discussion depends on an exploration of English, Latin, and French writings — and also of large numbers of other manifestations of changing social practices. Nor, particularly, would I use a

41 As, for example, in the discussion of such Middle English works as Pore Caitif or (despite its title) Ignorancia sacerdotum, or the works of Deguileville, either in their original French or their English (or Latin) versions. 42

In this, Nicholas Watson’s dichotomy of ‘not [...] a centennial coincidence, the product of a new [Z]eitgeist, but [...] the result of specific historical forces and acts’ (‘Censorship’, p. 823) presents us with a false alternative: superstitious coincidence or naive Hegelianism on the one hand, or Archbishop Arundel’s specific historical act on the other. 43

See Colin Platt, King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 44

It is important to remember here that the invocation of Gould’s model does not imply that there was a causal relationship between the plague and the social changes that followed it: catastrophic ecological change does not determine the structure of the new ecology that will develop afterwards, but by sweeping away dominant antecedent structures, opens the field for the development of other forms.

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modern sense of what is and is not ‘interesting’, ‘exciting’, or ‘innovative’ as a criterion in evaluating cultural influence in the past. An important point of entry to the field would be the observation of the growth of associational forms of relationship in the purgatorial economy in the aftermath of the plague — including corrody and confraternity as well as innovations in the patterns of religious foundation.45 Only some sixteen houses of the religious orders were founded in England in the aftermath of the plague: most, like the houses of the Carthusians, the observant Franciscans, and the Birgittines, represented orders whose pious strictness of discipline could stand as a guarantee of the efficacy of their prayers for their benefactors.46 The vast majority of religious foundations in the period were rather of hospitals, secular and academic colleges, and chantries. It should also be noted that the size of most of the foundations in the aftermath of the plague was such that they were within the reach of the gentry and the wealthier bourgeoisie as investments in the economy of spirituality. This includes even some of the larger houses, like those of the Carthusians at London and Coventry, where most of the cells were endowed separately according to the same economic pattern as that which governed lesser hospitals and chantry chapels.47

*** Beside these new mortuary practices, we should also continue to examine and consider new living practices, such as the development of ‘mixed lives’ and the ‘journées chrétiennes’ of the kinds described by Nicole Rice and Geneviève 45

The concept of associational forms of relationship derives from David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 46 The Carthusian houses of London (1371), Hull (1377), Coventry (1381), Axholme (1397–98), Mount Grace (1398), and Sheen (1414); the friaries of the observant Franciscans at Greenwich (1482), Richmond (c. 1400), and Newark (Notts., 1507); of the Carmelites at Northallerton (1356) and Sele (1493); of the Austin Friars at Thetford (c. 1387); of the Crutched Friars at Donnington (c. 1376); of the Bonneshommes at Edington (1352); and the abbeys of the Poor Clares at Bruisyard (1364) and the Birgittine double house of Syon (1415). See David Knowles and R . Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London: Longmans, 1953); Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). 47

See Andrew Wines, ‘The Founders of the London Charterhouse’, in Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Julian M. Luxford (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 61–71.

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Hasenohr;48 new practices of authorship (including in particular translation and compilation), readership (particularly among women) and book culture, as detailed by Jessica Brantley, Jennifer Bryan, Mary Erler, and Catherine Sanok, among others;49 liturgical and para-liturgical practices and spaces, as examined by Roberta Gilchrist, Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Sarah Stanbury, and Nancy Bradley Warren;50 as well as practices of dissent and reformation.51 But it is important to remember that these various new forms and practices did not develop in isolation, but rather in dynamic relation to each other. For example, although it is common enough for critics to discuss ‘devotional miscellanies’ and ‘Lollard miscellanies’, the fact is rather that many of the works collected in such manuscripts sat (apparently comfortably) side-by-side with works that would be collected into completely different anthologies by modern critics. If we pay attention only to the prescriptions of archbishops and the criticisms of their major opponents we will miss the fact that many people, while listening to both, were willing to make up their own minds. It was not only the great and powerful among

48

See Nicole R . Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister: The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost’, Viator, 33 (2002), 222–60; Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Geneviève Hasenohr, ‘La Vie quotidienne de la femme vue par l’église: l’enseignment des “journées chrétiennes” de la fin du moyen âge’, in Frau und spätmittelalterlicher Alltag. Internationaler Kongress: Krems an der Donau, 2. bis 5. Oktober, 2004 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986), pp. 19–101. 49 See Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 50

See Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994); Women’s Space, ed. by Virginia Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005); Nancy Bradley Warren: Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 51

See Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006); Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. by Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003).

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the orthodox who owned copies of the Wycliffite Bible versions,52 but many others — including a large number of people (or local churches or chapels) whose copies were apparently formatted for para-liturgical use. This is not to say that Lollardy was not a dominant strand in English spirituality in the fifteenth century, or that it was a local or a passing movement, or that it was not a major vector of social change: demonstrably, it was.53 What I would argue is that we must be careful methodologically in deconstructing the semiotic basis upon which scholars of the past few decades have built the current narrative of an anxious, troubled, repressed English spirituality after Arundel, sliding inevitably (or not) toward the cataclysm of the sixteenth century, and in constructing beside, within, and around that narrative another, queer narrative of polyglossia, of performativity, of negotiation and contestation of power — a preposterous historical project.

52

The fact that we find few names of owners in copies of the Wycliffite Bible versions other than those of the rich and powerful does not necessarily signify much: they are the people who usually left their names on their belongings. We do not know many of the names of the original owners of Piers Plowman or of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection either. 53

I am consciously using the image of a vector here, in the way that physical analysis looks at the motion of a diagonally-falling object in terms of its outward and its downward movement forces. Looking at Lollardy as a vector of momentum in its social-intellectual world — rather than as a pie-slice — seems more useful methodologically, since the definition of a vector requires the identification of a direction of movement, while the definition of a pie-slice requires the identification of borders.

V ERNACULAR T HEOLOGY / T HEOLOGICAL V ERNACULAR : A G AME OF T WO H ALVES? Ian Johnson

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he possibilities of the collocation ‘vernacular theology’ are the main subject of this essay, which is in part a reconsideration of this thought-provoking term, and which will also suggest three ways in which an understanding of vernacular theology, or the theological vernacular, may be developed beyond what has so far generally been the case.1 Each of these involves the vernacular repackaging or adaptability of texts for purposes of theological performance, whether such performance involves the more or less programmatic nurturing of spiritual discipline; or the demonstration, shaping, or display of Christian ethics and rudiments of the faith; or the interpretation and application of biblical matter; or the enactments of devotion and the exercise of the affecciouns; or the exposition or implementation of particular theological positions. Each of these three ways depends on, and opens up, its own particular discursive possibilities. The first of them is concerned with the implications of punctuabilitas in texts of vernacular theology; the second involves theological play with genre; the third attempts to imagine possible behaviours and attitudes of post-Arundelian vernacular readers of manuscripts containing seemingly clashing mixes of heterodox and orthodox materials. Before this, however, there needs to be some revisiting of the high-

1

The support of the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) towards costs for conference attendance and the preparation of this essay is gratefully acknowledged. This essay develops features of the paper given at the ‘After Arundel’ conference and also of an essay, entitled ‘Vernacular? Theology? Vernacular Theology?’, lodged on the Geographies of Orthodoxy website at: .

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conceited term itself, commencing with an anecdote, inside whose storiale husk of latter-day scholarly confusion and terminological obduracy lies a kernel of awkward but productive truth. At Kalamazoo in 2007 some speakers on late medieval English religious literature and culture talked of vernacular theology as if it was still very much the vital paradigm. Others, however, spoke of ‘vernacular theology’ whilst gesturing scare quotes for the expression. Others went so far as to consign it to the past tense. All this was evidently rather unsettling; someone in the row in front of me started talking about having to change what she had put in her paper. However exciting or inconvenient (or illusory) this moment of possible paradigm shift was, everyone was still, in effect, carrying on speaking about vernacular theology nonetheless, and no better locution or concept came over the horizon to take its place, nor has done since — unless I have missed it. A chief moral of this brief tale of clerks in commotion is that vernacular theology cannot be jettisoned or avoided. Intransigently useful, ‘vernacular theology’ is a problematic yet attractive combination of terms. As Nicholas Watson points out, it has the advantage of: encouraging reflection on the kinds of religious information available to vernacular readers without obliging us to insist on the simplicity or crudity of the information: that is, the term is an attempt to distance scholarship from its habitual adherence to a clerical, Latinate perspective in its dealings with these texts.2

Vernacular theology, like its Latin counterpart, is definitely intellectually worthy of being called theology. What is more, it shines with the lustre of the designation ‘vernacular’, an invariably positive term, charged with connotations of access, freedom of expression, and incipient democratization. On one level, this yokingtogether of heterogeneous categories seems straightforward enough, but such a conceit needs to be used with tact, for although the two component terms may engage each other in the arena of linguistic usage they may not always be playing the same game: the agenda or situation of theology are not necessarily the same as those of the vernacular/vernacularity. ‘Vernacular theology’ has been in play for quite a while. Although the expression was used by Ian Doyle as long ago as 1953, and although Bernard McGinn has had significant dealings with the term, it was with Nicholas Watson’s extraordinarily influential article of 1995 in Speculum, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, that vernacular theology entered

2

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 823, n. 4.

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the consciousness of so many medievalists in English Studies.3 It is impossible to name an article that has, in the last three decades (or longer), had a greater agendachanging impact on Middle English Literary Studies. Watson’s narrative of vernacular theology is all the more moving and depressing because it is powerfully written as well as being academically engaging — a tale of lost opportunities, of something precious snatched away by stifling small-mindedness. His story certainly taps into the modern academic penchant for seeing medieval vernacular textuality in terms of competition against colonial, clerical Latin culture and sources. This partiality has its own agonistic idiolect: ‘appropriation’, ‘supplanting’, ‘resistance’, ‘displacement’, ‘rupture’ — such is the idiom favoured in modern forays into medieval ‘vernacularity’.4 However, this politically excited and at times teleologizing binarism, if unchecked, is in danger of overlooking the common ground between Latin and English texts/culture, let alone their rich intertextual relations, and of thereby impairing a sound and fully productive understanding of vernacular theology. ‘Vernacular theology’ is a suggestive and fluid category, and should be seen as opening up more than it closes down. On the one hand, as a meeting point of the sacred and the politico-linguistic, it can be used to account for the translatio of aspects of a clerical Latinate over-culture into the lay sphere and the formation and release of spiritual authority and difference into new textual, personal, and cultural loci.5 On the other hand, if pushed into indiscretioun, vernacular theology can slip into an essentialism which represents culture, personal experience, and authenticity 3

Our attention is drawn to Doyle’s first use of the term in a very useful and informative recent discussion of vernacular theology, Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–20 (p. 401). The collocation is used in A. I. Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th and Early 16th Centuries with Special Consideration of the Part of the Clergy therein’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1953). See also Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–02, for acknowledgement of McGinn’s use of the term in the Introduction to Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. by Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 1–14, and also in McGinn’s monograph, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1500) (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1998). For further recent reconsiderations of vernacular theology, see Literary History and the Religious Turn, a special issue edited by Bruce Holsinger of English Language Notes, 44 (2006), 77–137. 4

The biggest influence in this area is Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Those who have followed in the wake of this pioneering study have not always matched its sophistication and interpretative flexibility. 5

For an important study of the adaptation and transmission of clerical theology and spiritual guidance in the vernacular for the laity, see Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline.

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too much as a reflex of linguistic vernacularity. Moreover, its tendency to be coopted into a liberationist narrative, which imagines linguistic and social boundaries as fault lines, is, understandably enough, tempting fare to modern academic taste, especially for monoglot Anglophones. Such a moralized narrative is much more appealing than the unthrilling fact that medieval people and texts crossed such boundaries routinely without transgression or trauma. The vernacular theology ‘movement’ may have shed its own invaluable light on discourses of the sacred by being sensitive to the unique contingencies of vernacular difference, but it has sometimes averted its gaze unwisely from the unstruggling harmoniousness that also characterizes larger Latin, European, and vernacular traditions of holy textuality and culture. In dwelling on textual examples of personal spiritual distinctiveness or initiative and in valorizing these against an allegedly unadventurous backdrop of mainstream devotional performance, vernacular theology, as we have known it, has also been running the risk of underplaying the personal possibilities and subtleties of interpretative leeway arguably permitted, licensed, and encouraged in the more ‘conventional’ and less adventurous times ‘after Arundel’. If the category/conceit ‘vernacular theology’, then, is to prove itself adequately capacious it has to be able to cope with, and be interesting about, less exotic materials, especially after Arundel. It has to be able to accommodate, where appropriate, a repertoire of abstractable ideology of transcendent Christian truth and doctrine not only in mainstream texts which can with some confidence be designated as vernacular theology but also in works and genres which may not present themselves primarily or obviously as vernacular theology. The term ‘repertoire’ is deliberately chosen here because it encompasses a notion of performative variety applicable across a range of works — running from clear-cut texts of vernacular theologizing to works of more oblique or intermittent religiosity that may deploy or reshape the tiniest nuance of vernacular theological significance alongside other agenda. In other words, vernacular theology may be, and perhaps should be, regarded as a competence or langue, inasmuch as it is a type of discourse informing individual works and genres, attitudes and behaviours, and impacting broadly and productively on religious life and culture at large. It is therefore perhaps proper and profitable to conceive of ‘vernacular theology’ not just as a cultural phenomenon or a set of texts but also as a condition, mode, circumstance, attribute, or aspect of texts and culture which can best be appreciated in terms of transactions of production, reception, and circulation, each instance of which produces different but related significance for different readers/hearers — not just a theologically vernacular what but a theologically vernacular how that incorporates circumstances of mouvance and ideology (and

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even divine perspective and the ‘otherworldly’). Not so much ‘vernacular theology’, then, as its slightly defamiliarizing complement, the ‘theological vernacular’.6 This sibling term, ‘theological vernacular’, implies a degree, or degrees, of theological (in)competence in people, behaviours, and culture. Each text is a sign of what is possible. The notion of a ‘theological vernacular’ is therefore a reminder that extant holy English works, to the extent that what they utter is recognizable and possible within the competence of the vernacular, are, in one sense, paroles to the theological vernacular’s langue, whilst at the same time being more like langue themselves in being able to generate a range of further readerly performances and further textual adaptations. The formulation ‘vernacular theology’ is a noun-based term implying the existence of a discrete phenomenon, an integral ‘thing’ or corpus. Somewhat differently, the more adjectival and conditional collocation ‘theological vernacular’ suggests a more contingent, discontinuous, and dispersible coming into being in terms of attributes and modalities as a circumstance of not only actual textual/oral utterances but also as a factor in traffic amongst texts and, most importantly, amongst people and their institutions (Latin to vernacular, intervernacular, and intravernacular). The term ‘theological vernacular’ is, therefore, more intuitively attachable than its twin to behaviours, transactions, and practices affecting and affected by written texts. When, therefore, we see in texts evidence of which affective and hermeneutic choices were or were not made in, for example, expounding, translating, compiling, dramatizing, preaching, liturgizing, chanting, reciting, confessing, praying, meditating/imagining, or asserting, we are also in a position to imagine, as a corollary, what kinds of other choices might have been made and we may thereby infer, to some useful extent, repertoires within and beyond texts. And where better to examine the variegated repertoire of mainstream theological textuality than in the manuscript and textual tradition of a work condemned as the most paradigmatically leaden and monolithically repressive of them all, Nicholas Love’s villainously Arundelian Mirror?7 This essay, however, is not chiefly interested in how Love is not so oppressive after all. Nor shall it discuss how Love does not actually infantilize and spiritually hamstring his readership.

6

This discussion of the ‘theological vernacular’ uses materials presented in my paper, ‘What Theology? W hat Vernacular? Holy English Texts and Contexts in the Later Medieval Period’, given at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2000. 7

Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005).

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Nor shall it deal with the issue of how Love’s work is a sophisticated witness to a mainstream European tradition, and how it has been critically undervalued by modern scholarship, and how it should be accorded the cultural centrality it merited in its own times.8 Instead the focus is on the supple subtlety of vernacular theology as evidenced in the punctuabilitas, the ‘punctuability’, in the handwritten repertoire of its texts, with Love’s Mirror as test case. For this purpose we shall now turn to Malcolm Parkes’s contribution to the Waseda proceedings volume, ‘Punctuation in Copies of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’.9 Parkes’s essay is not per se about vernacular theology or the theological vernacular. Its implications, however, for our appreciation of the theological nuances and delicate mouvance achievable in the vernacular are profound indeed, for Parkes shows how a mutable profusion of rhetorical and hermeneutic possibilities are articulated in the punctuabilitas of what, from an editorial view, is a rather stable and carefully disposed text. The same words and the same linguistic structures recur across codices, but the varied punctuational repackaging of these words and structures by scribes reflects and generates, from manuscript to manuscript, richly different emphases of theological understanding. These variations frequently show finesse and intelligence. The lesson for modern scholars is that that even in the chilly deeps of an ‘oppressive’ and constraining work, licensed against heretics by Arundel himself, the theological vernacular could thrive on choice. One of Parkes’s chief examples from the Mirror involves the biblical episode in the Garden of Gethsemane when the Archangel Michael admonishes Christ, tells him to be of good comfort and to work manfully, comments on his plight, and transmits to the Son words of reassurance from God the Father. Analyzing and comparing textual extracts from a number of manuscripts at his customary subatomic level of unsummarizable terseness, Parkes elicits, with critical tact, a remarkably detailed variability of theologically salient emphases.10 The punctuation

8

For disapproval of Love’s Mirror along these lines, see Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, 85–124 (pp. 93–98). For a defence of Love, see Ian Johnson, ‘The Non-Dissenting Vernacular and the Middle English Life of Christ: The Case of Love’s Mirror’, in The Medieval Translator, ed. by Renevey and Whitehead, pp. 223–35. 9

Malcolm Parkes, ‘Punctuation in Copies of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’, in Nicholas Love at Waseda: Proceedings of the International Conference 20–22 July 1995, ed. by Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 47–59. 10

For instance, commenting on the treatment of this passage in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A 387 B, fol. 26r, Parkes notes that ‘the speech has been presented as a single paragraph.

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of, for example, tropology or anagogy, or of features of division, conditionality, sequencing, complement, association, juncture, grouping, or revisionary repointing are scrutinized to great effect. The question of the degree to which the text of a particular manuscript is marked up directively or let loose equiparatively, with a light punctuational touch, to the vagaries of lectoris arbitrium, is also addressed. Each act of punctuation both marks and makes something performable in the interlinked repertoires of text, of readerly experience, and, more importantly, of vernacular theology itself. Punctuabilitas is thus an agent and a consequence of the most delicate contingencies, nuances of variability, decisions, and confusibles that can be read into the rhetorical, grammatical, logical, or expository levels of such texts. Not only the smallest, medial, larger, and agglomerated divisions of narrative sense, moralization or interpretative significance, but also the isolable articulations of sentiment and opportunities for ruminative development consort with each other in a gallery of possible performances and decisions. These performances would of course be complicated further depending on whether the text involves a lector reading out loud, or a listener, or a private reader visually taking in the words laid out on the page. Vernacular theology, then, is a matter of the pragmatics of what can be done, large-scale or small-scale, with discourses. It is not just a corpus of overtly theologizing texts but also a tradition informing and enabling the production, reception, circulation, and development of theological thoughts and sentiments in diverse cultural places, obvious and less obvious, formal and informal. Vernacular theology should therefore be seen as encompassing a range of forms of behaviour that involve modes of vernacularizing theologically when the opportunity or obligation arises. The theological vernacular can also be seen as a habit or a temper that may, among other functions, translate materials theologically, perhaps even in a text that

Both the admonition of the angel and his comments on the situation are contained in a single sententia (lines 1–5) separated from that containing the reassurance from the Father. The long second sententia contains a set of antitheses which are given equal prominence as result of this separation, and the punctuation emphasizes the function of the comments as an expansion of the admonition (‘Bith now of good comfort my lorde .’). This link, and the punctus after ‘my lorde’, also emphasize the relationship between the angel and Christ. A reader is therefore invited to construe the following antitheses as referring to the paradox of the dual nature of Christ as both lord of angels and man, and the concomitant paradox of suffering and glory with joy as proper to His nature. In line 2 a single application of the punctus elevatus (after ‘hye degre’) was deemed sufficient to indicate the complement of ‘it is semly’ whilst at the same time emphasizing the lordship of Christ, ‘Punctuation in Copies’, pp. 49–50.

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does not have theology or devotion as its central feature. Its reach and ability to rework such discourse is visible, for instance, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Boece. When, in Book IV Metre 1, Chaucer comes to translate an account of the soul ascending towards the light/summum bonum, he seems to do so with a fourteenth-century taste for heavenly hope and with a contemporary theological decorum in rendering and colouring his sources that can best be described as theological vernacularizing.11 In the very details of translating a not-primarily-pious text, a value-adding discourse of highly discriminating vernacular theology (with a tinge of affective piety) is evidently at work. That the theological vernacular should cross generic boundaries for its own ends with particular vernacular audiences in mind is inevitable. Genre produces modes of reading, predisposing and playing with reader expectations as to the content and agenda of texts. In casting a particular world view, and as a bearer of themes and attitudes towards those literary materials it processes, genre has an especial interpretative and ideological purchase on sources and readership alike. So when the theological vernacular touches, however glancingly, an untheological genre, complex and interesting meanings and reorientations may emerge. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider how the theological vernacular breathes on a text outside the normal run of vernacular theology. This text is no treatise or manual of spiritual ambition. It does not teach imitatio clerici, nor raise the reader up towards the contemplative ether. Far from it: the Passion of Our Lord in Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (c. 1285–1300 or earlier?) is an accurate and systematic gospel harmony in fast-paced couplets.12 It is notable for its lack of homiletic amplification. However, it appropriates and implicitly subverts, in its own distinctive way, the genre of the chanson de geste as part and parcel of reinforcing the authority of Christ and his life in its sovereign textuality, and recolouring generic values and sentiments for its intended audience. It is also desirable to examine this work because it is so much earlier than those usually discussed by modern scholars interested in Middle English vernacular theology. Reading the Passion of Our Lord in terms of the theological vernacular may, then,

11

See Ian Johnson, ‘The Ascending Soul and the Virtue of Hope: The Spiritual Temper of Chaucer’s Boece and Retracciouns’, English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, 88 (2007), 245–61 (pp. 245–51). 12

An Old English Miscellany, ed. by Richard Morris, EETS, O. S. 49 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1872), pp. 37–57. For dating of the scribal hand of the manuscript see Betty Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29, Part II: Contents, Technical Matters, Compilation, and its History to c. 1695’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 50 (2003), 268–76 (p. 271).

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be fruitful in helping to decouple vernacular theology somewhat from its habitual fifteenth-century preoccupations with heterodoxy and orthodoxy. The Passion of Our Lord presents itself in terms of a literary fashion whilst playing with it and marginalizing it. It offers, however briefly, a gospel-driven critique of chansons de geste/Charlemagne romances, rising above them at the same time as cashing in on their appeal. Proceeding from the unimpeachable textual substrate of the harmonized Gospels, the maker of the Passion is all the more free to take liberties with geste idiom in order to legitimate his work and maximize its effect, as can be seen from the opening rhetorical throw: Ihereþ nv one lutele tale. þat ich eu wille telle. As we vyndeþ hit iwrite. in þe godspelle. Nis hit nouht of karlemeyne ne of þe Duzeper. Ac of cristes þruwinge. þet he þolede her. (ll. 1–4)

The first word of the work, before any subject matter has been divulged, immediately pitches the poem into the genre of the orally delivered tale; yet this orality is, paradoxically, derived from the ultimate in what is written, the Bible. The term ‘lutele tale’, just about the least suitable description imaginable for the vast written truth of the most important part of scripture, carries its own theological irony.13 This irony is sharpened straightaway by a highly conventional citation of textual auctoritas and scriptural fidelity: the tale is as it is to be found in the gospel (‘As we vyndeþ hit iwrite. in þe godspelle’). The subsequent proclamation (with its flurry of negatives) that this tale is neither about Charlemagne nor his twelve retainers, implies that Christ can be seen, yet nevertheless must not be seen, in terms of the chanson de geste and of all that Charlemagne stands for. As Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne was the historical embodiment par excellence of a Christianizing translatio imperii subsuming and overgoing the Roman Empire, but in this text it is Christ who overgoes ‘karlemeyne’ in the greatest translatio of all. Medieval tales of heroes characteristically begin with a familiar catalogue of worthies, and the star of any given story would, predictably enough, have his name trumpeted as the climax to a prefatory roll call, and this happens here. The invocation of Charlemagne’s ‘Duzeper’ alludes to Christ’s own ‘Duzeper’, the disciples who, instead of roving abroad conquering kings and earls, baptize them

13

Likewise, in line 68 the tag indicating oral delivery, ‘as ich eu segge may’, would normally be mere pleonasm, but here, however, literal meaning breaks through the formula, which now means what it says: in other words ‘I really can tell you this because it is indubitably true’. Thus, the bluff of the genre is called; the vernacularized gospels are valorized as sovereign discourse, and the appeal of geste idiom is productively redeployed.

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(l. 678), thereby outdoing the Carolingian dozen. Charlemagne himself is not denied his fame but is pointedly elided in favour of Christ when, in the fourth line, the hero of this story is named, and his deeds, the matter of the tale, declared alliteratively in a manner echoing antique English heroic poetic tradition: ‘Ac of cristes þruwinge. þet he þolede her’. This line significantly alters the rhetorical pattern set up by the previous line. Whereas the syntactic parallel, ‘of karlemeyne […] of þe Duzeper’ generates the expectation that the next line would continue the pattern by categorizing the tale as being one ‘of Christ’, the anticipated ‘of criste’ is wrong-footingly extended as ‘of cristes þruwinge’ (of Christ’s Passion). A routine bombastic catalogue of heroic name and fame modulates nimbly in mid-word into the citation of the divinely ordained process of the Passion, which takes priority over any mere name or reputation as the dynamic of the sententia of this holy work. The verb ‘þolede’, ‘suffered’, in being active, invertingly mimics an active feat worthy of celebration in verse. Such passive agency befits the epic virtue of heroic endurance and glorious death — only this time (reminiscent of the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood) death will be no glorious defeat but a yet more glorious victory. Thus the poet gets the spiritual best of this world and the next while the theological vernacular gets the generic better of Charlemagne and the chanson de geste. In a theologically-freighted point about the translatability of Christ and, by implication, about the generic values recontextualized in this work, the poet takes care to tell us that Christ ‘þolede her’, suffered here. Though not a meditative text, the Passion of Our Lord undoubtedly draws on the everyday tradition of thinking on Christ’s Passion and his insistent suffering and redemptive presence. The heroes of the chanson de geste are, in contrast, not here, being unalterably gone: legendary and distant. Christ’s story, moreover, is true and, for all that it occurred long ago in a place far away, is held to have happened here in our midst (a point which would have added impact if this text were to be recited to an audience). The values and sentiments of the legendary past, as exemplified by geste heroes, were, nevertheless, clearly enjoyed and ‘owned’ by later medieval audiences. Familiar generic and chivalric virtues of morality and prowess, and the codes of fellowship, loyalty, affection, and hospitality are accordingly put to work, however glancingly, by this Passio Christi, with considerable theological intelligence. Such Christological reorientation of features and values of genre is effected not solely to make gospel matter attractively and intuitively comprehensible to an Anglophone audience. It also constitutes an affective process of sentimental education in the theological vernacular. This type of theology is in line with the common medieval understanding, exemplified by Bonaventure, that theology does not so much prove

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as move.14 Here, clinching moments of stylistic play make rudimentary but important theological points immediately emotionally intelligible to the vernacular affecciouns. The reader/listener, after the experience of taking in this text, may perhaps be able to see or feel such values and sentiments a little differently in a new perspective connected to Christ and his story, and may thereby be more susceptible to a beneficial change of habitus. The Passion of Our Lord testifies to the resourcefulness and flexibility of the theological vernacular in re-slanting and remixing materials for an audience/ readership. A separate but related story of flexibility may be told about the ways in which texts were remixed with each other in codices after Arundel. This story forces us to rethink the nature of what the theological vernacular was allowed to do, and was capable of doing, after the alleged epistemic shift instigated by the Constitutions. Indeed, the title of this essay could also be taken to be referring to another ‘game of two halves’ — the Big Match between Orthodoxy and Dissent. The first, ‘golden’, half of this game, played on the field of vernacular theology, brims with Middle English textual examples of individual inventiveness, ideological latitude, and a fecundity of spiritual ambition, but comes to a not entirely sporting end with the anti-heretical legislation De heretico comburendo and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–09, which this conference celebrates. The post-Arundelian second half, so the story goes, is a relatively leaden affair. In comparison with the fourteenth century’s dazzling individual runs of spiritual athleticism from the likes of the Cloud-author, Richard Rolle, and Julian of Norwich, and some magisterial passing from clerics to laity in Hilton’s Mixed Life or Book to a Mother, the unadventurously pious fifteenth century is bogged down in conformity, formula, and aureation; it is unsubversive, unambitious, unironic, neither individual nor witty, and rather tame and fearful: all in all ‘safe’ and ‘dull’. Or is it? One fact brings into question such a narrative: the fact that the ‘Golden Age’ texts produced in the fourteenth century were copied, circulated, wanted, and read much more in the fifteenth century than they were in the 1300s. Does this mean then that vernacular religious culture and experience after the ‘Arundelian’ era was not, after all, stripped of much of the ideological latitude and creative energy enjoyed in the late fourteenth-century glory days of vernacular theology? Was it, then, the fifteenth century that was the true Golden Age of Vernacular Theology? The Geographies of Orthodoxy project addresses this problem with a particular concentration on the key area of Middle English pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of 14

Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar, 1984), p. 127.

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Christ.15 One exciting aspect of this enterprise is that it is working variously to reconsider the notion that vernacular religious writing becomes enfeebled in the wake of Arundel’s Constitutions. The various cohabitation, within particular codices and social networks, of English pseudo-Bonaventuran materials with less orthodox religious and secular writings certainly problematizes modern understanding of the properties and health of post-Arundelian vernacular theological sensibilities.16 Take, for instance (thanks to Ryan Perry, who has produced the codicological descriptions of this and another manuscript, to be discussed below), Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 38 (322).17 Its fascinating conjunction of texts raises questions about what being Lollard, or orthodox, or reformist, for both texts and people, or being categorized as such by others, might or might not have involved.18 When apparently clashing texts are made to be neighbours in a codex, we have to try to imagine how they might speak with and against each other (or not) in readers’ minds. This manuscript started life as a somewhat Lollard-leaning late fourteenth-century collection of texts, to which, intriguingly, the orthodox pseudoBonaventuran Middle English Meditationes de Passione Christi was apparently added in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The collection starts with some

15

The web site of this AHRC-funded joint Queen’s University-St Andrews research project is: . 16

See the strand of discussion which ran from 29 April 2009 to 11 October 2009 [accessed 23 August 2011] following on from the paper given by Ryan Perry and Stephen Kelly at ‘After Arundel’, in which Nicholas Watson, Fiona Somerset, and Michael Sargent engage in a productive discussion with the authors of the paper which, amongst other things, reconsiders the problematics of theorizing and understanding the implications of codices with ‘mixed’ textual populations of ‘heterodox’, ‘Lollard’, ‘Wycliffite’, ‘mainstream’, ‘reformist’, and ‘orthodox’ materials. 17

Such profiles of manuscripts and texts are available: . See also Linne R. Mooney, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XI: A Handlist of Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), pp. xviii, 10–11. 18 The sense in which I am using the term ‘Lollard’ here acknowledges that there is in modern times, and there was in the Middle Ages, a well-established want of consensus as to what the term might mean in general — let alone for users of an individual book. Such a caveat notwithstanding, it can be said that this protean term may be used to designate someone following the academic movement associated with Wyclif, and it may also be used to describe someone in a more popular tradition which may originally have had its roots amongst Oxford theologians but which mutated variously over time so as to become rather different in its ideology as well as in its personnel.

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Wycliffite sermons (Set 5 in Hudson’s edition), followed by Thomas Wimbledon’s famous sermon of 1389 delivered at Paul’s Cross.19 Though the latter contains prophetic elements from Joachim of Fiore and Hildegard of Bingen which John Wyclif himself would presumably have particularly hated, nevertheless, as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has pointed out, this kind of material was regarded with such suspicion by the Church that it became guiltily associated with Lollardy itself.20 Next in the manuscript is Richard Rolle’s Form of Living — temperamentally and theologically a long way from Lollard treatments of Scripture but jammed up right next to, of all things, a Wycliffite exposition of the Paternoster.21 But then, the Lollards had something of a taste for Rolle, and for the Form of Living in particular. Intriguingly, the version of the text copied into this manuscript is the original Form of Living, as composed by Rolle, and not the Lollard adaptation and its ‘alternative spiritual program’ aiming to inculcate ‘active Lollardy rather than contemplative anchoritism’ — on which Fiona Somerset has written illuminatingly in discussing this manuscript in the context of Wycliffite spirituality.22 Rolle’s Form of Living was reframed in Latin, perhaps by Wyclif himself, in De amore siue ad quinque quaestiones: there is an English counterpart to this, The Five Questions.23 This ‘alternative program’ involves ‘a confident rejection of the selfdoubting continual focus on one’s own interior state that Rolle attempts to instil. This is rejected in favour of trust in one’s knowledge of Scripture and one’s capacity to prove one’s love by performing what Scripture demands’.24 Here, ‘love

19

English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983–96), I, ed. by Hudson (1983). 20

Perry’s description of the mansucript cites Hudson, PR, p. 424, and Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 42, 67, 79, both of whom point out that this sermon appeared in Lollard manuscript contexts. 21

Richard Rolle, Form of Living, in Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, ed. by S. J. OgilvieThomson, EETS, O. S. 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1988), pp. 1–25. 22

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, pp. 375–86 (p. 380).

23

For discussion of the ascription to Wyclif, see Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, p. 378. For an edition of De amore, see John Wyclif, Opera minora, ed. by Johann Loserth (London: Paul, 1913; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966), pp. 8–10. For The Five Questions, see Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869–71), III (1871), 183–85, and Wyclif: Select English Writings, ed. by Herbert E. Winn (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 110–12. 24

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, pp. 382–83.

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is a form of work, whereas for Rolle love is an alternative to action in the world’.25 The Latin and English Lollard adaptations of the Form of Living focus accordingly on the community rather than on the solitary soul.26 What might it signify, then, in this manuscript, which is not exactly shy of Lollard matter, that Rolle’s Form sits unadapted? Is this not so much mouvance as a kind of stickaunce that might be modified or compensated for by feints of mouvance in a reader with heterodox leanings? That the Form of Living is recorded in its pre-Lollard format here indicates the possibility that a Lollard-friendly reader could cope with, and even benefit from unLollardized Rolle. We do not know if such a reader would simply accept the Form on its own terms or read it more adaptively: Rollard spirituality was a complex mix. Things become even more complex when we also take into account the addition to the texts of this manuscript of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes de Passione Christi. Although this non-dissenting addition does not seem to sit comfortably alongside Lollardleaning materials, it is more obviously compatible, spiritually and politically, with the Form, even though the two works are so different in temper and purpose. This was not the only codicological occasion on which an English version of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi kept company with dissenting material. In the mid-fifteenth-century New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 648, Scribe A’s penning of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life is followed, in the hand of a second scribe, first by a Middle English Lollard adaptation of Richard Ullerston’s Latin defence of Bible translation, and then by a passage in Latin from St Birgitta’s Revelationes.27 However, as Ryan Perry observes, the material towards the end of the book, the Lollard tract and the Bridget extract, exhibit a pattern of water damage mapping precisely onto the leaves near the beginning. These items were therefore originally bound in ahead of Love’s Mirror.28 This leaves us with the strange possibility of a Lollard-cum-Birgittine run-up to the most institutionally sanctioned Arundelian text of the day. Even more intriguingly, the scribe who copied out the dissenting tract on translation also writes ‘Amen’ below Arundel’s Latin memorandum on fol. 141v (immediately to the right of the other scribe’s ‘Amen’), thereby apparently endorsing Arundel’s endorsement of a text ‘for the confounding of heretics or Lollards’ (ad […] hereticorum siue 25

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, p. 383.

26

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, pp. 383–84.

27

For the translation tract, see the edition in Curt Bühler, ‘A Lollard Tract: On Translating the Bible into English’, Medium Ævum, 7 (1938), 167–83. 28

Perry’s observations are available at .

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lollardorum confusionem).29 So much for a riven culture of orthodox versus heterodox: things are clearly more fluid for this literary labourer. The collocation of these texts in this codex might mean that someone of non-heterodox theological tastes could be in favour of Bible translation but could also be attracted by the albeit-circumscribed scripturalism of the Mirror. Or could it mean that a reader with some sympathy for a heresy of the vernacular might also find spiritual fruit in meditative tradition outside scriptura sola? Complexity, latitude, possibility, discretion, spiritual ambition, and choice: these are all characteristics of the Trinity and Pierpont Morgan manuscripts: such qualities should not be denied to the post-Arundelian world which made and used these two books. Perhaps we should also imagine, more than has been the case hitherto, that fifteenth-century piety encompassed other less exalted elements of flux, mood, or eclecticism, or plain unworked-through inconsistency. Such textual mixes make one wonder if readers read adaptively, or perhaps even provisionally, not necessarily or always asserting the text to themselves, but using it for the effect/affect of edification and stirring of devotion for the time being (as medieval tradition of imagination and meditation would have put it), without necessarily needing to accept all the ipsissima verba. Might we, then, entertain a notion of the theological vernacular as pragmatic post-Arundelian negative capability — that is, as a sensibility of devout reading, involving degrees of suspension of (dis)belief, that intermittently hung fire with decisions of interpretation and position-taking? Or if it did not hang fire perhaps it just kept itself a bit quiet in order to stay out of trouble. After all, as Ian Forrest has shown, those who were prosecuted for heresy had often caused some social offence or alienated the wrong people.30 To sum up: whatever reformulations are made of it and whatever is alleged or asserted about it at medievalists’ gatherings, vernacular theology is in all probability not going to go away. It is too rich and productive a compound to be set aside. This essay has made a modest attempt to think of a few ways in which the collocation can perhaps be put to more use, initially by applying to vernacular theology a translatio of ‘theological vernacular’, which serves as a reminder of how, in addition to being a classifiable group of texts, it functions in terms of competence and modalities. Then, in discussing the theological vernacular with regard to the punctuabilitas of texts, we saw how its fine-tuneable theological energies were rechannelled with productiveness and intelligent variety after Arundel. In another 29

Love, Mirror, ed. by Sargent, p. 7, which reads ‘confutacionem’ rather than ‘confusionem’ — slightly different but with the same substantive meaning and intent. 30

See Forrest, The Detection of Heresy.

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instance of fine-tuning, the Passion of Our Lord shows how, in a work with very little theological elaboration, the resources of the theological vernacular could extend obliquely to deft touches of motivated generic play. And finally, two manuscripts, containing an apparently clashing combination of orthodox and heterodox materials, invite us to imagine significantly more complexity and latitude in post-Arundelian textual behaviours than has generally been entertained hitherto. These codices ask us to countenance a mutable and variegated reading sensibility capable of accommodating and/or compartmentalizing texts in tension. Presumably, a concomitant ‘compartmentalité’ might have been applied by readers of such manuscripts to elements at odds with each other within texts too. On the one hand, theology is provisional, insufficient, artificial, necessary, fruitful, transcendent, and boundless. On the other, the vernacular is an irregular complex of enabling and constraining circumstances. In vernacular theology (and the theological vernacular), each constitutes the other’s condition. Together, they demand of us no little caution — and no little imagination.

Part II Discerning the Discourse: Language, Image, and Spirituality

O RTHODOXY’S IMAGE T ROUBLE: IMAGES IN AND AFTER A RUNDEL’S C ONSTITUTIONS James Simpson

W

hen I first read John Capgrave’s remarkable Life of St Katherine (c. 1445) in the late 1990s I was struck, among many other things, by the text’s apparent repudiation of images. After the tyrannical emperor Maxentius has decided that the cult and ‘dew rente’ of the old gods must be renewed, Katherine confronts Maxentius directly with a double and unresolved attack on the idols by which he is surrounded: they are either devils, or else they are irredeemably dead matter: Thi goddis are develes, and thi prestis eke, Deceyvoures of the puple, rith for covetyse; Thei wote as weel as I, thow men hem seke These maumentis, I mene - thei can not sitt ne ryse, Thei ete not, thei drynke not in no maner wise. Mouth wythout spech, fote that may not goo, Handes eke have thei and may no werke doo.1

Between the ultimate source of this passage (Vulgate Psalm 113) and Capgrave’s text must surely stand Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale. There too the early Christian female convert Cecilia repudiates her powerful male suitor by repudiating pagan idolatry. Like Katherine, Cecilia insists on the insensate, material deadness of the pagan statues to the gods:

1

John Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. by Karen A. Winstead, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1999), IV , 305, pp. 589–95.

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James Simpson That ilke stoon a god thow wolt it calle. I rede thee, lat thin hand upon it falle, And taste it wel, and stoon thow shalt it finde.2

Capgrave, however, massively expands his sources, both Psalm 113 and Chaucer’s saint’s life: Katharine demystifies the statues and the pagan gods through euhemerism (IV, 632), and in Book V she recurs to, and further expands on, the following: the material wastefulness of the proposed statue; the violence associated with it, designed to punish those who refuse to kneel down before it; and, again, its irremediable deadness, the deadness of its legs, hands, eyes, and tongue. It will be fit for nothing but birds to defile (V, 400–525). Now of course, as is obvious, Capgrave has his saint repudiate pagan statuary, in which case there is nothing surprising whatsoever about the iconoclastic impulse. But in the context of orthodox fifteenth-century English defences of religious imagery in the face of Lollard attacks, Katharine’s repudiation is surprising. The effort of imagination required to shift the referent of Katharine’s speech from pagan to Christian imagery is minimal. Here is a Christian saint vigorously repudiating the visual cult of what would be a statue to her. What is more, she does so by using the topoi and vocabulary of Lollard polemic concerning images, including ‘maumetis’ and ‘stokes’ (IV, 701).3 When I first read this passage, I was, as I say, struck by the fact that an indisputably orthodox text was voicing views that could easily be aligned with heterodox views. In this essay I argue that, even if my surprise was justified, Capgrave is by no means alone. For the first half of the fifteenth century, at least, there are many orthodox writers who voice deep anxieties over images. They did so because the orthodox position with regard to the vivacity of images was perilously close to a heretical position isolated and attacked by Lollards.4

2

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005), VIII, 501–04, p. 641. 3

For Lollard ‘signature’ use of ‘maumetrie’, see Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’, pp. 15–30 (p. 19). For an example of Lollard use of ‘stock’, see W. R . Jones, ‘Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1973), 27–50 (p. 33). 4

This essay’s field of investigation, and some paragraphs, overlap with James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 2, pp. 49–84.

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I The question of images clearly occupied high and visible profile in early Lollardy, both in the self-presentation of Lollards, and in presentations hostile to Lollardy.5 The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards of 1395, for example, declares that the prayers made to ‘deve ymages of tre and of ston, ben ner of kin to ydolatrie’. The learned Lollard author acerbically evokes, in order to invert, St Gregory’s famous dictum about images being books for the illiterate: deaf images of tree and stone are, he asserts, ‘forbodin ymagerie’ that is ‘a bok of errour to the lewid puple’.6 Thus the relatively early proponent of Lollardy; so too, however, the early enemy: Henry Knighton, writing earlier than 1396, distinguished Lollard heresy primarily by reference to rejection of images. ‘[I]t was’, he says, ‘characteristic of that sect of Lollards that they hated and inveighed against images, and preached that they were idols, and spurned them as mere simulacra’.7 Knighton refers more than once to the ‘doctrines’ of the Lollards; of these doctrines, however, we hear but one: rejection of images, by way of introducing the striking narrative of two iconoclastic Lollards of Leicester who, as early as 1382, burned an image of St Katherine to prepare some soup.8 In early descriptions of Lollardy, then, the image question evidently had high profile. Despite this, by contrast, images played a lower role than the sacraments in the legislative arsenal against, and legal pursuit of, Lollardy. I look briefly at both these orthodox counters to Lollard views of the image, before turning to the orthodox theological arsenal in the following section.

5

For Wyclif’s own, moderate views on images, see John Wyclif, Tractatus de mandatis divinis, ed. by Johann Loserth and F. D. Matthew (London: Paul, 1922), chap. 15, pp. 152–62 especially. For a detailed account of Wyclif’s position, see Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Volume 1. Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 98–104. 6

Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Anne Hudson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978; repr. 1997), p. 27. For Gregory the Great’s defence of images, see Celia M. Chazelle, ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles’, Word and Image, 6 (1990), 138–53. 7

Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. by G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 297. I have altered the translation. 8

For which see Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards and the Breaking of Idols’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 131–50, and the same author’s book The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 2, pp. 76–94.

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The list of twenty-four heretical and erroneous conclusions of Wyclif isolated by the Blackfriars Council of 1382 nowhere mentions images.9 Neither do the 267 heresies and errors extracted from the works of Wyclif in 1412 anywhere mention Wyclif’s views on images.10 In 1409 the text of Arundel’s Constitutions does target the image question. The Constitutions award the issue, however, a distinctly lower profile than the textual and sacramental issues on which they lay primary emphasis. While promising completely to extirpate heresy, the text focuses almost singlemindedly on verbal, textual, and pedagogic, rather than visual, control. Draconian formal strictures occupy most of the separate articles: strictures on preaching, teaching, reading, and language use for scriptural books. The Constitutions come closest to definition of a precise heretical subject with reference to the eucharist. After the formal and textual stipulations of the previous articles, article eight sounds like a catch-all: That no one should assert conclusions or propositions being against good morals. Only in article nine, however — the penultimate substantial article — do we find reference to images as part of a general interdiction on disputing ‘established articles of the Church’. Let no one teach contrary to the determination of the Church, ‘especially about the adoration of the glorious cross, of images, the veneration of saints, or pilgrimages to places, or their relics’. The cross and images of the saints are to be duly honoured, as by custom, with ‘processions, genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces, offerings, kindling of lights and pilgrimages’.11 In sum, the legislative response to Wyclif and to Lollardy awards the question of images a relatively low place. Let us also look briefly to the status of images in the legal pursuit of Lollardy, before turning to the deeply equivocal theological repudiation of Lollard views on images and popular idolatry. On 26 January 1401 the Convocation of the English Church recorded William Sawtre’s condemnation as a relapsed heretic. Sawtre was burned as the first victim, indeed a premature victim, of the statute De heretico comburendo of 1401, formally promulgated only some weeks after. The first list of Sawtre’s errors and heresies is adduced from a prior interrogation in Norwich. There are seven items, five of which focus on images, and one on pilgrimage.12 The last defines a eucharistic 9

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 157–58.

10

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 339–49.

11

III,

For the text of the Constitutions regarding images, see Concilia, ed. by Wilkins, Article 9, 317–18. The translation is by Sarah James, to whom I am grateful. 12

I assume that item 5 concerns images: ‘quod tenetur magis adorare hominem, quem scit praedestinatum, quam aliquem angelum dei’ (that he is considered rather to worship a man he knows to be predestined, than any angel of God), Wilkins, Concilia, III, 255.

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heresy. The errors concerning images all state what Sawtre would rather worship than the cross: suffering Christ; a temporal king; the bodies of the saints; a truly contrite and confessed man. The second item, for example, reads thus: ‘Quo magis vellet adorare regem temporalem, quam veram crucem Christi’ (That he would much rather worship a temporal king, than the true cross of Christ). In short, the grounds for which the first heretic burned in England is arraigned primarily concern images. The ground on which he is interrogated and convicted, however, concerns the eucharist. The trial record is perhaps revealing in its emphases. After Sawtre has explicated the offending statements, Arundel himself takes over the prosecution: ‘And immediately following this, all the other articles having been left aside, the […] archbishop interrogated […] Sawtre especially concerning the sacrament of the altar; after the uttering of the sacramental words, did true bread remain or not?’ (my emphasis). Arundel continues hammering Sawtre on the question of the eucharist, that day and the next, looking for a yes or no clinching answer. Sawtre’s evasions suffice for a conviction of heresy.13 Sawtre’s views on idolatry, then, are evidently set aside as Arundel’s legal trap closes; a yes or no on the real nature of eucharistic bread is a readier, surer way to conviction. In the later heresy trials of Norwich, conducted between 1428 and 1431, the position in which views on images labelled heretical appear might also suggest their inferior status as evidence. Views on images are routinely listed, coupled with views on the saints and pilgrimage; but the gatherings of views on these topics usually come low down the lists of heresies, which almost always start with sacramental heresies concerning, in the case of John Skylly for example, baptism, confirmation, confession, and the eucharist. Of the eighteen heretical positions listed for Skylly, this comes in at number thirteen: ‘quod nullus honor est exhibendus ymaginibus crucifixi, Beate Marie vel alicuius sancti’ (that no honour is to be shown to images of the crucified [Christ], of the Blessed Virgin, or of any other saint).14 Another list (that of Richard Fleccher) follows the same pattern: after the three initial sacramental heresies, this one appears at place number ten: ‘that no worship shuld be do to ony ymages, but that all ymages owyn to be destroied and do away’.15

13

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 256.

14

Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. by Norman P. Tanner (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 53. 15

Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 86. Sometimes the image charges head the list. The list for William Colyn, skinner, begins with images (Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 91). His is a very odd list, though, including the proposition that all women should be held in common. The list for John

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That evidence could be extended: the trial of John Oldcastle in 1413 lists two sets of positions judged heretical; the first list requires Oldcastle to abjure his views on images: he is to declare that images are ordained ‘to be kalendars to lewed men, to represent and brynge to mynde the passion of our lord Jhesu Crist’.16 After Oldcastle refuses to recant, another, more specific list is produced, which really counts. This one starts with the eucharist, and, although mentioning pilgrimage and relics, makes no mention of images.17 Oldcastle is convicted as a heretic on the basis of this second list.

II If images play very much a secondary role in the legal conviction of Oldcastle, one might contrast that with the relatively high profile of the image question in the theological campaign against him. Thomas Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle (published in the summer of 1415), for example, while beginning the list of Oldcastle’s heresies with the sacraments, as do the legal texts, ranges very freely among many Lollard positions, attributing them all to Oldcastle, including communal possession of women. Among these, Hoccleve dwells for two full stanzas on images: we all know that the image of the saint is not the saint; and just as a pair of spectacles helps a man of poor sight to see better, so too with images: we do not look at them but through them.18 Why should the question of images be awarded apparently lesser status than the management of words, spoken and written, and than the issue of certain sacraments, in the legislative pursuit of Lollardy? In what remains of this essay I suggest that orthodoxy is in fact confused about images. Dangerously, orthodoxy shares with heterodoxy a distrust of illiterate reception of images. Excellent studies by

Goodwin places images at number two, but the list is very short (only three items) (Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 207). 16

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 355.

17

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 355. It is true that Oldcastle himself does affirm his views on images in this closing sequence of the trial, but in a way that neither affirms nor denies the heretical view (Wilkins, Concilia, III, 356). 18

Thomas Hoccleve, Remonstrance against Oldcastle, in Selections from Hoccleve, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 71. For the larger question of Hoccleve’s complex account of images, see Simpson, Under the Hammer, chap. 2, and Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 2, pp. 45–83.

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Jones, Aston, Hudson and, most recently, Kamerick have delineated the positions of both image attackers and defenders.19 Here I look further at the way these opposed positions, heterodox and orthodox, might interact and, more especially, overlap. The question of images is, in the words of the Twelve Conclusions, ‘ner of kin’ to other many issues. I focus here on one point of contiguity — the question of whether or not the unlearned think that images are vivacious, an issue on which both the unorthodox and the learned orthodox found themselves divided. Lollards treat images sometimes as dead, sometimes as alive. One early fifteenthcentury Lollard writer, for example, takes his cue from Psalm 113. 4–8, writing about the idols of surrounding peoples. This psalm, a stand-by for Christian iconoclasts, reads thus: 4

The idols of the Gentiles are silver and gold, the works of the hands of men. 5 They have mouths and speak not: they have eyes and see not: 6 They have ears and hear not: they have noses and smell not: 7 They have hands, and feel not: they have feet and walk not: neither shall they cry out through their throat. 8 Let them that make them become like unto them; and all such as trust in them.20

Taking his cue from this insistent denial of vivacity, the Lollard writer emphasizes the deadness of images, even as they are being treated as if alive: they neither thirst nor experience hunger, neither feel cold nor suffer disease, ‘for they may not feel, nor see, nor hear, nor speak, nor look, nor help any man of any disease’.21 At this point, however, he goes one further than the biblical source, by attributing deadly voracity to the images, since they eat the food of the poor. Those who sustain the images should instead be nurturing the ‘meek true poor man that is the true image of God’. This is the clearest Lollard emphasis, that the images are definitively dead matter, even if they are somehow hungry. On the other hand, some Lollard attacks unequivocally attribute liveliness to images. The dead idols are potentially inhabited by the devil. The Lollard William

19

For these excellent summaries of the Lollard positions on images, see Jones, ‘Lollards and Images’; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, chap. 4, pp. 96–159; Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, pp. 179–81; Hudson, PR, pp. 301–09; and Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 19–27. 20

Cited from The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Baronius, 2003), Psalm 113. 21

Cited in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 119.

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Thorpe was, by his account, interrogated by Archbishop Thomas Arundel (probably before 1407). Among the many points on which Arundel tests Thorpe, he presses him about the miracles that are reported to have occurred at sites of especially famous images of the Virgin. Thorpe charged that such miracles were diabolical: on account of human unfaithfulness, the ‘fend [devil] hath power for to worche manye of these miraclis that now be done in siche [such] placis’.22 At her trial for heresy in 1429, the Lollard Margery Baxter declared that demons had entered images in churches; hiding within the images, these demons lured the people into idolatry.23 Lollards were not the only ones uncertain about the vivacity of images. The learned orthodox were also self-divided on this question. On the one hand, orthodoxy had encouraged a dramatic, living relation with the image in the tradition of devotional piety. Orthodoxy had also claimed miraculous power for certain images; that miraculous power legitimated extensive systems of pilgrimage to specific places. On the other hand, orthodoxy was obliged strenuously to deny that the images were anything more than memorials and purely material representations. Learned orthodoxy in fifteenth-century England certainly had a problem with the reception of images by the unlearned but orthodox. When the Constitutions brand certain textual practices heretical, and when they promise monthly surveillance of the University of Oxford, they project intellectual repression of a known enemy — that is, of other intellectuals. Intellectuals are most at ease attacking and repressing other intellectuals. When, however, the Constitutions come to the question of images, they evoke, just once, the practices of the unlearned: ‘genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces’. As they target the practices and beliefs of other intellectuals, the Arundelian attack on Wycliffism feels secure; about the practices and unarticulated beliefs of the unlearned, and in particular about their visual imagination, the orthodox learned are, however, much less certain. For everything the Lollards say about images and idolatry had been, and would continue to be said, by orthodox figures.

22

See William Thorpe, The Testimony of William Thorpe, 1407, in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. by Anne Hudson, EETS, O. S. 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1993), p. 60. 23

She is reported to have said that ‘devils, when falling to earth, entered images standing in churches, and lived in these continuously and still reside there lurking, so that the people adoring the same [images] thus commit idolatry’. See Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 49, and Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art, p. 14 for discussion.

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There are very few Western monotheistic cultures in which the image is not in any kind of trouble. Very often those who defend images with their right hand turn out to be destroying images with their left.24 All the cultures of Western Christianity, from late Antiquity to the Reformation, nevertheless managed a delicate balancing act between the transcendent and immanent, between the invisible and the visible, between the desire to see and the need to pass beyond sight.25 In differing contexts, and with differing accents, the image’s balancing act was maintained between heaven and hell, and between competing cults regarded as idolatrous. We can see as much in this early fifteenth-century frontispiece to a Parisian text of Augustine’s City of God (Fig. 1).26 The image mediates between the living Christ and the eucharist, a relation that legitimates this very image by distinguishing it from pagan idolatry on the left and Jewish idolatry of the Word on the right. Dangerously poised (idolatry is the highway to Hell), the image nevertheless manages to preserve a licit space of transit between the earthly seen and the heavenly unseen. That said, fifteenth-century England betrays signs that this delicate balance was becoming unstable.27 We have already observed heterodox, Lollard attacks, from the late fourteenth century, on images. There are also signs of images being in trouble in various orthodox traditions.

24

If Gregory the Great is credited with legitimating the Christian image, he was also remembered as the iconoclast of pagan images in Rome; see Tilmann Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols: The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965), 44–65. 25

See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 203–08; and Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 413–39. For the heightened tension between the material seen and the invisible unseen in late medieval art, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion’, in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz: von Zabern, 2001), pp. 46–69. 26 27

Discussed in Camille, The Gothic Idol, pp. 191–93.

I am here influenced by this remark of Jeffrey Hamburger: ‘If anything, the expressions of skepticism regarding images, let alone outright hostility, running right through the fifteenthcentury, even within the religious mainstream, have been underplayed, as if the period were one of unabashed and unopposed iconophilia’ (‘Seeing and Believing’, p. 48). See also Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte: Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), Part 3, pp. 231–329, devoted to late medieval Bohemia.

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Figure 1. Augustine, City of God, frontispiece, Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr. 22912, fol. 2v . Early fifteenth century. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Orthodox, Christian-Platonist, aniconic traditions found vernacular expression in late medieval England. The most vibrant such figure in Middle English was the iconoclastic author of the late fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing and related texts, who paradoxically encourages his elite, probably Carthusian, readers to make ‘an ymage of his nakyd, unmaad and unbigonne kynde’ (an image of God’s naked, unmade, and uncreated nature). We must ‘pare awaye’ all hindrances to this imageless image, every ‘merveilous fantastik ymage, conielid as it were in a kumbros clogge abouten hym’ (marvellous fantastic image, congealed, as it were, in a cumbrous impediment around him).28 Such Christian-Platonist attacks on the image were, however, institutionally restricted, and they were resolutely epistemological rather than theological. They certainly contained no larger project of image demolition, even if these same Carthusian circles did make the first English welcome, in the mid-fifteenth century, to the imageless devotio moderna, in the form of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.29 Outside these elite traditions of aniconic spirituality, however, orthodox defenders of the devotional image struggled to maintain the image’s unsteady, increasingly untenable balance. A vast tradition of orthodox late medieval spirituality, known as ‘devotional piety’, had, from the thirteenth century, promoted imaginative, theatrical, visual engagement with the narrative of Christ’s life.30 As Nicholas Love says about the readers of his Mirror of the Blessed Life, in 1410, ‘symple creatures […] as childryn haven nede to be fedde with mylke of lyghte doctryne and not with sadde mete of grete clargye’ (unlearned people […] like children, need to be fed with the milk of easy doctrine, and not with the solid food of high theology). Even though these simple creatures can read, they need images: for them ‘is pryncipally to be sette in mynde the ymage of crystes Incarnacion, passion and Resurreccion so that a symple soule that kan not thenke bot bodyes or bodily things mowe have

28 Deonise Hid Divinite and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to the Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson, EETS, O. S. 231, repr. with corrections (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1958), p. 6. 29 30

For late medieval Carthusian visual culture, see Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness.

See, for example, Denise Despres, Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, OK : Pilgrim, 1989). The tradition’s most widely disseminated text, the Meditationes vitae Christi (composed between 1336 and 1364), is described as ‘the single most influential devotional text written in the later Middle Ages’. See Sarah McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi’, Speculum, 84 (2009), 905–55 (p. 905). Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is a translation of this text.

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somwhat accordynge unto is affection’.31 These readers must actively imagine, but never believe, that what they see is alive; they must ‘ymagine by reson […] not by errour affermyng bot devoutly ymaginyng and supposyng’ (p. 72). This tradition had immediate and vast upshot for the visual arts, since it was inherently visual. It also had immediate upshot for the relation of text and image, since it simultaneously made images speak, and submitted those words to the power of the image.32 As we have seen, in the late fourteenth century English Lollards charged that images were being treated idolatrously, as if they were alive. As they responded to that charge, orthodox defenders of the image found themselves colliding with the vast tradition of devotional piety, of the speaking image. On the one hand, the orthodox needed to defend the imaginative, salutary vivacity of images; on the other, those same orthodox needed absolutely to deny that the images were in any way alive. This was a fine balance across a fine psychic boundary; it produced trouble, since to get the balance wrong was to incur the charge of idolatry. Orthodox repudiation of Lollardy’s theology of images often expresses deep anxieties about what happens between the unlearned and their images. In bringing those anxieties to light, I follow, and attempt to extend, the fine perception of the late Michael Camille that the orthodox early fifteenth-century English images he discussed in his 2002 article are ‘a premonition of the crisis that would convulse England for centuries to come — not so much the ends of the idolater’s deludedness, as the very beginnings of the iconoclast’s desire’.33 Fifteenth-century anxieties concerning the image, expressed by both heterodox and orthodox, are symptoms of a visual culture in trouble; they unknowingly point towards the drama of 1538, which marks the beginning of a century and more of iconoclastic legislation in England.

31

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 10. All further references to this text will be made by page number of this edition in the body of the text. Obsolete letter forms have been modernized. 32

Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published in German, 1990), p. 410: ‘The image’s speech either was delivered to the beholder, or it occurred within the image between the figures, which were talking about the beholder. In this way the image forsook its traditional aloofness and was ready to address the beholder in a way that produced a private dialogue as it happens between living persons’. 33

Michael Camille, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. by Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeeman, pp. 151–71 (p. 171).

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III In what remains of this essay, I offer three examples of orthodox, or apparently orthodox, hesitancy over images. The three examples I consider are as follows: Dives and Pauper (c. 1410); John Lydgate’s 1426–28 translation of the second version of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (1355); and Reginald Pecock’s Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (c. 1455). If none of these texts expresses outright rejection of images of the kind we seem to find in Capgrave, they all, nonetheless, do express only guarded, suspicious acceptance. Dives and Pauper Unlike the principal orthodox defenders of the image in Latin, Roger Dymmock and Thomas Netter, writing soon after 1395 and 1415–28 respectively, Dives and Pauper, written between 1405 and 1410, deploys a dialogic form.34 This dialogue gives cogent voice to what are effectively Lollard positions.35 In Dives and Pauper both speakers express views forcefully and academically, just as both treat each other with respect. Even as, however, we observe the orthodox view on images being propounded forcefully (by Pauper), we are also aware of an absence and a silence in the debate: as the wealthy, secular speaker debates with his poor, spiritual instructor, their differences cannot disguise their joint hostility to credulous reception of images. Dives objects vigorously to images, which are discussed at the very opening of the text, under discussion of the first precept of the Decalogue. The first commandment forbids the making and worshipping of images, and yet ‘meen doon makyn these dayis ymagys gret plente bothin in cherche and out of cherche, and alle meen [...] wurshepyn imagys’. If, he clearly declares, he worships images as other

34

See Roger Dymmok, Liber contra XII errores et hereses Lollardorum, ed. by H. S. Cronin (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1922), and Thomas Netter, Thomæ Waldensis Carmelitæ Anglici Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei Catholicæ ecclesiæ, ed. by F. Bonaventura Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice: Typiis Antonii Bassanesi, 1757–59; repr. Farnborough, 1967), III, 902–52. See also Joy M. Russell-Smith, ‘Walter Hilton and a Tract in Defence of the Veneration of Images’, Dominican Studies, 7 (1954), 180–214; and Nicholas Watson, ‘“Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse”: Idols and Images in Walter Hilton’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. by Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeeman, pp. 95–111. 35

See Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum. References to this text will be to this edition, made by part, chapter and page number in the body of the text. For the broader context of this work, and another work by the same author, see Hudson, PR, pp. 418–21.

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men do, then ‘I doo ydolatrye and ayens Godys lawe’ (I, 1, p. 81). So, he logically follows, he wants images destroyed — ‘I wolde’, he says, ‘they weryn brent everychon’ (I, 1, p. 82). The very fact of this debate between a spiritually-committed, well-read secular figure and his more learned spiritual advisor defamiliarizes the question from the beginning. Nothing can be taken for granted here. As common ground is gained, the big unknown between both parties remains whether or not the unlearned think images are alive. Dives affirms that ‘mechil of the peple’ worship images, since ‘thei staryn and lokyn on the ymage wyt wepynnge eye. They heldyn up here hondys, they bunchyn [knock] here brestys and so [...] they doon it al to the ymage’ (I, 3, p. 86). Pauper instantly agrees that if the ignorant do indeed ‘doon it to the ymage’, then they ‘synnyn wol heyliche in ydolatrie and they been nought excusyd’. But, he immediately goes on to argue, the ‘lewed’ do not worship the image; they worship God above all things, and saints in their degree; ‘al the wurshepe that he doth aforn the ymage he doth it noght to the ymage but to hym that the ymage representyght hym’ (I, 3, p. 86). Eventually Dives concedes that no one could be so brutish as to think that the image itself, which neither sees nor hears, could offer any help (I, 5, p. 90). Pauper’s refusal to excuse the ‘lewid’ who worship images from the charge of idolatry contrasts with the position of the tract attributed to Walter Hilton in defence of images.36 Hilton argues that the simple do indeed worship the image: the ‘simplices laici’ (unlettered lay folk) do not, however, sin, since their intention is good, even if they do indeed worship the image, ‘licet actualiter feratur mens eorum in ipsas ymagines quas vident, et non in Deum’ (even if their mind is actively raised up to the images that they see, and not to God). They act as the unlearned inevitably do when they see a beautifully painted, beautifully adorned image: ‘they worship that image more than another, and the image more than

36

For which see Walter Hilton, De adoracione ymaginum, in Walter Hilton’s Latin Writings, ed. by John P. Clark and Cheryl Taylor, Analecta Cartusiana, 124, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1987), I, 179–214. See also Russell-Smith, ‘Walter Hilton and a Tract in Defence’.

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God’.37 Nonetheless, they are to be forgiven, since what Hilton calls their ‘implicit intention’ is virtuous. Between Hilton and the Dives and Pauper author, one can see the cleft stick on which the orthodox defender of images for the unlearned is caught: either one concedes, as Hilton does, that the simple do worship the images, but can be forgiven, or one strenuously denies that the unlearned worship images. The learned must either allow that idolatry can be forgiven, or that the unlearned never worship the image as image. Both positions are vulnerable, as we can see in Pauper’s own defence of images. The iconoclastic view is forcefully represented and forcefully repudiated in favor of orthodox defence of images. Are orthodoxy and iconoclasm, however, so cleanly distinguished? The only way that Pauper can defend images is via their devotional, affective impact: Take heid to the ymage how his heid is bowid doun to the, redy to kissyn the and comyn at on wyt the. See how hese armys and hese hondys been spred abrod on the tre in tokene that he is redy to fangyn [clasp] the and halsyn [embrace] the and kissyn the and takyn the to his mercy. [...] On this maner, I preye the, rede thin book and falle don to grounde and thanke thi God that wolde doon so mechil for the, and wurshepe hym abovyn alle thyngge, noght the ymage, nought the stok, stoon ne tre, but hym that deyid on the tree. (I. 2, pp. 84–85)

This passage reveals how certain it is that the learned will inevitably imagine the illiterate worshipping the image itself. For the centre of the learned position is itself an imagination, as distinct from a belief, that the image is alive, forever suspended in an agonizingly static posture of desiring embrace. That is what Dives must imagine, but he must also be capable of making the very fine, purely psychological, distinction between imagining and believing. The distinction may be exceptionally fine; it may be maintained only by especially self-conscious agents. For all its fineness, this distinction is no less than the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy.

37

‘[S]icut solent simplices facere quando vident pulcram ymaginem artificiose depictam et preciose ornatam: statim reverencia quadam carnali movetur mens eorum ad adoracionem cum humiliacione corporali faciendam illi ymagini magis quam alteri, et magis quam spiritualiter ipsi Deo quia eorum intellectus et affectus quasi occupantur in sensu exteriori’ (just as the unlettered are accustomed to do when they see a beautiful image artfully painted and gorgeously adorned: immediately, by a certain carnal reverence, their mind is moved to worship with bodily submission that image above another, and their reason and will are occupied in the outer sense rather than spiritually occupied with God himself). Hilton, De adoracione ymaginum, ed. by Clark and Taylor, p. 206.

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It is, nevertheless, a fine distinction from which orthodoxy cannot retreat, precisely because, as Nicholas Love says about the readers of his Mirror of the Blessed Life, in 1410, ‘symple creatures [...] as childryn haven nede to be fedde with mylke of lyghte doctryne and not with sadde mete of grete clargye’. Even though these simple creatures can read, they need images: for them ‘is pryncipally to be sette in mynde the ymage of crystes Incarnacion, passion and Resurreccion so that a symple soule that kan not thenke bot bodyes or bodily things mowe have somwhat accordynge unto is [his] affection’ (p. 10). These readers must actively imagine, but never believe, that what they see is alive; they must , ‘imagine by reson [...] not by errour affermyng bot devoutly ymagining and supposyng’ (p. 72). In the Mirror, Love seems unaware of the danger of the fine boundary line between actively imagining but never believing. Pauper’s repetitiveness, by contrast, underlines the flimsiness of the boundary line: Knele [...] aforn the ymage noght to the ymage. Make thin preyere aforn the ymage but noght to the ymage, for it seeith the noght, it heryth the nought, it understondiyth the nought. Make thi offryng [...] aforn the ymage but noght to the ymage. (I, 2, p. 85)

These repeated denials are themselves dangerous, since the very insistence on the deadness of the image, drawn from Psalm 113, attributes agency to the image even as it denies agency. But the heated rhetoric of the repetitions also exposes the proximity of danger, and concedes the very charges of idolatry made by Lollards: ‘For yf thu do it for the ymage or to the ymage thu doist ydolatrye’. If Dives and Pauper was written near to and after the Constitutions, as seems likely, then it approves of the legislative defence of ‘genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, [and] embraces’ before images. Its approval is, however, very finely cut against consciousness of the profound objections to bodily response to images. If the learned should allow imagination to become belief, then they ‘synnyn wol heyliche in ydolatrie and they been nought excusyd’. Certainly Archbishop Arundel is himself represented, at least, as being aware of the fineness of the purely psychological boundary line between orthodoxy and idolatry. In The Testimony of William Thorpe of 1407, Thorpe has Arundel agree with the Thorpe figure. In the second question of Thorpe’s interrogation, concerning images, Thorpe argues that only things created directly by God deserve worship, not imagery nor things ‘in likness of mannes crafte’. He represents Arundel agreeing, but going on to make a very fine, Aquinian distinction: ‘I graunte wel that no liif owith to do worship to ony siche ymage for itsilf. But a crucifix owith to be worshippid for the passioun of Crist that is paintid thereinne,

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and is brought therethorugh into mannes mynde’.38 This had been the orthodox position since at least Aquinas formulated it in the mid-thirteenth century. In this context, we can see how fragile it is.39 Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man I referred earlier to Michael Camille’s description of the fifteenth-century image question as a ‘premonition of the crisis’ of 1538, which marks the first iconoclastic legislation in England. Camille was discussing Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,40 and in particular the orthodox defence of images made in that text by the pilgrim to the Villain who worships Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies (Fig. 2). The Villain, rebuked by the learned pilgrim for worshipping a lifeless ‘marmoset’, replies in terms that take us directly and dangerously into heterodox territory: how do you dare reprove me for doing my observance to this ‘ydoles set on stages’, Syth pylgrymes, in ther passages Honowre and worshepe, everychon, Ymages off tymber and off stone; And crystene peple, ful nyh alle, On ther knes to-forn hem falle; And whan al-togydre ys souht, They may helpe yow ryht nowht, Nor done to yow noon avauntage, No mor than her, may myn ymage. (Pilgrimage, ll. 20,966–74)

As Camille astutely points out, the villain does not believe in the vivacity of the idol, and so the words of this ‘image maker become indistinguishable from the words of the contemporary Lollard’.41 Lydgate makes the apparently unlearned idolater voice entirely cool, learned positions about the deadness of statues. Even more strikingly, it could be argued, the villain’s voice is also, suddenly, indistinguishable from that of the learned orthodox, who, faced with what the 38

The Testimony of William Thorpe, ed. by Hudson, pp. 56–57.

39

For the Aquinian position, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. by Peter Caramellus, 3 vols (Torino: Marietti, 1956), IIIa q. 25 art. 3, III, 146. 40

John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. by F. J. Furnivall and K. B. Locock, 3 Parts, EETS, E. S. 77, 83, 92 (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1899–1904). All further references to this text will be cited by line number in the body of the text. 41

Camille, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire’, p. 166.

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Figure 2. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim encounters Idolatry and she shows him the carpenter worshipping an image he has made’, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 65 v . c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board.

Constitutions called ‘genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces’, instantly goes on to argue that the worshipped statues are decidedly dead. For an unsettling moment, learned pagan-idol maker, the Lollard, and the orthodox Christian all share the same position against the only non-voiced player here, the credulous Christian who bows to the statue he or she is believed to believe is invested with life. For a vertiginous moment, then, we catch a glimpse of the structure of discourse: this villain is not a true idolater, because he does not believe that the statue is alive. His learned understanding of the deadness of the idol throws into relief the point that Voltaire was to make in his Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764: that no one ever confesses to idolatry; idolatry is only ever a charge, never a confession, and it is a charge usually made by the learned about the ignorant.42 It is a charge about the

42

I cite from the English translation of 1765. See Voltaire, ‘Idol-Idolater-Idolatry’, in The Philosophical Dictionary for the Pocket: Written in French by a Society of Men of Letters, and Translated into English from the Last Geneva Edition. With Notes (London: for Thomas Brown, 1765; first published in French in 1764), Item 266, pp. 183–200.

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belief of others that can only ever itself be a matter of belief; the voice of the credulous can never be heard, precisely because it cannot be heard by definition, since no one owns up to idolatry, and the ‘illiterate’ are by definition inarticulate: what they really think can only be intuited and articulated by the learned. The credulous believer in the statue’s vivacity is, then, always already a construction of the learned. And the learned here are, potentially, and unsettlingly, the pagan image maker, the Lollard, and the learned orthodox. They all agree. Oh, no, the pilgrim instantly goes on (as he must): we, and the unlearned, never honour the artefact itself; we honour the saints represented by the artefact (Pilgrimage, ll. 20,975–95) (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim’s defence of images: the high altar and its “calendar’”, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 68 r . c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board.

Is Lydgate treading here on dangerous territory? Now of course one could argue that Lydgate was translating. And Lydgate, we all know from a recently standard view, was a dull fellow who produced translations as a machine produces sausages,

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unthinkingly. This, it might be argued, is a kind of embarrassing cultural hangover from a mid-fourteenth-century French context that has suddenly become inapposite in an English context. Lydgate, such a view would argue, has merely not noticed that such talk about images has become not altogether à propos. The same argument could be extended to Capgrave’s representation of the iconomach Katherine. The argument could be extended to the larger cultural environment, since orthodox Christian hagiography and historiography were powerfully charged by the cultural memory, often vibrantly represented, of iconoclasm.43 Destruction of images is precisely what marks the Christian dispensation; Lydgate, along with contemporary orthodox hagiographers such as William Parys, elsewhere makes extended and heated reference to pagan idolatry. In orthodox Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1443–47), too, the following saints either break images, or otherwise insist on their insensate materiality: Cristina, Agnes, Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, and Cecilia.44 Lydgate marks the Christian dispensation as a triumphal moment of spontaneous iconoclasm, when ‘Ther was non ydole upright myght stonde / But to-schiverede unto pecis smale’.45 The new moment of Lollardy, it could be argued, takes the orthodox by surprise, since their standard archive is rendered suddenly vulnerable: what orthodox Christians object to about pagan idolatry can suddenly be directed at orthodox Christians. The orthodox will need to be careful in replaying their standard views of iconoclasm, since those very materials from the orthodox archive might now be directed against the orthodox themselves. Was Lydgate aware of this danger? I think so, for the following reasons: first, the pilgrim’s defence of orthodox image worship is added to his source (a point

43

See William Parys, ‘Life of Saint Cristina’, in Sammlung altenglischer Legenden, ed. by Carl Horstmann (Hildesheim: Henniger, 1875), pp. 183–90. See further Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 83–84. For discussion, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 406–07. 44

See Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. by Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS, O. S. 206 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1938). 45 See John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS, E. S. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1935), II, 302, ll. 5502–03. For early Christian iconoclasm and its continuing reverberations in the later Middle Ages, see Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols’. For violent, though metaphorical, late imperial, Christian iconoclasm, in a text still readily available to late medieval English writers, see Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), Book IV , pp. 135–78.

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made by Camille); and, second (not mentioned by Camille), this orthodox defence of images evokes a proximate, earlier passage in the Pilgrimage about images. In this earlier passage Lydgate elaborates his source, and, I think, cites Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner, to attack excessive, spectacular, and deceptive use of both images and their close companions in this field of discourse, miracle-working relics. Avarice confesses to walking about with pardons, ‘with reliks, and dede bones, / closyd undar glase and stons: / I shew them undar sell and bull, / And thus the pore people I pull’ (Pilgrimage, ll. 18,105–08).46 Avarice gulls the simple minded not only with fake relics; she also uses ‘ymagis of tre and stone’: these she paints anew, with ‘colours bothe whit and redd’, and bores small holes so as to create the illusion of miraculous liquids flowing. She sets these images ‘in stretis and at hermitagis, and in a subbarbys at many a towne’, where the lame are encouraged to prostrate themselves before them (ll. 18,127–54). In both passages concerning images, then, Lydgate adds to his source.47 The additions are complementary: the forceful statement of the orthodox position (images are dead representations; they provoke memory) is unsettled, hedged as it is by frank recognition that images are being abused. It is also unsettled by the recognition that three groups of learned folk all agree about how deceptive images can be when adored by the unlearned: the Lollards, the pagan image maker, and the orthodox Christian. Reginald Pecock’s Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy Pecock’s treatment of images in the Repressor is the most extensive and systematic vernacular treatment of the image question in the period between Arundel and the first iconoclastic legislation of 1538.48 Pecock astutely understands the fundamental issues on which the orthodox must engage ‘the lay party’, as he politely calls Lollards. Part One of the Repressor is devoted to biblical interpretation, and Part Two to images,

46 See Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner in the ‘General Prologue’, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Mann, ll. 699–704, p. 29; the reference is complex, because Chaucer seems also to have known this passage from the Pèlerinage in the first place. Translating the Pèlerinage, Lydgate cites Chaucer translating the Pèlerinage. 47

Lydgate is translating from the second version of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage. See Le Pèlerinage de l’Homme (Paris: Vérard, 1511), fol. 70v . The passage running from lines 18,103–10 is not found in the source. 48

Thomas More competes with Pecock for the accolade just given him. For the broader picture up to and including 1538, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, chap. 8, pp. 383–457, and further references, and Aston, England’s Iconoclasts.

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taking up 143 pages of the only modern edition. Pecock recognizes the centrality of the issue, describing ‘the havyng and using of ymagis’ as the ‘first governance for which the lay peple overmyche and untreuly wijten the clergy’.49 My treatment here is necessarily brief, and I focus on the one key issue: whether or not the orthodox laity treat, and whether they are in any way permitted to treat, images as alive. Pecock’s fundamental position is the fundamental position of the learned orthodox, even if he characteristically invents a new phrase for that position: images are legitimate as ‘rememoratijf or mynding signes’. They are in no way forbidden in Scripture or by any ground of the faith (II, 2, p. 137). They are in no way treated as alive. Solomon may have become an idolater, but these days no one could be so ‘foond, masid, and dotid’ that they would worship ‘ydolis as Goddis’ (II, 2, p. 145). This is the core of Pecock’s entire, extensive section. Once stated, Pecock qualifies the standard position in various ways. Very quickly, he goes on to concede that iconoclasm is justified in cases of idolatry. ‘Images’, he says, ‘mowe leefulli be broke, whanne thei ben usid in ydolatrie irremediabili’ (II, 2, p. 147). But on what grounds might that be the case? The lay party erroneously assert that the ‘peple trowen [...] that sum godli vertu is in tho ymagis, or that tho ymagis doon miraclis, or that thei ben quyk and seen, heeren, or speken at sum while, or that they sweten at sum while’ (II, 3, p. 148). Now that the charge of vivacity is more explicit, so does Pecock repudiate it more explicitly: no adult in Christendom, who is not simple minded (‘a natural fool’) believes such a thing. Unlike any of his contemporaries, Pecock acknowledges that it is in fact very difficult to know whether or not idolatry is being practised. He also recognizes how easily such charges are made and how difficult to prove (II, 3, p. 150). All that said, Pecock, than whom there is no Middle English writer more committed to logical consistency, shifts position. Even if men do believe that images sweat and speak, wise people ‘oonli laughe at suche folies [...] of which no moral harme cometh’ (II, 3, p. 156). The evils that arise from misuse of images are no worse, he says in a cunning bridge-building argument, than the evils that that arise from lay men reading the Bible in the vernacular (II, 3, p. 159). After a long defence of images and their affective power, however, Pecock moves to the intimately related question of relics and pilgrimage. Here, however, his orthodox defence of pilgrimage sites depends precisely on what he described earlier as the risible fancy of the credulous, or even of the ‘natural fool’. God does 49

Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. by Churchill Babington, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), Part 2, chap. 2, p. 136. All further citation will be made from this edition by part, chapter and page number in the body of the text.

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choose one image over another as the fit destination of a pilgrimage; therefore, Pecock declares in his own voice, it is not inconvenient that God make thilk ymage of stoon or of tre forto swete and that the ymage be mooved fro oon place unto an othir place withoute mannis bering and [...] that the yghen of the ymage be turned hidirward and thiderward verrili or semyngly as though the ymage sie, and that the ymage (in such maner as God made the asse of Balaam) speke. (II, 8, p. 186)

In short, Pecock shifts ground a good deal in the Repressor. In one section, images are most certainly dead; it is inconceivable that any, even the brutish, contemporary should think otherwise. In another, he concedes that the ignorant do treat statues as if they were alive, but dismisses the idea of moral harm from such well-meaning idolatry. In a third and separate section, however, he actively promotes the idea that the images have shown signs of life, by sweating, eye movement, and apparent speech.

Conclusion In conclusion, may I outline the directions we might take with regard to this material. The superb scholarship on Lollardy since the 1980s has, for the most part, been analytical, defining positions. This has been true of the excellent work on images. Thanks to that work, we might now also move to a more synthetic view, as we try to understand how given positions are interconnected. In the case of images, this is not simple, precisely because the issue of images is deeply connected, by more and less visible links, to a wide variety of related issues, the most significant I list here: pilgrimage, relics, saints, miracles, the charisma of place, the relation of learned and illiterate, the eucharist, the presence of the past, periodization, the functions of the psyche itself, the relation of Christianity to Judaism and classical paganism, materiality, information technologies (both text and image), money, and intercession. Some of these interconnections were easily visible to contemporaries: saints, pilgrimage, and images are, for example, always collocated in heresy trials. The deeper, larger cultural dramas of, for example, writing supervening over images, and of images giving way as forms of intercession give way, are always going to be visible only from afar. But whatever the issue, visibility and audibility are the real problems, since the entire debate implies x-ray vision in the learned; all talk about images is conducted by people (namely, the learned) who agree about key aspects of image worship by the rest (namely, the illiterate). For both simple and profound reasons, the illiterate cannot be heard.

C ENSORSHIP AND C ULTURAL C ONTINUITY : L OVE’S M IRROR , THE P ORE C AITIF, AND R ELIGIOUS E XPERIENCE BEFORE AND AFTER A RUNDEL Christopher G. Bradley

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he author of the Cloud of Unknowing addresses his work to an unnamed student seeking spiritual instruction. Before instruction commences, the author appeals to his personal relationship with the student and begs restraint in further circulation of the lengthy, advanced work: I charge thee and I beseche thee, with as moche power and vertewe as the bonde of charite is sufficient to suffre, whatsoever thou be that this book schalt have in possession, outher bi propirte outher by keping, by bering as messenger or elles bi borowing, that in as moche as in thee is by wille and avisement, neither thou rede it, ne write it, ne speke it, ne yit suffre it be red, wretyn, or spokyn, of any or to any, bot yif it be of soche one or to soche one that hath (bi thi supposing) in a trewe wille and by an hole entent, purposed him to be a parfite folower of Criste, not only in actyve leving, bot in the sovereinnest pointe of contemplatif leving the whiche is possible by grace for to be comen to in this present liif of a parfite soule yit abiding in this deedly body; and therto that doth that in him is, and bi thi supposing, hath do longe tyme before, for to able him to contemplative levyng by the vertuous menes of active levyng. For elles it acordeth nothing to him.1

1

The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Patrick J. Gallacher, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1997). I have for clarity introduced my own punctuation for Middle English quotations throughout. For background and bibliography, see Ad Putter, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and The Cloud of Unknowing’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 33–51, and Valerie Lagorio and Michael G. Sargent, ‘English Mystical Writings’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), pp. 3068–73.

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The breadth and passion of this injunction is striking. Here and in several similar passages, the author sternly enjoins anyone who comes across his book not to read, discuss, or copy it unless both that individual and any others with whom he or she intends to communicate concerning the book’s contents are possessed of true will and holy intent to be perfect followers of Christ to the ‘sovereinnest pointe of contemplatif leving’ that is possible for them in this life — ‘[f]or elles it acordeth nothing’ to them. The restriction is fearsomely strenuous, a requirement that potential readers go through the eye of a needle. The strenuousness of the prohibition reflects the author’s realization of just how difficult it was to control texts in a time of increased lay hunger for what the author had produced — a vigorously written, rigorously considered, vernacular spiritual manual. Because his authoritative position as author/teacher is threatened once the text leaves his hands, the author appeals to the ‘bond of charity’ as an attempt to extend his personal influence over a less personal future. The audience broadens, and the author truly becomes an author, with readers, rather than a teacher, with students.2 Wide readership represents a relinquishment of stable, authoritative interpretation; once passed on, a text, particularly a vernacular text, takes on a new ‘openness’.3 It is at least apparently available on equal terms to all comers, its interpretation subject to the vagaries of linguistic and theological context, to uncertain means and manners of circulation. The Cloud author perceived that ‘open’ text — text not moored to personal relationship, its interpretation not governed by institutional authority — is subject to decontextualization and distortion, to chaotic and dialogic hermeneutic forces. ‘Having’ a text, whether materially or intellectually, includes the power to use, or abuse, that text. The author lists how the book might come to someone’s hand, ‘bi propirte outher by keping, by bering as messenger or elles bi borowing’. Possible points of uncontrolled contact between readers and these instructional materials proliferate. This list emphasizes the book as a material artefact, susceptible to being circulated, borrowed, bought, inherited, copied, partially copied, mis-copied, but the materiality functions as a surrogate for anxiety about the at least partially distinct matter of the interpretation of whatever version of the text ends up in a given reader’s hands. The tone and exhaustiveness of this

2

I intend to discuss this interesting shift of audience from students to readers in the Cloud (among other vernacular theological texts), and the corresponding shifts of pedagogical discourse, in a forthcoming essay on the Cloud. 3

For exploration of the different and occasionally conflicting valences of ‘open’ text in this period, see Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy.

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recitation of possible means of holding a manuscript reflect the author’s anxiety as he confronts the disjuncture between spiritual teacher and student that occurs when holy teaching has been entrusted to text, to the material form of a manuscript, to a certain worldliness. The author seeks to limit this multiplicity by attempting to re-personalize the delicate instructional relationship threatened by uncontrolled contact between readers and instructional material. He seeks precise definition of an intended audience; he seeks a reading community that is also a spiritual community.

Injunctions on Readership In light of the appeal by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, the question arises: how do we modern scholars of medieval literature and intellectual history read such passages? We form a reading community but not, of course, a spiritual community. Are we not precisely the sort of readers — as the author colourfully puts it, the ‘fleschely janglers, [...] tithing tellers, rouners and tutilers of tales, and alle maner of pinchers’ — who the author feared would grab hold of his book and misuse it, pinching off the bits that suit our questionable purposes?4 What is more, scholarly ‘misuse’ of devotional works stretches far beyond the Cloud. Devotional writers insist that the reader should not get caught up in their words, because words cannot express the essence of their spiritual insights; indeed, they assert, their words are useless if severed from personal commitment to an active devotional programme. Scholarship mining devotional texts is at best superfluous and at worst, it is misguided, irresponsible, and foolish. There are clever ways of avoiding the problem by focusing on the ancillary insights that can be derived from such passages, ignoring the core claims of the work while isolating its rhetorical or theological features and allegiances. For instance, the Cloud passages serve rich rhetorical functions, preparing readers to approach the work with a more reverential attitude and placing blame for any perceived shortcomings on the shoulders of an inadequately committed audience. Or, these restrictive passages can be placed within the institutional framework of Carthusian-influenced spiritual instruction, and within the context of the ‘negative theology’ tradition.5 Indeed, such readings may seem the only option,

4 5

Cloud, ed. by Gallacher, Prologue.

Carthusians cherished mystical and contemplative experiences of many colours, but they remained vigilant in policing boundaries between active and contemplative, secular and religious.

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since the author’s restrictions cannot be treated seriously by scholars without risking a paradox: all but the most pious modern readers fall short of the author’s requirements, and in any case no scholarly project could be oriented toward using the text as the author commands. If scholars chose to heed the author’s terms and use his book as he prescribes, they could not use it at all, qua scholars. In a sense, scholarship does not violate the spirit of this injunction because scholars do not purport to use these texts for spiritual purposes; perhaps the restrictions apply only to those who seek devotional insight.6 Scholars may be wasting their time, but their worst harm is to produce more scholarship, which though spiritually worthless will lead few souls to perdition. But even this response avoids the core of the author’s point, which could be loosely paraphrased: this text will speak properly only to those who take religion very seriously, who seek religious insight, and who are determined to lead a religiously exemplary life. Thus, at a minimum, we must admit that we are in fact violating the Cloud author’s ‘terms of use’ — and I believe we might want to offer reasons for why we do so. We might seek a theory of engagement. The underlying question in these pages is: do medieval English religious texts not seem somehow, and at least somewhat, recognizably religious, thus demanding of us some sort of scholarly consideration — say, even, a theory — of what religion is or how it works? To answer this question in the affirmative is not to say that we must cordon ‘religion’ off as a sealed-off, sacrosanct realm of human endeavour or scholarly inquiry. As scholars of the subject have long realized, the concept of ‘religion’ serves more as useful shorthand for a range of practices and expressions than as an essentialized, Other category of human experience.7 Nor does my suggested approach

See for background, Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, pp. 28–57; Michael G. Sargent, ‘Introduction’, in Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 1–154. Here and throughout, more than can be acknowledged in footnotes, I owe a debt to Michael Sargent for his exemplary and inviting work on the Mirror. As far as negative theology is concerned, the tradition itself, and the Cloud’s place in that tradition, remains cloudy, but it is introduced by Putter, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and The Cloud of Unknowing’, pp. 45–47. 6

Of course, many modern readers do use the Cloud in the pursuit of spiritual insights. See for instance John Main, Word into Silence (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980). Such writing is as a rule removed from dominant historicist or theological discourse on the texts, and faces its own challenges beyond my scope here. 7

In addition to the work of the scholars of religion discussed later in this article, a still useful introduction might be Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. by Michael Banton (London: Tavistock, 1966), pp. 1–46. James Simpson has stated: ‘No one argues now as if religion were a mere allegorical reflex of or code

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require commitment to orthodox religion of any sort. (Indeed, works of scholarship offering pious accounts of devotional literature often fail to present a satisfactory theory of engagement, because they are not sufficiently distanced from the presuppositional universe of the works they study.) What is required is not the conviction that the beliefs of those being studied are substantively correct. Rather, the required scholarly commitment is a commitment to understanding, so far as possible, the perspective, the Weltanschauung, of those historical persons to be studied: a commitment to inquiry into how religious texts made sense to those persons who created or read them; along with a conviction that the ways in which they made sense to those individuals, not just rationally but emotionally, culturally, and practically, are worth scholarly attention. This commitment can, of course, be made by scholars of any religious persuasion, or none at all. More specifically, I propose that the Cloud’s restrictions be interpreted as invitations to heightened sensitivity to the nature of the Cloud not just a repository of some interesting literary or historical data but as a record of serious religious commitment — that is, a thoroughgoing emotional, intellectual, and literary involvement — on the part of both writer and (some) readers. Such a perspective would shift many of the emphases in studies of medieval English religious literature. It might deepen our understanding, or at least warn us away from oversimplification, regarding the complex responses to contemporary culture and politics, cross-cutting intellectual and institutional allegiances, and relationships to language, pedagogy, and textual culture that are evidenced in medieval devotional texts. In the sections that follow I test some of the readings Nicholas Watson uses to support the argument in two of his enormously influential ‘vernacular theology’ articles: ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, and ‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’.8 I suggest that Watson’s readings of Love’s Mirror and the Pore Caitif, driven by his literary-historical and political interests, fail to give due consideration to plausible

for the true reality (usually politics or economics)’ ( James Simpson, ‘Confessing Literature’, English Language Notes, 44 (2006), 121–26 (p. 121)). Unfortunately, this seems to me a somewhat premature conclusion, at least if it is intended to include implicit or methodological features of arguments, although Simpson seems rightly to point to rising uneasiness with the typical reductivism. My agenda is to stir up further unease. 8

Appearing respectively in Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64 and New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), pp. 85–124.

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alternative explanations for certain features of the texts, features that might relate to functional aspirations the authors had for their texts based on their views of religious experience and the devotional aims of their readers. Watson’s literary and theological perceptions are notably sharp.9 That, in this case, his argument takes insufficient account of some crucial aspects of the works in question suggests there may be an underlying problem deserving of wider airing and more detailed consideration.10

A Mirror Reflecting Cultural Change? The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is an early fifteenth-century adaptation, in Middle English, by the Carthusian leader Nicholas Love, of the popular Latin Meditationes vitae Christi. The Mirror, circulated widely in late medieval England, offers a series of gospel narratives rendered suitably for meditation, with instructions for devotional use. After the promulgation of Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions — a set of decrees which among other things laid out an aggressive programme of ecclesiastical control over vernacular spiritual writings — a memorandum appended to the text noted the Archbishop’s endorsement of it as an orthodox work of spiritual instruction, an unsurprising endorsement given Love’s close connection with Arundel’s ecclesiastical circle, as well as the conservative, and militantly anti-Wycliffite, tenor of the work.11 Reading the Mirror in light of his view that the Constitutions represented a sharp turning point in English religio-literary history, Watson characterizes the 9

Possible citations abound. His and Jacqueline Jenkins’s recent annotated edition of Julian of Norwich offers an unprecedented abundance of brilliant, sensitive readings of a difficult English religious masterpiece: The Writings of Julian of Norwich: ‘A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman’ and ‘A Revelation of Love’, ed. by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, Brepols Medieval Women Series (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006; also published in hardback by Brepols in 2006). 10

Because I agree with Gillespie that Watson’s ‘Censorship’ article ‘remains the most richly nuanced and powerfully contextualized discussion of vernacular theology in Middle English, and asks many questions that still require answering’, a statement almost equally applicable to the second article treated here, I believe that these, more than most, reward continued engagement and scrutiny. See Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, p. 405, n. 11. 11

Sargent discusses the timing of the Mirror’s composition and release with regards to the Constitutions and Memorandum. See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 36–37, 147–50. For Sargent’s summary of the Mirror’s political and ecclesiastical context, see pp. 23–37; for its anti-Wycliffism, see pp. 54–75.

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Mirror as a work of cynical, politically driven condescension. It should be understood, he asserts, as Arundel’s ‘means of putting a positive face on the draconian restrictions he was imposing’, in that it ‘offers the uneducated reader more than catechesis: substituting the rational and social concerns it so scrupulously shuns with an offer of a life of affective intensity’.12 It provides for an emotionally intense but doctrinally ‘safe’ set of carefully worded meditations couched in a set of clear instructions for edifying orthodox use. The Mirror is, Watson says, ‘designed to divert lay readers from doctrinal inquiry and to remind them of their childlike dependence on clerics who think for them’.13 He has argued that this emphasis is explicable by reference to the Mirror’s place in the postArundel decline of vernacular theology, a decline that contrasts with the preConstitutions vibrancy of English vernacular theology, exemplified by texts such as Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, and the Pore Caitif. This article does not assess Watson’s claims about the Constitutions and the before-and-after eras of English religious writing which he suggests that they respectively curtailed and inaugurated. Rather, I focus on the argument that casts the Pore Caitif as a pre-Arundelian foil to the Arundelian Mirror. Considering the pastoral context and content of these works in addition to their political context opens up more textured awareness of both texts — dimensions of their attitudes toward tradition, audience, religion, and even politics that might go unnoticed.

Adaptation and Responsiveness Love himself provides compelling explanations of his goals and composition process, explanations that focus on responsive, pastoral motivations more than cynical, politically driven repression. While these explanations need not be taken at face value, they are sufficiently plausible that they cannot be disregarded out of hand. Throughout the Mirror, Love offers reasons for omitting significant stretches of his source text, the Meditationes vitae Christi, as well as for rearranging numerous sections and inserting his own comments and exposition. Love selfconsciously references his Latin source to bolster the authority of his project but also, in doing so, shows a striking willingness to criticize it explicitly and implicitly

12

Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 855, 854.

13

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 853.

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for its shortcomings.14 Two particularly colourful passages exemplify Love’s statements of his purposes, and his views on his source-text: Bot for also miche as hit were longe werke & perauenture tediose boþe to þe rederes & þe hereres hereof, if alle þe processe of þe blessed life of Jesu shold be wryten in englishe so fully by meditaciones as it is õit hidereto, aftur he processe of he boke before nemede of Bonauenture in latyne, þerfore here aftur many chapitres & longe processe þat semeþ litel edificacion inne, as to þe maner of symple folk þat þis boke is specialy writen to, shal be laft vnto it drawe to þe passion.15 ... And þus shortly we passen ouere here miche processe of þe gospel & many chapitres of þe forseid boke of Bonauenture, for þe litel edificacion of hem as it semeþ nedeful to symple soules, to whech þis boke is specialy writen in english as it haþ oft be seide here before. And so leuyng þis processe in many places we shole onely telle þe notabilitees þere vpon shortly to edificacion.16

Love portrays himself as tailoring the source-text to make the Mirror more ‘userfriendly’; that is, appropriate for the ‘symple soules’ for whom he writes. He looked, he says, for ways of maximizing impact on his readers, redacting, rearranging, and supplementing his source-text to that end. His stated goals include warning against heresies, expanding the passages most suitable for affective meditation, trimming down the ‘tediose’ bits, and rearranging stories to suit meditative practice. Love’s aspirations for his Mirror, as reflected in his many decisions to accept, reject, or modify his source text, remain open for scholarly exploration; a sensitive reader could discern many layers of motivation pursued in this rhetorically sophisticated and strikingly self-conscious work.17 But there is no reason to discredit Love’s statements of his goals as one significant part of his project. In fact, this emphasis on practical effect can be discerned in a number of other devotional texts of pastoral theology. The Pore Caitif, for instance, refuses theological categorization in favour of practical purpose when it discusses the classification of sins: ‘summe of hem ben deedli synne & sum venyal but it is hard to discusse riõ tli whiche ben oon & which ben oþir’.18 He goes on to note that the 14

Love’s practice therefore contributes to our still-evolving understanding of the vigorous, creative, adaptive project that was ‘translation’ throughout the medieval period. 15

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 75–76.

16

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 86.

17

See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 38–54, and the extensive notes provided on the main text. 18

In the unfortunate absence of a published Pore Caitif edition, I rely on the works here cited

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risk involved in any sin (i.e., a slide toward damnation) is sufficiently grave that to focus on fine categorizations is sheer foolishness: ‘if a man hadde eiõ te peris & he knewe þat summe of hem weren venemyd with deedli poisoun and wist not verili which he wolde refuse hem ech oon & ete noon of hem alle’.19 The emphasis here is not on formulaic doctrinal instruction but on integration of the commandments with each other and with the lived experience of the believer.20 The motivating factor is a practical desire to affect the audience morally and affectively, not to explicate a theological point or interpret a passage of scripture. Pastoral goals structure many passages in both the Pore Caitif and the Mirror, passages that from a theological or doctrinal point of view are not entirely consistent or thorough. The passages may not constitute proper ‘vernacular theology’, but surely their stated desire for simplicity and practicality emerges as much from pastoral concern as from explicit or implicit solidarity with an agenda of social control and literary repression. The direct authorial claims and specific characteristics of the Mirror, as with a number of similar texts, support its being crafted in response to a burgeoning, powerful desire for — and market for — pastoral theology, written in English and presented to allow for easy consumption of spiritual teachings. The vibrant literature of devotional guidance that flourishes in late medieval England emerges from this same responsiveness and concern for the nourishment of active lay piety.21

and my perusal of most of the surviving manuscripts. Mary Theresa Brady, ‘The Pore Caitif: Edited from MS. Harley 2336 with Introduction and Notes’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fordham University, 1954) remains by far the most important and encyclopedic discussion of the work. The quotation here is from p. 72. For Brady’s published work, see Mary Theresa Brady, ‘Lollard Interpolations and Omissions in Manuscripts of The Pore Caitif’, in De cella in seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 183–203, which includes further bibliography. 19

Pore Caitif, ed. by Brady, p. 72.

20

Another comment that is theologically underdeveloped but pastorally on the mark: ‘þus he þat hatiþ man hatiþ god & brekiþ alle þe comaundementis of god for þei ben conteyned in loue to god & man’. Pore Caitif, ed. by Brady, p. 88. 21 Similarly, for instance, the Cloud, which in so many ways differs from the Mirror. Responsiveness underlies the Cloud passages cited at the beginning of this essay, in which the author portrays his work as contingent, circumstantial, occasional — as opposed to universal, systematic, all-purpose. Devotional instruction is, according to the Cloud author’s framework, dependent on the context and the individual. A related common ground is that both the Pore Caitif and the Mirror repeatedly mention that their readers’ good intentions and perseverance are crucial to their success. See, for instance, Mirror, pp. 61, 69, 84; Pore Caitif, p. 1; Kantik Ghosh, ‘Nicholas Love’,

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Love and his fellow devotional writers struggle with how to reconcile history and tradition with their present day, how to preserve the continuity of time-tested and authoritative devotional practices and teachings in the face of changing institutional and socio-cultural environments. These self-conscious passages from the Mirror are in a sense Love’s way of considering the historical narrative of which his work forms a part — by situating historical changes in the context of the religious experience of those to whom it was seeking to minister. The author/translator’s job is in a sense to be a careful student of the past, and of the techniques of transmitting knowledge of the past, all with an eye towards making it speak powerfully in the present. It is in light of these practical, pastoral challenges that the impact of legislation such as the Constitutions may begin to be weighed. What may emerge is a sense of cultural continuity — of a surprisingly robust and varied sort — in the face of would-be ruptures. Love’s Mirror appears in this light as a conflicted work, defying any simplistic categorization of it as a tool of the establishment, or as an instrument of resistance. In his Mirror, Love reflects the difficulties of his position in his time: the work is at once obsessively, and selfconsciously, polemical; self-consciously both devotionally empowering and theologically limiting; and throughout, because of its self-consciousness, disarmingly genuine in its conflictedness.

Intertextuality, Rumination, and Sufficiency Preoccupations with history and context arise again in Love’s attitude towards the other texts with which his audience would be familiar. Two examples demonstrate that Love expects his audience to have access to other books: In þe whiche processe bene many gude notabilitees touchyng temptacion of man in þis world, of þe whiche seynt Gregoury & oþere doctours speken in þe exposition of þis gospell, Ductus est Jesus in desertum, &c. & specialy Crisostome in inperfecto, þe whech for þei bene sufficiantly writen, not onely in laytne, but also in english, we passen ouere at þis tyme spekyng forþermore of þe turnyng aõeyn of oure lord Jesus home to his modere at Nazareth.

in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by Edwards, pp. 53–66 (p. 61). My observations on the tensions in the Mirror are present in one form or another in Ghosh’s discussion. Another sensitive treatment of the Mirror is Sarah Beckwith’s, in her Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 1–6, 60–66. Her conclusions fall perhaps somewhere between my position and Watson’s, although she offers much additional religious and intellectual depth.

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[Concerning the Pater Noster:] Bot for als miche as þis matere is spoken of in many oþer tretees & bokes boþe in latyne & in english & þis praiere sufficiantly expowenet, þerfore we passen ouer more shortly at þis tyme hereof.22

Love frequently alludes to and refers the reader to other devotional works and assumes the reader will keep exploring these different texts, searching out new material and growing in understanding as a result.23 Some such comments could be considered asides to clerical or educated readers, but this is belied by Love’s emphasis on the availability of discussion in English. Further, even where such comments are absent, Love demonstrably relies on prior knowledge of biblical stories. Narratives are often oblique and compressed, and he assumes that his audience has foundational knowledge even of relatively obscure stories, whether that knowledge was gained from books such as the Wycliffite Bible or from public teaching.24 Rather than writing so thoroughly as to render such external sources of knowledge obsolete, Love merely draws out a suitable meditation from known narratives. This observation forces reconsideration of Watson’s assertion that: Love presents his Mirror not only as a means of spiritual and intellectual education but as a bastion against such education. To learn its lesson, the reader must emulate the passivity of the infant, receiving nourishment from a clerical writer who retains full control over what he dispenses and how he dispenses it.25

Watson’s perspective draws support from any number of passages in the Mirror, but these passages are in tension with the fact that Love clearly believed — indeed, took for granted — that his audience would have at least some other sources of devotional ‘education’ aside from the Mirror.26 Maybe, then, the Mirror remains

22

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 75, 84.

23

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 31, 46.

24

For example, Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 33.

25

Watson, ‘Conceptions’, p. 95.

26

Compare part two of The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by John Henry Blunt, EETS, E. S. 65 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1873), pp. 68–69: some bokes ar made to enforme the vnderstondynge & to tel how spiritual persones oughte to be gouerned in all theyr lyuynge that they may knowe what they shall leue & what they shall do [...] And when ye rede eny suche bokes, ye oughte to beholde in yourself sadly whether ye lyue & do as ye rede or no [...] Other bokes there be that ar made to quyken & to sturre vp the affeccyons of the soule as som that tel of the sorowes & dredes of deth [...] to sturre vp the affecyons of drede & of sorow for synne. Some tel of the grete benefites of oure lord god [...] to sturre vp oure affeccyons of loue and of hope in to hym. Somme telle of the ioyes of heuen, to sturre vp the affeccions of ioye to desyre thyderwarde. And some

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under the ‘full control’ of the ‘clerical writer’ only in terms of technique: Love goes to great lengths to demonstrate (whether successfully or not) how fervent devotion can be properly managed, and the possibility of developing this personal practice is what the Mirror holds out to its ‘infant’ readers. No doubt that Love did not believe most of his audience would achieve high contemplation, and he warned against aiming directly for such heights, but he could not have hermetically sealed off the devotional education of his readers. He did not seek to do so. The ramifications of this intertextuality may be that even the Mirror, a most Arundelian-affiliated text, partakes fully and enthusiastically in the flourishing of vernacular devotion, albeit along the lines of the reform-oriented conservatism that emerged most fully after Arundel’s death. Love allows his work to be shaped by the context within which his audience is likely to encounter it — that is, in dialogue with other vernacular religious works. His user-driven approach demands a keen awareness of the immediate situations of actual devotees, as he struggles to make traditions and existing bodies of pastoral and devotional wisdom speak to that newly formed, growing audience. He explores the possibilities of safely orthodox devotional production amidst such pressures, and what emerges from this experiment is a multi-faceted and internally conflicted artefact. This internal conflict comes to the fore again in the Mirror’s presentation of St Cecilia, which is Watson’s prime example of how Love offers his readers only static, limited devotional experience.27 Love writes: Among oþer vertuese commendynges of þe holy virgine Cecile it is writen þat she bare alwey þe gospel of criste hidde in her brest [...] In þe which she set her meditacion & her þouht niõt & day with a clene & hole herte. And when she hade so fully alle þe manere of his life ouer gon, she began aõayne. And so with a likyng & swete taste gostly chewyng in þat manere þe gospell of crist, she set & bare it euer in þe priuyte of her breste. In þe same manere I conseil þat þou do. For among alle gostly exercyses I leue þat þis is most necessarye & most profitable, & þat may bringe to þe hyest degre of gude liuyng.28

Watson describes the passage thus: ‘Cecilia lives her days in a repetitive round of devout meditation on episodes from Christ’s life selected for their affective impact’; he observes that ‘her energies are entirely directed within’.29 There is merit

telle of the foulnes & wretchednesse of syn to sturre vp your affeccyons accordingly to the matter that ye rede. See also Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 44–46. 27

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 855.

28

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 11.

29

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 854.

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to Watson’s observation concerning the strikingly inward-focused piety that the Mirror encourages, although its Carthusian authorship may furnish as plausible an explanation for its inward orientation as does recent legislation. In discussing the Longleat Sermons as representing one instantiation of non-Arundelian vitality, Watson claims that ‘[u]nlike the Mirror (though like Pore Caitif, the Chastising, Dives and Pauper, and especially Julian’s Revelation) [the Sermons] presupposes a reader capable of, and interested in, concentrated study’.30 But the Cecilia passage, at the very least, does not so clearly deny the possibility of a reader ‘capable of, and interested in, concentrated study’. True, Cecilia’s study, as described in the Mirror, sounds repetitive, but to dismiss her meditations as the changeless and unending consumption of devout, childish pabulum would be to ignore the passage’s crucial and evocative image of meditative rumination — Cecilia’s ‘gostly chewyng’. In this striking phrase are echoes of a time-honoured meditative practice well known to Love. Cecilia’s meditative labour, so heartily endorsed by Love, does not differ greatly from the spiritual rumination that apparently provoked Julian of Norwich’s remarkable, long-term reworking of her visions, or the embodied responses to devotional texts that inspired Margery Kempe.31 Devotional continuity is not stasis. Rather, meditation on familiar images, narratives, and doctrinal mysteries can form the core of profound religious experience, a continually renewed awareness of religious truths affectively ‘chewed’ over many years — not simply swallowed whole. Parts of the Mirror also complicate Watson’s portrayal of the Pore Caitif as breaking down the hierarchical barrier between laypersons and clerics assiduously maintained in Love’s Mirror. For instance, Love notes at one point that his discussion has reached the limit not just of ‘lewde’ reason but of all ‘mannes’ reason.32 Here and in similar passages he fails to maintain a strict separation between matters fit for clerical audiences and those fit for lay audiences. At times,

30

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 855.

31

For example Vincent Gillespie, ‘Strange Images of Death: The Passion in Later Medieval English Devotional and Mystical Writing’, in Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 117 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1987), pp. 111–59, and Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 53–77. More expansively on the practice, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. by Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961). 32

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 23.

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that is, he acknowledges that whether learned or humble, we are all in it together, limited by our human weaknesses. Watson focuses on part of the prologue to the Pore Caitif: This tretyse suffisith to eche cristen man and womman. This tretyse compiled of a pore caitif & nedy of gostly help of al cristen peple [...] shal teche simple men & wymmen of gode wille, þe right way to heuene, yf þei wille besye hem to haue it in mynde & to worche ther after, wiþouten multiplicacion of many bokes. And as a child willing to ben a clerk, begynneþ first atte grounde, þat is his a.b.c., so he, this desiring to spede þe betir, begynneþ attte grounde of helthe, þat is cristen mennes bileue.33

To Watson, this passage exemplifies the ‘universality to which the [Pore Caitif] aspires’; he argues that the ‘egalitarian language of the [Pore Caitif’s] opening points a different way, towards a readership liberated by the education it provides and responsible for its own reform’.34 Parts of the Pore Caitif support this reading, but others support an alternative reading: that this prologue imagines devotional instruction distributed only on a ‘need to know’ basis, with a certain minimum amount of knowledge ‘sufficing’ for most. The treatise may serve, that is, to provide a bare adequacy to its readership. The author indicates: choose my instructional text, and do not seek ‘multiplicacioun of many bokes’ — a multiplication that here, more than in the Mirror, seems frowned upon. This passage serves as an effective promotional message for the Pore Caitif as a one-stop-shop for every would-be

33 As quoted by Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 849. Watson takes this prologue from Downside Abbey, MS 26542, fol. 94r , which formed the basis of the Pore Caitif transcription in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 239–41; as well as in Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, p. 107. As far as I can tell, the first sentence should not be relied on as authorial. Although the Downside manuscript may have been unknown to her, Brady, in the introduction to her dissertation, characterizes this head sentence as the way ‘a scribe who copies his book advertises it’, and cites the language as appearing in only two other manuscripts out of the more than forty that she knew of: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds anglais 41 and Glasgow, Hunterian Museum, MS 520. She notes ‘somewhat similar’ language in British Library, MS Harley 953 (p. lxxxiii). Whether the language is original or not, Watson treats the passage in general as aptly representing the Pore Caitif’s pastoral approach, and I do not disagree, although I draw different conclusions, in particular as regards the question of how we might read ‘sufficiency’ in light of the broader instructional stance taken in the text. 34

Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, p. 108. He here writes that the ‘Pore Caitif sees itself as democratizing the spiritual life by reminding everyone, lay or cleric, that only a certain set of religious truths [...] matter and that these truths are common to all’. Along the same lines, Watson briefly revisits the Pore Caitif in ‘Cultural Changes’, p. 134.

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student of devotion, but it hardly reflects the sentiment of an egalitarian, ‘powerto-the-people’ writer. An underlying image in ‘suffisith’ is the sufficiency of food, and this lexical undertone is apt: what suffices for a simple diet could provide bare sufficiency to anyone, and in that narrow sense be ‘universal’, but that is not to say that richer food would not be expected by, and appropriate for, a more refined palate.35 The Pore Caitif prologue could introduce it as a work designed to assuage the spiritual hunger of a curious, non-Latinate audience, while also insinuating that for such readers to seek further knowledge would be exceeding that which ‘suffisith’.36 It may be a discussion-ending gesture, a way of closing off dialogue with no more than an assurance of bare satiety.37

Conclusion: Devotion, ‘Religious Experience’, and History In these pages, I have suggested that we can discern significant continuity in the face of cultural change, even in a work as profoundly implicated in the Arundelian project as Love’s Mirror. This continuity emerges directly from the theory of tradition evident in many devotional works, including the Mirror, a conception founded less on authority — ‘this can be trusted’ — than on experience — ‘this has worked and will work for you’. (For similar reasons, the fruits rather than the roots of Wycliffism are often as not the central objects of orthodox criticism of the heresy — it led, so defenders of orthodoxy said, to arrogance and decadence.) Underneath political, ecclesiastical, institutional, and doctrinal pressures is the beating heart of pastoral theology and personal spiritual instruction; and the way practical, pastoral goals work themselves out in the face of constantly evolving pressures deserves more scholarly attention than it has received.

35

See MED entry on this word (esp. 1a and 1b at ‘suffisen’). Complicating matters is that a ‘sufficiency’ of food, of course, is never permanently satisfying: more is required, all too soon. 36

Against this view, one could point to the structure of the tracts of the Pore Caitif, noting its varied and at times rather ‘mystical’ components as evidence that it adheres more closely to a ‘progressive devotion’ model than to a rudimentary didactic one. This argument strikes me as potentially compelling, as does Watson’s overall thesis, which certainly survives this essay. 37

This is the way in which forms of the word ‘suffice’ are used in the instances I have found in Love’s Mirror and in the Cloud author’s Book of Privy Counselling. See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 22, 55, 63; The Book of Privy Counselling, in The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Treatises on Contemplative Prayer, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson, Analecta Cartusiana, 3 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1982), p. 79.

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This proposed focus explains my insistent use of the term ‘devotional’ to describe ‘vernacular theological’ texts. The term ‘devotional’ is not used with a view to ousting other classifications, but because without a real interest in the devotional aspects of texts we risk missing much of their historical meaning. Devotion looks to the function of religion — it is a currency of psychological intensity.38 Doctrines matter, but that they actually affect an individual’s religious experience is the sine qua non of devotion. A ‘vernacular theology’ emphasis may fail to capture this crucial aspect of these texts (although it brings others to the fore). As I have shown in the Mirror, we can observe specific ways in which Nicholas Love self-consciously helps his audience along, and what he helps them to is an encounter with religious feeling via gospel narratives and meditations. From this perspective, the Mirror’s success depends almost wholly on the listener’s or reader’s ability to break down historical barriers and experience the events of the gospels and especially the passion, with immediacy, with passionate intensity. The responsiveness of the Mirror and of similar texts to the actual needs and position of its readers deserves special attention because a dominant characteristic of late medieval English devotion is a Church struggling to make room for precisely the same categories of affective response, of ‘religious experience’, for which our modern histories have not found a place.39 My thesis is not that before and after Arundel there is a continuity of religious practice or belief. Instead, I argue for a continuity of engagement with certain fundamental questions, questions particularly 38

Watson objects to the term by noting ‘the aura of otherworldliness that often surrounds terms like “devotional,” or indeed “spirituality”’ (‘Censorship’, p. 824, n. 6). Still, there are costs to forsaking such terms, their ‘otherworldliness’ notwithstanding. For further terminological and classificatory exposition, see Nicholas Watson, ‘The Middle English Mystics’, pp. 539–65. As used here, in line with most medieval usage, ‘devotion’ means religious observance animated by emotional attachment or fervour, in contradistinction to ceremonial, ritualistic, or pro forma performance of ritual. To be sure, Watson has disavowed, in his previous reflections on the ‘Censorship’ article, an overly reductive ‘alignment’ between politics and religion, noting: ‘However closely politics and religion are aligned — and “Censorship and Cultural Change” is all about that alignment — the study of religion as religion at some junctures inevitably moves [...] critics away from the political and towards the difficult, because novel, terrain of the affective and the transcendant’ (‘Cultural Changes’, p. 134). 39

There are exceptions, including those considered in Watson’s moving ‘Desire for the Past’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 21 (1999), 59–97, some of whose goals I hope I here advance. Watson cites exemplary, wide-ranging, and contentious works by Caroline Walker Bynum, Louise Fradenburg, Carolyn Dinshaw, Barbara Newman, and David Aers. Despite these and other brilliant and varied contributions, many open questions remain.

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pressing in the decades following hard upon the rise of Wycliffism, which was both an embarrassment to the English church and an undoubted harbinger of change, left to the historical players (and not just Arundel, dead by 1414) to work out. The Mirror presents one example of a general problem in the study of religious writing, which is precisely that it makes religious demands on its readers, striving to make its impact a living one in its time. The pervasiveness of normative, moral, or emotional demands (demands that I here call ‘religious’, but that stretch beyond that categorization) in historical texts, forms one of the main difficulties for scholars who seek to understand reform and social change, to write or understand history, especially literary history. Simply put, the political, formal, and conceptual dimensions of texts provide firmer (or at least easier) ground for analysis. But when we omit considerations of more subjective matters, we tell history wrongly, and we tell the wrong history. Here, for instance, we misunderstand Nicholas Love unless we see how he takes account of his audience’s experience, tailors his text to it, and strategically pursues his goals in light of it — goals that are demonstrably not just social control. Were we to talk about medieval religious experience explicitly, we might find ourselves considering, doubting, and revising our assumptions about medieval religious experience, and in doing so contribute to a dialogue about comparative dynamics of religious experience, a dialogue hitherto largely dominated by theorists of religion, in religion faculties, seminaries, and departments of psychology and sociology.40 The potential pitfalls of my proposed approach are manifold. Scholars may be tempted to anachronism, to essentializing, to narrow piety. But laying out a history 40

‘Religious experience’ itself is a term of art from the scholarly discourse in religion. It has developed as a way of framing discussions of individual and corporate religious practice. It relates to the more theoretically oriented ‘phenomenology of religion’. It recognizes the otherness of the object of study while acknowledging (and theorizing) revealing commonalities or continuities between the object and the researcher. While such an approach has influenced many medievalists, a ‘religious experience’ approach has had limited impact on the study of historical religions. Still, the tensions it was formulated to express — if not resolve — are applicable. For basic discussion and bibliography, see Douglas Allen, ‘Phenomenology of Religion’, in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Lindsay Jones (New York: Macmillan, 2005); and the remarkable contribution of a leading scholar of religion, Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Another way of analysing the literature is as ‘psychological’, on the strength of the analogy between the practical goals of the authors of devotional texts and the similar emphases of modern clinical psychology, which focuses on manipulating, ‘curing’ the self, or giving it the tools (especially self-knowledge) to ‘cure’ itself. So, for instance, Masha Raskolnikov, ‘Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology, and the History of the Self in Middle English’, Literature Compass, 2 (2005), 1–20.

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based only on reassuringly straightforward and factual (as contrasted with interpretive or speculative) bases is no more intellectually honest, or accurate, than risking one that cannot be so confidently laid out. Furthermore, everyone writing on religious topics has a ‘theory’ of religion whether they admit it or not — of what counts as religion, and how it works. In these early articles, Watson may give too much credit to Arundelian gestures of control, and paints a picture of an orthodoxy narrower than it may have been. I want to take seriously the notion that the Church’s jealousy for authority reflects not the pervasiveness but the fragility of its control over the religious life of English persons. This situation resulted in more strategically sophisticated, and perhaps more respectful, approaches to the experience of lay believers than has been recognized. In any case, different underlying views of religion and authority such as these merit explicit discussion; during which discussion, history of a sort remains the scholarly focus, a history requiring attentiveness to the affective dimensions of medieval devotion, to the actual social and cultural arrangements which permitted and facilitated devotion, as well as to how devotion worked or did not work under those circumstances, based on whatever evidence we can find. This shift of approach might provide one way forward, in filling out our story of devotion before, during, and after Arundel.

V OICE AFTER A RUNDEL David Lawton

I

n 1413, of all years, Margery Kempe went to see Julian of Norwich in her anchorhold at Norwich. According to The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery told Julian about:

the grace that God put in hir sowle of compunccyon, contricyon, swetnesse and devocyon, compassyon wyth holy meditacyon and hy contemplacyon, and ful many holy spechys and dalyawns that owyr Lord spak to hir sowle, and many wondirful revelacyons whech sche schewyd to the ankres to wetyn yf ther wer any deceyte in hem, for the ankres was expert in swech thyngys and good cownsel cowd gevyn.1

This sentence is an extraordinary microcosm, raising questions of penance, vision, voice, authority, and contemplation as well as order, sexuality, and gender under the seemingly innocuous heading of ‘holy spechys and dalyawns’. Margery Kempe’s strong association of voice and vision underscores her awareness that the conversation / ‘comunyng’ she has with Christ is spiritual: the most important voices you hear are the ones other people do not. Revelations are images appearing in the soul, not before the eyes; sacred voice and vision are therefore equally communications to the soul. Julian talks, it would seem at some length, of how to distinguish true from false spiritual communication: the rule is charity. She proceeds to encourage Margery in her course, whatever the world may think, and the two women — affirmed as soul-mates — go on to recapture the sweetness of sacred conversation in their own. While neither is in doubt that speech here is a metaphor, like Augustine they see it as a wholly indispensable and theologically necessary one; and the book’s references to holy conversation encourage us to keep 1

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Lynn Staley, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1996), Book I, chap.18, accessed online at: .

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in sight the spoken interchange between the two women. Julian is implicitly authorizing not only the spiritual speech within Margery’s soul but also her vocalized response to it, which includes unverbalized crying, voice even without words, as the surplus of spiritual communing. In spite of their recognition that voice may be used in malo, Margery and Julian are as far away as possible from the view of voice that informs pastoral rhetoric, which takes its text from such authorities as James 3. 6: ‘the tonge is fuyr and universitye of wikkednesse […] it is a wicked thing, & withouten reste, & ful of dedlyche venym’.2 Their easy conjunction of voice and vision is ruptured in the surrounding culture, in which Lollards distrust images, and Arundel, one might suppose, distrusts voice. The Constitutions are pastoral rhetoric imposed as a national state of exception. Though their greater target is probably writing, most of their provisions target the voice: in reading aloud, in preaching, and in teaching. Margery Kempe’s text enacts its scrupulous obedience to them even as it violates their spirit — most egregiously in its representation of her meeting with Arundel himself, which must be dated a little before her meeting with Julian. As she tells it, she walks unscathed from his fiery furnace; they converse amicably, if not, as with Julian, for ‘many days’, but still ‘tyl sterrys apperyd in the fyrmament’.3 This is not unimaginable, but it still seems to me quite surreal, the lion and the lamb at play. The Arundel who takes the time to argue with Thorpe, who cemented his king’s succession with a vernacular sermon on the theme Vir dominabitur in populo, is invested enough in vernacular voice to set a premium on controlling it. It is in the shadow of such control that the conversation between Margery and Julian functions as sanctuary during a period of social and political upheaval. It expresses something like a countervalue to the mood of the Constitutions, a positive value for personal religious experience and its public voicing. Personal experience often speaks to us in voices, especially in a memorial culture, at the level of auctoritates (voces) or at the sometimes lower cultural level of secondary orality, manifesting, to adapt a phrase of Paul Zumthor’s, ‘the desire of text to be made voice’.4 I would argue that voice is a useful category with which to analyse the literature and culture of the fifteenth century, and forms a useful supplement to the

2

A Fourteenth-Century English Biblical Version, ed. by Anna C. Paues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 32. 3

Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, I, chap. 16, accessed online at: . 4

Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Seuil, 1983), pp. 159–60 (‘Toute poésie aspire à se faire voix’).

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questions we ask about the effect of the Constitutions. It may be especially useful in contexts where hard evidence is lacking — about the dating of texts, or about their orthodoxy or otherwise. In cases open to doubt we may sometimes find voice working as a screen, set in place for a spectrum of reasons. We need to give such indeterminacy its readerly due. Recent work paying heed to voice gives us valuable examples of how we might do this: Mishtooni Bose’s essay on Pecock’s voice,5 and its fashioning of a rhetoric of vernacular argumentation; two essays by Annie Sutherland, one showing how in Julian of Norwich biblical citation is internalized in the thinking structure of the vernacular text, the other showing how the author of The Chastising of God’s Children does something like the opposite, keeping biblical text ‘almost hermetically sealed from the narrative voice’;6 and Vincent Gillespie’s study of Julian’s writing as ‘a vast echo chamber of allusion and imitation’, with his persuasive claim that ‘the range of textual voices she uses, and her subtle and strategically shifting nuances of style and register, demand a different way of listening’.7 Such listening for multiple voices can help with questions about the Constitutions. Were they as culturally coercive as Nicholas Watson powerfully suggested (in an essay itself attentive to textual voice)? 8 If so, was this only for a limited period, say into the late 1420s? Or were they largely ineffective, as suggested by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s work on European religious discourses in England,9 or by Ralph Hanna’s conclusion that Bible translation remains the main game in town,10 or by Vincent Gillespie’s argument that vernacular theology prevails over Arundel’s attempt to censor it?11 Or should we

5 Mishtooni Bose, ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’, in Lollards and their Influence, ed. by Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 217–36. 6

Respectively Annie Sutherland, ‘Oure Feyth is Groundyd in Goddes Worde: Julian of Norwich and the Bible’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition: England, Ireland and Wales. Exeter Symposium VII : Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. by E. A. Jones (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 1–20; and her ‘The Chastising of God’s Children: A Neglected Text’, in Text and Controversy, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 353–73 (p. 366). 7

Vincent Gillespie, ‘“[S]he do the police in different voices”; Pastiche, Ventriloquism and Parody in Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), pp. 192–207 (p. 193). 8

Watson, ‘Censorship’.

9

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion.

10

Ralph Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts before Lollardy and their Fate’, in Lollards and their Influence, ed. by Somerset, Havens, and Pitard, pp. 141–53 (p. 150). 11

Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–19 (p. 418).

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modify our understanding of the Constitutions, either as merely one more link in a chain of controls going back at least to Blackfriars in 1382, or as more limited in their intentions than has recently been understood? (The fullest exposition I have found of this argument is in Sarah James’s 2004 Cambridge thesis.)12 Listening to voice may help reframe the questions we ask and the answers we expect. Take the frame in two manuscripts of the so-called ‘fourteenth-century biblical version’ edited by Anna Paues in 1902 — so-called because it may not be (at least entirely) fourteenth-century, attempts nothing of the Old Testament and only half a gospel of the New, and is a compilation of several texts perhaps newly combined.13 I would like to register indeterminacy rather than disencode it, that of the senior brother in the frame. Asked in the name of ‘Cristis lawe of charite’ by his ‘lewed’ brother and sister to teach them ‘thinges that beth needful to the hele of oure soules’, he agrees that he has a moral duty to do so, but famously demurs, adding what seems like contemporary context to a traditional complaint: ‘we beth now so far yfallen from cristis lawe, that yif I wolde answere to thin axynges y moste in cas underfonge the deth, and thou wost wel a man is yholden to kepe his lyf as long as he may’.14 This is a crux of long standing. The fear of capital punishment seems to point to De haeretico comburendo, but the specific context of biblical translation is more pertinent to Arundel’s Constitutions. Though one might be more inclined than Paues to a date post-1409, the reference is frustratingly inexact (as well as not quite clear: what does ‘in cas’ mean?). The context is as shadowy as 12

Sarah James, ‘Debating Heresy: Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Theology and Arundel’s Constitutions’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2004). 13

On this, see Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’, and London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 306. The ‘Paues’ version exists in whole or part in the following manuscripts: Cambridge, Selwyn College, MS L. 108. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 434; Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 14. 39 (Acts); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 250; and Bodleian Library, MS Holkham misc. 40. Of these, only the first two contain the prologue and frame. It is clear that Selwyn is assembled from discrete parts already transmitted elsewhere. In the Holkham manuscript, the Paues Epistles appear with Wycliffite Early Version Gospels, and with the Middle English translation of Gretham’s Miroir, translated in Northamptonshire c. 1400: The Middle English Mirror: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library MS Holkham misc. 40, ed. by Kathleen M. Blumreich, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 182 and Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 9 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in collaboration with Brepols, 2002). There are also connections with other composite texts, such as The Lyfe of Soule (n. 43 below). 14

Biblical Version, ed. by Paues, p. 4. Paues accepts the prologue at face value, and assumes a monastic provenance: ‘brother and sister, that is, a monk and a nun on the one hand, and on the other their brother superior’.

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the date. Do we follow Paues in automatically taking ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ to be certain sign of a monastic provenance? I would like to direct attention to the following sentence, in which the senior brother urges his brother and sister to put their heads down: ‘& parawnter it is spedful to holden oure pes a whyle forto that God foucheth saf that his will be yknow [...]’.15 The prevailing sense of the passage is one of uncertainty, of not quite knowing what may happen next or where, for the time being, solid ground may lie. Some traumatic cultural change is clearly in the wind. It is registered very differently and less tentatively than in the Constitutions themselves or the explicit condemnation of them in The Lantern of Light (‘thise newe constituciouns, bi whos strengthe anticrist enterditith chirchis’), though there is real despair in its talk of these days of great tribulation.16 Even in the less partisan texts, we are no longer in the discursive world of Cursor mundi or Gretham’s Miroir, where it is safe pastoral advice to tell people to stop reading romances and learn about the Bible. So, for example, Hoccleve advises Oldcastle to improve his life expectancy by means of less biblical and more romance reading.17 What are the private consequences of major public change? It is precisely the moment of indecision and demurral that we should be hearing here (albeit disingenuous — the senior brother is being talked into saying yes). This voice is remarkably reluctant to speak to the actual political facts of the case, but it does give access to perception and feeling. How does it feel to be subject to an untested degree of cultural and political coercion, real or apprehended? One might discuss this question by drawing on the life experience of more recent times, in eastern Europe, or in Germany, or even in the land of the First Amendment and the Patriot Act. But I wonder, nevertheless, whether our response to the fifteenth-century situation is a little too coloured by Foxe, and seen not only through the prism of righteous martyrdom but also through the state 15

Biblical Version, ed. by Paues, p. 5.

16

The Lantern of Liõt, ed. by Lilian M. Swinburn, EETS, O. S. 151 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1917), pp. 17–18. 17

For Gretham’s Miroir, see n. 13 above; on Cursor mundi and earlier translation, see Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’; David Lawton, ‘Englishing the Bible, 1066–1549’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 454–82, and David Lawton, ‘The Bible and the Biblical in English, from Caedmon to 1550’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume One: To 1500, ed. by Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 193–233; and for Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle, see Hoccleve’s Works, II: The Minor Poems in the Ashburnham Ms. Addit. 133, ed. by Sir Israel Gollancz, EETS, E. S. 73 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1925 for 1897), p. 8, s.n. ‘Address to Sir John Oldcastle’.

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mechanism of a more centralized and effectively coercive government than Arundel had at his disposal. The patchy and contingent impressions from many of the fifteenth-century texts we read often tell us something valid about differences among sub-communities, dioceses, regions, classes, and indeed temperaments. Surveillance may sometimes be more fear than fact, but it is nonetheless legible in textual voices. Voice is a real category in this culture, not an imposition upon it. When Margery Kempe brings her case before Julian, Julian’s expertise would lie in her knowledge of a book such as The Chastising with its extensive differentiation of trustworthy from untrustworthy visions and voices, or a treatise such as the related one in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39. This manuscript contains not only a copy of The Chastising, but also the Lay Folk’s Catechism and the Stimulus amoris, showing therefore a profound concern with the classification of sins and virtues, with the active and the mixed lives. Its concern for voice goes beyond lay penitential instruction to the kind of self-help that might have found its original place in a monastic context. The treatise sets out ‘How a man schal knowe which is the speche of the fleisch in his herte, & which is of the world, and which is of the fend, & which is of god’. Stirrings of appetite are ‘the speche of the fleisch’; the speech of the world is whatever leads to self-regard or self-aggrandisement, ‘that thou weenest thyself be betere than anothere man is’; thoughts hostile to one’s neighbour are ‘the spechis of the fende’. The speech of God leads one ‘to beholden non othere mannus defautis but thin owne with sorowe and forthenkyng’, and to active thoughts of virtues and good deeds. If such thoughts ‘be euere medlid with mekenesse and lownesse of thin owne herte’, says the writer, you may be sure that ‘it is a spekyng of god and not of thi silf’.18 Though the framework and terminology are penitential, the process is interior: only, in this ‘privy counsellyng’, one’s advisors must be not Will and Lust but Reason and Need — that is, an awareness of living in a Christian community, a fair field full of folk. That community, however, is a place of contested and deceptive voices, in which one must beware ‘a wikked, fayre spekyng tunge’, which, according to A Myrour to Lewde Men and

18 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39, fols 149r–150r, my transcription. The sentiments chime not only with those ascribed to Julian in The Book of Margery Kempe but with The Chastising and other texts such as Gretham’s Miroir, which also foreground voice: ‘For many there ben that speken right faire and deliciousliche, and han her tunge al so deliuer that thei ne douten hem noght of nothinge, and cunne teche wel the folk, but al thei don it for her owne profite, other for to ben holden wys, other for to ben preised therfore, other for to wynnen, other for to disceyuen, other for to han gret worshipe’(Mirror, ed. by Blumreich, p. 516).

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Wymmen, is the sterile tree cursed by Christ (such as the Pardoner).19 On this authorities agree. The problem is the subsequent one, of determining which voice is which. There is no cordon sanitaire between religion and literature, and I therefore find myself unable to restrict an examination of voice to ‘religious writing’. The ever-increasing upsurge of interest in vernacular theology over the last half-century tends to pose a distinction such as we find in some scholarly formulations — as in Ralph Hanna’s: The Lancastrians fostered one literary endeavor, courtly poetry, and tried to root out the other, the Bible in English. […] In contrast to the Chaucerian mode, a vernacular bible has, since the tenth century, always been central to English literary production.20

The polemical opposition here is fruitful, but there is a potential correction to make about voices and communities, and there are also some reciprocities to demonstrate between these very different traditions of writing. Nor should we assume a link between Arundel’s Constitutions and the ‘narrowing of the Chaucer tradition’ detected by Paul Strohm.21 The premise behind it is that most English literature, especially poetry, of the fifteenth century is monologic; and, whether one looks at the courtly or the biblical or both, it is simply not so. On the contrary, I would argue that the fifteenth century plays quite extraordinarily with voice; that its accomplishments with voice, though less ostentatious, are often more nuanced, complex and subtle than those of the Ricardian generation; and that Arundel’s Constitutions, and the intellectual climate these portend, contribute to their design. It is in the voice that we hear complicity, or resistance, or anxiety. In what follows on the subject of fifteenth-century voice I have concentrated for the most part on texts that can be dated close to the Constitutions, or that, even if belatedly, can be seen as their intellectual contemporaries. I have kept in view both religious and secular, courtly and biblical, and have focused on two questions: what are the resources for voice in the fifteenth century, and what inflects the choices individual writers make? I have concentrated on three major repertoires of voice that can be read through a range of major texts of the pre- and 19

‘For ye schal vnderstonde that a wikked, fayre spekynge tunge is the tree that oure Lord Ihesu Crist cursed for he fond theron no fruyt but all leues. By leues may be vnderstonde euil wordes’ (idle speech, avaunting, flattery, swearing, forswearing, backbiting, chiding, cursing, grucching, etc.): A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen, ed. by Venetia Nelson (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981), p. 211. 20 21

Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’, p. 153.

Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the Chaucer Tradition’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 4 (1982), 3–32.

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post-Arundel period: the Boethian, the Psalmodic, and the Pauline.22 I shall claim that they are public resources for interiority. The Boethian is the bedrock for voice throughout the fifteenth century, in religious as well as courtly contexts: Boethius has theological standing, the De musica is one of the foundational texts for voice itself,23 and Book III, metre 12 of the Consolation is one of the definitive treatments of what Ian Johnson has called the sapient Orpheus.24 The vernacular Consolation is Walton’s, not Chaucer’s. Johnson describes Walton’s relation to Chaucer as that of corrective imitation, and locates the point of difference in Chaucer’s classicism.25 The relevant passages in Walton’s two Prefaces are so steeped in reminiscences of Troilus, and so openly cite its renunciation of the pagan gods at the end of Book V, that I am more inclined to stress imitation over correction, except that what is being imitated is Chaucer’s high style in the Troilus, not at all his relatively bare though technical prose in the Boece. It is less likely that Chaucer creates the English taste for Boethius than that he shares it with a reading community in London, Oxford, and beyond, to which presumably Usk, and later Walton, also belong. Walton’s correction of Chaucer is therefore probably best seen as stylistic and rhetorical, replacing the plain prose that falls beneath Chaucer’s own poetic standard. Walton’s translation might then be said to be more Chaucerian than Chaucer’s, and one should visualize it at the beginning of a serious programme to upgrade English written language for serious argumentative and philosophical purposes. This is hardly an anti-intellectual programme. It is an attempt to raise the level of English translation, as with Nicholas Love, as with the Deguileville versions, especially the prose Pilgrimage of the Soul of 1413: the latter, like Love’s text, more pictorial and less abstract than 22 This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. There are many other important voices — the vox clamantis, the prophetic (including individual biblical prophets such as Jeremiah or Ezekiel, on which Mishtooni Bose has an essay forthcoming), the mythographic (Ovidian, Orphic), and so on. I pay attention here to those voices most conducive to maintaining public interiorities. 23 On the Boethian voice in English, see, for example, David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 761–99; on Boethius and music see Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), especially pp. 84–101; and on both topics see also Katherine Zieman, ‘Chaucer’s Voys’, Representations, 60 (1997), 70–91. 24

Ian Johnson, ‘Walton’s Sapient Orpheus’, in The Medieval Boethius, ed. by Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 139–68; and Ann Astell, ‘Orpheus, Eurydice, and the “Double Sorwe” of Chaucer’s Troilus’, Chaucer Review, 23 (1989), 283–99, reprinted in her Job, Boethius and Epic Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 25

The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 35.

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Piers Plowman, more suited to orderly sequential reading than a kind of concorded skimming, but of high linguistic register and stylistic quality — all three texts in their ways extending, rather than narrowing, the literary and intellectual range of the vernacular.26 Boethius, however, has a special relationship with statescraft, serving not as a fossilized topos of resignation and detachment but to express the personal dangers, as well as the moral and political indeterminacies, of access to power, to which its readers had reason to be sensitive. Boethius remains an intellectual force from Usk to The Kingis Quhair because people continue to be, or to take, political prisoners, or fear that others may. The Boethian voice is divided and potentially hazardous, redolent of the contest between worldly place and spiritual status (as in the Trinity treatise), set at issue in the lifestyle of prominent Londoners. The Boethian subject is within the circle of power, and simultaneously its victim. As such, it is remarkably assimilable to the voice of the Psalms. In Version B of Richard Maidstone’s translation of the penitential psalms, for example, the Psalmist is not just weakened but sent to his bed in what is plausibly a Boethian reminiscence.27 The poet who occupies and transforms the Boethian voice most fully after Arundel is Hoccleve in The Regement of Princes — also found in his bed, fearful of the world’s inconstancy; but Hoccleve’s handling of this voice is complicatedly intertextual. I want to reconsider Hoccleve’s notorious passage on the burning of John Badby, not in order to extenuate it but rather to ask why the episode is so prominently foregrounded only a couple of hundred lines into the Prologue to the Regement. It is of course topical, and it allows Hoccleve to mythologize his patron, but is it also structural and conceptual? There are three or more significant intertextual strands working at once here: the Boethian, in which Hoccleve stands in place of the prisoner and the Old Man is a Loathly Male metamorphosis of Lady Philosophy; the Chaucerian, in which the Old Man’s unwelcome truthtelling and unattractiveness — as Age and as Poverty — invoke the Pardoner’s Tale, again, as it were, in the wrong key; and the Langlandian. Crucially, the Old Man begins by interrogating the poet about his moral and professional qualifications for writing the poem, and he puts Hoccleve through a process like that run by Reason and Conscience in Piers Plowman, C-Text, Passus V. The framework is pointedly

26

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent; The Pilgrimage of the Soul, ed. by McGerr. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Sarah Noonan for much productive discussion about late medieval reading habits. 27

Richard Maidstone, The Seven Penitential Psalms, ed. by Valerie Edden (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990).

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penitential: the Old Man’s initial ‘Awak!’ needs to be heard on several different notes, not just that of Pandarus with Troilus. The concern is that the poet’s Boethian Thought is, in effect, at best Sloth: the moral of the interview is that the poet should be able to turn his voice to the public good — as he will, echoing the Vigilate: ‘Knyghthod awake! Thou sleepist to longe’.28 In response Hoccleve as character establishes his credentials, to the Old Man’s evident surprise, by his disowning of Badby and his ideas. As poet he becomes one of the principal chroniclers of the episode, and goes into the detail of Badby’s heretical ideas, transgressing the letter and arguably the spirit of the seventh Constitution by light quotation and translation of biblical verses. The interview itself enacts a form of licence (in Henry’s name, rather than Arundel’s). The episode, however, is designed to function as a public defence of literature. Over a century later we see an even more bizarre version of such self-licensing, even without a longer poem to authorize, in Skelton’s 1527 Replication against Certain Young Heretics Abjured of Late.29 Though Skelton’s macaronic, allusive and teasing poetics could hardly have less formal resemblance to Hoccleve’s, the generic similarity in itself constitutes a case for continuity (as Skelton himself asserts, with his usual cool impartiality): Among the scabbed skyes Of Wycliffes fleshe-flyes Ye strynged so Luthers lute That ye dawns all in a sute The heritykes ragged ray.

Skelton’s poem applies for, and grants itself, licence; it curries favour, characteristically at the wrong moment, with Wolsey; and it too contains an outraged vindication of orthodox attitudes. The doctrinal issues are more limited in Skelton’s poem — Mary, the saints, pilgrimage, the defence of Latin (implicitly of Latin scripture) — but this is because Thomas Bilney was an Erasmian moderate, not an extreme Lutheran. Skelton’s poem is also a vigorous apologia for archiepiscopal policing of the universities (such as Arundel carried out in Oxford).

28

Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. by Charles R . Blyth (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1999), p. 65, line 897. On the Badby burning, see Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987). 29

John Skelton, The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. by Alexander Dyce, 2 vols (London: Rodd, 1843), I, 230–50, lines 165–69. See also Vincent Gillespie, ‘Skelton’s Replycacion’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 273–311.

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His gleeful taunting of the two young scholars, including the unpleasingly accurate forecast that Bilney would one day burn at the stake, is frankly enthusiastic about ecclesiastical violence (as is Lydgate’s ‘In Defence of Holy Church’), whereas Hoccleve plays out the full drama of Prince Henry’s attempt at conciliation — having the flames doused and offering Badby a lifelong pension in return for recantation — and takes care to represent Badby’s bleak fate as his own choice, an early form of road rage. But Hoccleve’s and Skelton’s poetic performances are recognizably similar interventions by poets in defence of heresy hunting, and both are above all concerned with the public vindication of their competence to do so. The rhetorical climax of Skelton’s poem is not his easy victory over the already humiliated young scholars but his response to detractors, enemies he imagines impugning his right to speak on such a subject. His poem becomes the last of his obsessive apologies for his own craft, proving Howe there is a spyrituall, And a mysteriall, And a mysticall Effecte energiall, As Grekes do it call, Of suche an industry, And such a pregnancy, Of heavenly inspyracion In laureate creacyon Of poetes commendacion

— and so on (lines 365–74). This is not at all like Hoccleve in tone, but it is not at all unlike him in substance: in both, the public punishment of heresy enables the poet to demonstrate his indispensability, and to speak to, and on behalf of, power, albeit from a petitionary position — as Hoccleve to Oldcastle: ‘Rys up, a manly knight, out of the slow / Of heresie’.30 It is Skelton who appeals to the ultimate biblical authority, by way of Jerome’s prefaces to the Vulgate: I call to this rekenyng Dauyd, that royall kyng, Whom Hieronymus, That doctour glorious, Dothe bothe write and call Poete of poetes all, And prophete princypall. (ll. 316–22)

30

Hoccleve, Remonstrance against Oldcastle, lines 105–06.

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Skelton’s poem helps reveal something that is already happening in Hoccleve’s: the Boethian voice in Hoccleve is amplified into that of the Psalmist, especially in the penitential psalms. The poet who is depressed, weak and unworthy is called to penance in dialogue with the Old Man; both speakers, the old Man’s echoing Hoccleve’s in this, feel beset by their enemies. Hoccleve’s voice, the voice of one completely fallible, can also speak for and to the King and the community; and the claim, no less foundational than Skelton’s though more discreet and coded early in Hoccleve’s quiet scripturalism, is that God speaks through that voice. This is the situation of the Psalms. Where Skelton claims its authority, Hoccleve more subtly and more thoroughly puts it to use in and as the voice of his poem. And it is important for Hoccleve’s whole career to recognize him under the sign of the penitential psalms. The single most powerful moment is well-known, when, in the Complaint, Hoccleve writes the Latin text of Vulgate Psalm 30, Qui videbant me foras fugierunt a me, and translates: As said is in the psalter mighte I saye; They that me sy fledden away from me Foryete I was al out of mynde awaye As he that deed was from hertes cheartee.31

We may not always hear the Psalm as loudly as we should in the depiction of Hoccleve’s mental breakdown. For there is little distance between the subject position of the Complaint and that of the Preface to the Regement. ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ is Hoccleve’s trope before it is Wyatt’s; the mirror in which he looks is penitential and scriptural; and the voice of Psalm 30 is always a trace in Hoccleve’s voice. In this instance it is the major key, Boethius the minor. James Simpson has given compelling readings of both Wyatt’s and Surrey’s fraught meditations on personal and political crises through their internalizing of the penitential psalms.32 I am suggesting here that the precedent is set in English writing a little after Arundel’s Constitutions. The centrality of the Psalms is not in itself surprising, of course — in personal devotion, in the liturgy, in the culture, for orthodox and Reformers alike: it is a target already too broad for the Constitutions. What is striking, however, is the use of the Psalms to explore and extend vernacular voice. Admittedly, the potential is not always fulfilled: most of the religious vernacular material of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries

31 32

Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. by Burrow, lines 78–81.

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 322–29 (Wyatt); and his Burning to Read, pp. 154–76.

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flattens or normalizes the voice of the Psalms. Maidstone’s popular paraphrases, in this and other respects unimproved by Thomas Brampton’s of 1414,33 embrace the dialogue form of the penitential psalms but not the nuances of speaker — the ways in which, for example, David’s voice moves from extreme sinner to king or prophet, from despair to hope, from fear of enemies to triumph over them. The Psalms become a regular alternation of Penitent and Christ, with David — and, one might add, the God of the Jewish Bible — drained of any specific historical vitality. In other texts, the ‘I’ of the Psalmist is glossed, even more inflexibly, as ‘the just man’. Rolle’s Psalter sets out the common sacramental mood sequence from the penitential psalms: ‘The seuen psalms […] bigynnys all in sorrow and gretynge and bitternes of forthenkynge, & thai ende in certaynte of pardoun’.34 Even though David gets his due — Psalm 50, for instance, ‘is the psalme of Dauid when he had synned with Vris wife’ — he becomes the representative penitent, since, after all (the gloss is on even so specific a Psalm as 131, Memento domine Dauid): ‘In this psalme spekis Crist and his kirke’. Such narrowing has a historical basis in Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos, acutely sensitive to voice though these are, because for Augustine the historical circumstances, the particular historical voice, are integuments. So he glosses Psalm 7, of David: ‘we are not going to consider the actual story with which the prophet has veiled its inner meaning but, assuming we have been converted to Christ, let us draw the veil aside’.35 But there is from the first an alternative and more multivocal tradition of Psalm commentary to supplement this sometimes reductive Christology: the prosopological, to which Marie-Josephe Rondeau devotes the second volume of his study of patristic commentaries on the Psalter.

33

For Maidstone, see n. 27 above. For Brampton, see the edition by James R . Kreuzer, ‘Thomas Brampton’s Metrical Paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms’, Traditio, 7 (1949), 359–403; for the ‘A’ Version, A Paraphrase on the Seven Penitential Psalms in English Verse, ed. by William Henry Black, Percy Society, 7 (London: [n. pub.], 1842). I am grateful to Annie Sutherland for showing me her forthcoming essay on Brampton’s version. 34

The Psalter or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles, with a Translation and Exposition in English, by Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. by H. R . Bramley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), Psalm 6, p. 21. 35

Augustine of Hippo, Aurelii Augustini opera, Pars 10: Enarrationes in Psalmos, ed. by E. Dekkers and others, Corpus Christianorum series latina, 38–40, 3 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956); Augustine on the Psalms, trans. by Dame Scholastica Hegbin and Dame Felicitas Corrigan, 2 vols (Westminster, M D : Newman Press, 1961), I, 75. In general, see the fine study by Michael Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

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Rondeau opens with Hilary of Poitiers: ‘The main question in understanding the Psalms is to be able to discern in whose names one must understand the words to be spoken, and to whom’.36 This inquiry remains a viable enterprise in Peter Lombard’s Commentary, and is to hand as a measure of the unambitious character of Maidstone’s or Brampton’s generic paraphrases. It asks questions sometimes about how many authors the Psalms may have had (Augustine and Jerome insist on a single Psalmist, David); and about whether David was writing in his own voice or in persona, and, if the latter, how many personae he may employ and how distinctly. While ultimately in medieval exegesis a Christocentric reading is inevitable, much of the commentary acknowledges, for example, that in literary terms the Psalmist who expresses ‘his own’ sinfulness in ‘his own’ complaint also writes the answer to it, the divine voice; while in theological terms God writes the Psalmist writing God. ‘Hyt ys not ye that spekyn, but hyt ys the speryt of your fader that speketh in you’. This is an answer to the charge: ‘Your mouthe is not the mouthe of God’.37 It expresses the same, hard-won, confidence in interiority as a last resort that marks the treatise in Trinity, MS B. 14. 39. Such commentary responds creatively, without flattening, to what Rondeau calls la complexité dramatique of the Psalms, to the huge tides of mood and feeling that sweep through them and give them their spiritual and poetic life — moods that include negativity, fear, anger, despair, and dissent. The Psalms are the place where Christianity does its most urgent and extensive thinking about voice and persona, both religious and literary. They are a culture’s score for public interiorities. This tradition is finely represented in English writing of the fifteenth century by the Commentary on the Penitential Psalms by Eleanor Hull. I would add this to the list on which Annie Sutherland has placed The Chastising of God’s Children, of underrated, if not (given the superb work of Alexandra Barratt) neglected, texts. Hull’s text is handicapped by the fact that it is a commentary, takes no visible part in the controversies of the day, and was described by its later fifteenth-century scribe Richard Fox as translated from a French book — though no specific French source has yet been identified, and Hull’s writing has a clarity and scope that makes it clear that she fully understood whatever material she may have used. As Barratt

36

Marie-Joseph Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques du psautier (IIIe– V e siècles), Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 220, 2 vols (Roma: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1982–85), II, 29. 37

The Seven Psalms: A Commentary on the Penitential Psalms Translated by Dame Eleanor Hull, ed. by Alexandra Barratt, EETS, O. S. 307 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1995), p. 4.

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says, her book is ‘one of the most sustained pieces of spiritual exegesis in English’.38 And it is throughout a sustained essay on voice, Hull’s inquiry into the sweetness and beauty that David is able to make from his pain and trouble of soul. She holds firm to the particularity of the historical David, while representing him as a penitent, ‘this penaunt’ (p. 11) — at times distinguishing between verses that reflect his specific situation and those places where he ‘spekyth in the person of every true repentant soule’ (p. 19). She is ready to deal with multiple voices and interlocutors, distinguishing, for example, between what David saw ‘by the speryt of prophecye’ (p. 23) and what he speaks as a leader for the sake of ‘all synners’ (p. 24). In her commentary on Psalm 6, she defends ‘the taryying of our Lord’ (p. 12): God delays his response to human prayer until the recipient is ready for the call. Only a fool, she writes, feels perfect enough to say: ‘See me here al redy; sey what thou wylt’. David, she adds, was ‘non of hem, but he speketh in oure persone and answeryth ous by wordys that God put in his mouthe forto chastyse them that mysdoth ayenst him’ (p. 12) — a superbly unshowy sentence containing six or so separate subject positions. Layers of voice, temporality, and agency are quietly and lucidly combined in this remarkable commentary, its literary complexity quarried from the Psalms. There is no question about Hull’s orthodoxy; she was a member of the confraternity of St Alban’s, served briefly in the household of Joan of Navarre, and had Beaufort connections. Barratt suggests that her treatise may have helped inspire John Fisher’s sermons on the penitential psalms, commissioned by Lady Margaret Beaufort.39 There is no other evidence that her text was widely circulated. At the time of Arundel’s Constitutions Hull was an adolescent preparing for marriage. Had her text been to hand in 1413, it would have delighted Julian of Norwich, and its subtle attention to voice might have engaged Hoccleve. My point is that the Psalms confer an education in voices, an interiority. In times of censorship or oppression they are a cleft in the rock, to be accessed by orthodox and heterodox alike according to training, preconception, culture, community, or temperament. It is almost but not quite as Lynn Staley concludes an important article: ‘In the language of and responses to the penitential psalms we can find the

38

Alexandra Barratt, ‘Dame Eleanor Hull: a Fifteenth-Century Translator’, in Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation, ed. by Roger Ellis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 87–101 (pp. 95–96). 39

The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ed. by John E. B. Mayor, EETS, E. S. 27 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1876); Exposition of the Seven Psalms, trans. by Anne Barbeau Gardiner (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998).

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tools for the expression of a subjectivity that will, in the end, separate itself from the outside figures of moral authority’.40 To my mind there is no ‘will’ about it. It will not necessarily; but it may. The potential is there, already in the voices. These voices exist in pre-existing scripturalism and in the heart of orthodoxy, even beyond the containment of literacy — and quite beyond the reach of Constitutions. The range of psalmodic voice gains even greater potency when associated, as often in religious writing throughout the Arundel period, with the third and final strand in this brief inventory of resources, the Pauline. I do not mean to exclude the non-Pauline epistles here, which are also crucial, but Paul is the Apostle, no longer the least of them, and the force of his writing and personal narrative overwhelms the New Testament from the Gospels to the apocalypse. Especially when Hebrews is attributed to Paul, the non-Pauline epistles appear formidably as his adjuncts. The association between Paul and the Psalms has the authority of Augustine, in his commentary on Vulgate Psalm 31 (Beati quorum), Augustine’s favourite (he kept it in his study, and read it on his deathbed): While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, I will confess my transgressions to the LORD , and you forgave the guilt of my sin. (Psalm 32. 3–5, New Revised Standard Version)

According to Augustine, the psalm treats ‘of the grace of God and our justification through grace, not through any preceding merits’;41 and the authority is Paul in Romans 4, with which Augustine’s second discourse on this psalm is suffused. Christ speaks through David, the Prophet; but Paul the Apostle speaks for Christ, and mediates between the sinful and righteous voices of the Psalms, the divine and the human. Paul is Saul before he becomes Paul, because he must precede himself as David. The voice of Paul merging with David’s confers a poetic interiority that speaks both of community and of persecution. The link is momentous for vernacular writing of the Arundel generation: translations of the epistles abound, with or without their narrative frame in Acts. This is the substance of the Paues version, and accounts for many of the biblical

40

Lynn Staley, ‘The Penitential Psalms: Conversion and the Limits of Lordship’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (2007), 221–60 (p. 260). 41

Enarrationes, Psalm 31, I, 189; St Augustine on the Psalms, II, 13.

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passages translated in The Book to a Mother.42 There is an excitement in hearing Paul’s powerful voice in the vernacular, just as there is to be a reawakening for Thomas Bilney when hearing Paul’s voice as if for the first time in Erasmus’s Greek. Yet it is a voice at once unmistakable and metamorphic, with a history, barely containable in one identity, as persecutor and apostle, as Roman citizen and tentmaker, as Gentiles’ champion and Pharisee; it is a voice that moves across temporalities, before and after his conversion, the time of travel, the age to come, the time in between; and it is a voice that weaves through a complex series of rhetorical occasions and culturally variable audiences, the voice of one who sets out to be all things to all people. It is therefore a universal resource, expressive of both affiliation and alienation: ‘Frend in Cryste, as Seynt Paule saith, we ne hauen here no cyte that is dwelling, but we seche on that is to come hereafter’.43 There is much here that can be coded, articulate, and yet remain unspoken, or at the least veiled in ambivalence. In the Digby play of the Conversion of Paul, his prior service as knight of the Christ-slayers Annas and Caiaphas is depicted, and they are called Jewish bishops, but no possible bearing on contemporary affairs is made explicit until the later and clearly Protestant addition to the play, which portrays these bishops explicitly as the servants of devils. In what seems to have been the proto-version, c. 1500, by contrast, this is not spelled out: Saul simply stands as the zealous servant of a persecuting state.44 But the relevance and appeal of Paul’s voice to persecuted subgroups is evident, and in many respects it seems to me the most difficult scriptural virus for orthodoxy to disinfect, one that yields a certain discreet immunity from institutional control. Just as Julian of Norwich assures Margery Kempe, so the author of The Lantern of Light tells his community: the Spirit speaks in you, though you are not graduate men in schools. From the first, in Paul the Church is not one: we hear it in his work as a series of segmented,

42 Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary, ed. by Adrian James McCarthy, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 92 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981). 43

The Lyfe of Soule: An Edition with Commentary, ed. by Helen M. Moon, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 75 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1978), p. 1. 44

‘The Conversion of St Paul’, The Digby Plays with an Incomplete ‘Morality’ of Wisdom who is Christ, ed. by F. J. Furnivall, EETS, E. S. 70 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1896), pp. 26–52; The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. by Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1986), pp. 98–105.

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if not fragmented, subgroups, a hotchpotch compilation not altogether unlike the Paues New Testament version. Paul’s voice, and its history, becomes a resource for orthodox and heterodox alike; the history of Arundel’s time echoes both its impassioned conviction and its duality. In the name of orthodoxy Arundel’s Constitutions seek to regulate irregularity, and its concomitant belief in individual inspiration. Yet such a subject position — allied, as in the Psalms, to antecedent sinfulness — is itself Pauline. So a Pauline voice can be a form of textual sanctuary, a sustained ambiguity about community, as in those texts we often find hard to date addressed to ‘Frende in Christ’, or ‘Brother’, or ‘Sister’. I suspect that we play the game of some of these texts when we identify them as monastic (or even as Wycliffite): The Book to a Mother, for one, teases its readers with hints about female enclosure, allied, uneasily or strategically, to the opening general claim that all one’s fellow Christians are one’s ‘Mother’. (Is the echo of Augustine’s Confessions accidental?) The Pauline or apostolic is a real voice. It can be a claim, as when Margery Kempe’s travel narrative switches from ‘this creature’ to ‘we’ (surely an invocation of the Acts of the Apostles?), but it is also easily and obviously deployed as a disguise, a persona. Again, as with the Psalms, such a voice, or even persona, does not have to separate itself from outside authority. But it potentially may; and again, out of the combat zone of the usual polemicists, the hearing of that separation depends largely on the particular reader. Its subject is the spiritual discrimination of voice. It would have appealed as much to Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as to polemicists such as Richard Wyche. It does not require a gloss. Even Thomas Arundel might have wished to make his peace with it. One may imagine how a reader even a little disenchanted with the Church’s authority, coupled by Arundel with that of the state, may have received a vernacular translation of I John. I quote again from the Paues version: Bote, my smale children, ye beth of god; & euerych spirit that vndoth Crist ne is noght of God; and this is Antecrist; of whom ye han yherd that he schal come: & now he is in the world. Bote, my smale children, ye beth of God, and ye han ouercome hym: for he that is in yow is gretter than he that is in the world. Thai beth of this world, and therefore thei specheth of the world, and the world yhereth them. Bote we beth of God: and he that knoweth God yhereth ous; and who that is nought of God he ne hereth ous noght. In this we han yknowe the spirit of trewthe, and the spirit of errour. My dereste bretheren, loue we togydere; for charyte is of God, & euerych man that loueth is yboren of God, and knoweth God.45

45

Biblical Version, ed. by Paues, p. 40.

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For those who are moved by this (as I am), it is worth asking: are we moved more by the passage itself or by its vernacular translation — by the voice, at least as much as by the theology, vernacular or otherwise? Its distinctions, of course, on the public level, are just those that the Trinity treatise prescribes for interpreting voice. If we interpret voice differently, we may come to a more nuanced view of the fifteenth century. It will not, in itself, dispense with terms such as propaganda, opposition, and even oppression. But voice is the inside of such terms, and it is vital to the texts that the fifteenth century imagined. To speak of public interiorities, if somewhat (though not entirely) paradoxical, seems just — and apt above all for the new work of fifteenth-century writing. I have tried here to begin a description of some major fifteenth-century resources for voice, with a view not only to what they were but to how they may have been received. The evidence is that the fifteenth century produces some extraordinary achievements in the field of mixed voice, and does so consciously. The extent of these achievements has only now begun to be recognized. They are in many respects more subtle and more complex than the more famous achievements of the late fourteenth century, sometimes necessarily so. Many of the options of that time — such as a debate structure in which extremes do not have to be moderated, or monologues in character, raising a question about the extent, if any, of authorial endorsement — are no longer safe options in the cultural circumstances of the new century; and much of the rethinking begins at the time of Arundel’s Constitutions. Do the Constitutions have anything to do with the achievements? In spite of all the timely revisionism in the present volume: almost certainly. It is not always the intent of regulatory censorship that counts so much as the atmosphere it creates, the blundering attempts at enforcement, and the inhibitions that suggest themselves as urgent subjects for internalizing. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the last years of his life, the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub used to baulk at the crowds of his compatriots that would come out to greet his readings in Anglophone countries. In Tasmania he once asked me: ‘Why? The Wall is down. What any longer do we have in common?’ And he added: ‘The great loss is in poetry. In those days we could not write about commissars, so we wrote about kings, and the commissars were pleased and passed our work. Then we felt very smart. But now what do we have to write about, without them?’ A pause. ‘Nature. Sex. Just like in English. Flowers’. Arundel ensures that fifteenth-century writers, of religious prose or of public poetry, need not write about flowers. He is therefore their sponsor: a Maecenas, more likely the Pontius Pilate, of voice.

Part III The Dynamics of Orthodox Reform

C ONCILIARISM AND H ERESY IN E NGLAND * Alexander Russell

J

ean Gerson, addressing the Council of Konstanz in February 1417, railed against the corruption of the Church. Contemporary habits could not be favourably compared with the purity of apostolic times, and Gerson drew the well-worn conclusion that as the Church had swollen in size it had abandoned the selfless spirit of Christian brotherhood. This applied especially to its centralized government. Gerson lamented that ‘the pope and his curia are engaged in many profane and unsuitable cases and law-suits, and are consumed by their anxious preoccupation with business’.1 Joshua’s criticism of Moses was equally true of the pope and his flock: ‘You will waste away with foolish labour, both you, and this people that is with you’.2 Gerson’s words were not dissimilar from those being used by Thomas Gascoigne in England writing thirty years later. Gascoigne had great respect for the ideal of papal government, but had no illusions about how it functioned in practice. He pointed out that ‘the pope often misleads and is himself misled, and it should be made clear how he errs, so that the truth be known’.3 Like Gerson, he condemned those who had embraced a spirit of narrow legalism, whilst abandoning their

* I would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Arts & Humanities Research Council which has made possible the research on which this article is based. 1

Jean Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, VI, 224: ‘Rursus si judicia minora reprobantur in Moyse, videamus in Summo Pontifice et curia sua quid de tot profanissimis et indignissimis causarum et litigiorum continuis et anxiis occupationibus?’ 2 3

Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, VI, 224; cf. Exodus 18. 18.

Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 118, p. 164 (this MS and Lat. 117 are both paginated, not foliated): ‘Item papa sepe fallit et fallitur ergo in quo fallit et fallitur manifestaretur ut veritas cognoscatur’. See Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 152.

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Christian duties. The burdensome consequences of misgovernment were plain for all to see. Rome was ruining ‘the church by promoting bad men whom it and the king have agreed upon’.4 These men were only appointed when bribes had been paid to papal courtiers. ‘Alas, Alas’, wails Gascoigne, ‘[corrupt prelates] have entrusted Jerusalem to the blind and the drunk, and they exclude those who are willing and able and know how to help the souls of the faithful!’5 Although their diagnoses of the Church’s ills were similar, Gerson and Gascoigne had very different perspectives on the prospects for reform. Gerson not only believed that reform was possible, he was convinced that it could be given an institutional footing in the frequent gatherings of general councils.6 He was unequivocal in condemning the popes for failing to call councils regularly.7 As a body truly representing the Church, a general council was infused with the Holy Spirit and could be trusted to provide guidance on matters of doubt. Gascoigne was clearly sympathetic to this programme. After wringing his hands at the intolerable abuses arising from the reservation of benefices by the pope, he invokes the corrective authority of the general council: ‘may God, if it please him, grant us relief in a general council, either through the appeal of the king or the realm!’8 But this was not a typical refrain in Gascoigne’s work. More usual was his frustrated recognition that the papacy would have to be relied upon to reform itself. The best that could be hoped for was that the pope himself would be a good man who would resist the efforts of his curial officials to corrupt him. Gascoigne pointed out that at the time he was writing, 1447, the Church was ruled by an admirable pontiff: Nicholas V. For a long time, he says, the church has tried to 4

Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 117, p. 291: ‘Item [Roma] destruit ecclesiam malos promovendo secundum quod rex et ipse consentiunt’. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 13. 5

MS Lat. 118, p. 157: ‘Heu! heu! posuerunt Jerusalem in custodiam cecorum et ebreorum […] et excludunt eos quis sciunt, possunt, ut optant magis animabus prodesse’ (Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 146). 6

This view was accepted at Konstanz and was enshrined in the decree ‘Frequens’ of October 1417, which required the regular assembly of general councils. See Phillip H. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, 1414–1418 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 105–09, 137 and L’Église au temps du Grande Schisme et de la crise conciliaire, ed. by E. Delaruelle and others, 2 vols (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1962), I, 199. For a translation of ‘Frequens’, see Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, pp. 128–29. 7

Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, VI, 225: ‘nulla fuit hactenus nec erit in posterum perniciosior pestis in Ecclesia quam omissio generalium conciliorum’. 8

MS Lat. 117, p. 438: ‘In concilio generali deus si sibi placeat det remedium vel per appellacionem regis et regni’.

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excuse its corruption by pointing out that the problem has been the lack of a good head in the Roman curia. He then remarks plaintively: ‘If a reformation of many wrongs cannot be brought about at present, you wonder when it will ever come, for “if the green tree does not bear fruit, what shall be done in the dry?”’9 This was not a particularly hopeful outlook. In Gascoigne’s mind reform was as necessary in the 1440s as it had ever been. Why then was the general council largely missing from his bad-tempered commentary? Had the English ever placed their hopes in the efficacy of the general council as a reforming body, and if so, what had happened in the interim?10 The rest of this paper will attempt to provide an answer to these questions. Before we can understand the place of the general council in English thought in the fifteenth century, we must touch upon the ideology used to justify its authority. Gerson’s hope that the general council could act as a reforming body to cleanse the church hierarchy of its corruption rested on the controversial doctrine that under certain circumstances the authority of the general council outweighed the authority of the pope.11 This idea was at the heart of the conciliarist theory, and it was crucial to the reformers’ plight, because if the general council did not possess the power to correct the pope, a corrupt pope would be very unlikely to submit to it willingly, and the evils arising from papal misgovernment could become endemic. How was conciliarism received in England? On one hand, there seems to have been a strong reforming movement within the English Church in the fifteenth century. The complaints that we have heard from Gascoigne were by no means exceptional. The reform proposals drafted by Richard Ullerston for the English delegates to the Council of Pisa in 1408, and the articles drawn up by Oxford University for the Council of Konstanz, shared a commitment to the improvement of pastoral care, the spread of preaching, and the removal of the abuses stemming from the centralized government of the Church.12 As Chris Nighman has shown,

9

MS Lat. 118, p. 171: ‘Si ergo iam non fiat plurium malorum reformatio, putas quando veniet, “si in viridi ligno” non fiet fructus, “quomodo in arido fiet?”’. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 157; cf. Luke 23. 31. 10

For a detailed study of the reception of conciliarism in England during the Great Schism, see Harvey, Solutions to the Schism. 11

For a recent analysis of Gerson’s thought on this matter, see G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, Jean Gerson, Apostle of Unity (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 272–78. 12

Ullerston’s proposals are reproduced in von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, cols 1126–71. For a study of these and their context, see Harvey, ‘English Views on the Reforms’. The Oxford University reform articles are printed in Wilkins, Concilia, III, 360–65. For

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these concerns resurfaced in the speeches of the English delegates who lamented the greed and corruption prevalent in the Church.13 But it was not all doom and gloom: there was also a mood of expectation. The bishop of Salisbury, Robert Hallum, greeted the Council of Konstanz as a new dawn for the Church when it would lay aside its faults and be born anew.14 But even here, the English delegates were separated from their conciliarist colleagues in one crucial respect. The Oxford reform articles for Konstanz were silent about the supremacy of the general council over the pope. Indeed they warned the English delegates that they should not play any part in the deposition of Pope John XXIII against his will.15 It seems ironic that this is exactly what the English did. Nor did they take a back-seat in the proceedings. They sent some of their party to persuade Pope John to return to the council after his flight, and then played their part in collecting depositions against him to serve in his trial.16 The English were prepared to renounce their obedience to the pope in practice. But they seemed less committal when it came to theory. Traces of conciliarist rhetoric are rare in the surviving speeches of the delegates. Even Hallum, the staunch reformer, seemed to have pinned all his hopes on bringing about reform before the election of the new pope. He does not seem to have envisaged a new ecclesiastical order in which the frequent gatherings of the general council would safeguard the ideals of the reformers. In Hallum’s view

one of the manuscript sources from which this was collated, see Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 183, fols 17r–21 r. 13

Nighman, ‘Reform and Humanism’. See also Chris L. Nighman, ‘Rhetorical SelfConstruction and its Political Context in Richard Fleming’s Reform Sermon for Passion Sunday at the Council of Constance’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 33 (2001), 405–25. In addition to Nighman’s many articles on the reform sermons preached at Konstanz (too many to list conveniently here), see C. M. D. Crowder, ‘Some Aspects of the English Nation at the Council of Constance to the Election of Martin V, 1414–17’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1953), pp. 379–85. 14

For Hallum’s role at Konstanz see C. M. D. Crowder, ‘Henry V, Sigismund and the Council of Constance’, in Historical Studies, IV: Papers Read before the Fifth Irish Conference of Historians, ed. by G. A. Hayes-McCoy (London: Bowes, 1963), pp. 104–05. See also, Ernest F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), pp. 53, 58–59, 83–84. 15 16

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 360. Corpus Christi, MS 183, fol. 17r.

John Spofford and John Catterick acted as the representatives of the English nation on the committee which took depositions against the pope. They declared him guilty of the charges brought against him; von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, IV , 182. For an analysis of the English involvement see Crowder, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 233.

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reforms needed to be legalized and set in train before the coronation of the pope, for they would be unlikely to follow after it.17 The uncomfortable dualism of the English stance towards the general council is captured in the work of Thomas Netter. The first book of Netter’s Doctrinale, which contained his statement on ecclesiastical authority, was presented to Pope Martin V in April 1426. It was written after the disappointment of the Council of Pavia-Siena, in which the cause of reform had been derailed by the chaos of international politics and the indifference of the pope, but before the Council of Basel had shattered the harmony of the conciliarist movement, alienating moderates by its extremism.18 Netter himself attended the Council of Pisa, and it is possible that he was at Konstanz as well.19 He praises the general council, saying that it is the institution which is closest in form to the universal Church.20 Some commentators have taken this to mean that Netter was a conciliarist.21 It is vital to distinguish, however, between the unexceptional view which recognized the importance of general councils and the controversial standpoint which acknowledged that under certain conditions the general council could be superior

17

For the view that Hallum was working for reform before the election of the new pope, see Crowder, ‘Henry V’, p. 105. 18

For Pavia-Siena, see Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Pavia-Siena, 1423–1424, 2 vols (München: Aschendorff, 1968–74). For ideas and diplomacy at Basel see Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), and his Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth-Century Heritage (London: Burns and Oates, 1979). The English participation (and non-participation) at Basel is covered by A. N. E. D. Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 5 (1973), 1–117. 19

Netter was not one of the official English delegates at Konstanz, but there are suggestions that he visited the council. See BRUO, II, 1343–44. In his history of the English Carmelites, John Bale says that Netter was present at Konstanz. See Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 41, fol. 177r. 20

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 376: ‘ipsa convocatio Synodi est tam conformis Ecclesiae universali; non tamen est universalis Ecclesia, nec ejus decretum, ut sit fides Symbolica; sed Ecclesiae Catholicae imago propinquior’. 21

Kirk S. Smith, ‘An English Conciliarist? Thomas Netter of Walden’, in Popes, Teachers and Canon Law in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. R . Sweeney and S. Chodorow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 290–99 (p. 295): ‘There can be no doubt that Netter deserves the label “conciliarist”’. I agree with Smith’s general interpretation of Netter’s thought, but take issue with this particular identification. To be fair, Smith later admits that ‘Netter’s conciliar thought is highly erratic, at times even contradictory’ (p. 298).

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to the pope.22 Only the latter view can meaningfully be called conciliarist. If we examine it closely, Netter’s opening statement on the general council is very revealing. Whereas Gerson had been sure that the general council represented the Church, and its decisions embodied the consensus of the universal Church, Netter will only admit that it comes close to attaining this ideal.23 There is a tension in Netter’s thought between the value of communal consensus in the Church and the sacred status of papal authority. For Netter, a dichotomy existed between the traditions of the Church, accepted by all the faithful from the apostolic church onwards and the aberrations of the heretics who ignored the common interpretation of Christian doctrines in order to walk in the path of error.24 He was at pains to refute those who argued that consensus and tradition provided no guarantee that any doctrine was true. In this view, only doctrines which could be founded upon scriptural precedent had any claim to legitimacy. Netter ascribes this view to Wyclif and alleges that Wyclif applied it to the general council, denying that there was anything intrinsically sacred about conciliar decrees.25 Wyclif, in Netter’s citation, argued that since doctrinal matters had been resolved by the teaching of the scriptures, it would be dangerous to call general councils superfluously. The word of God, working through the scriptures and the spirits of the righteous, already provided sufficient guidance.26 Netter had to respond to this attack by defending the general council and with it the value of

22

For a judicious attempt to define ‘conciliarism’ in this period, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 72. 23 For the problem of representation in the thought of the conciliarists, see Black, Monarchy and Community, pp. 15–22. In the thought of the early conciliarists, Black argues, the general council ‘simply was the church in its jurisdictional form’. 24

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 381.

25

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 383. ‘Blasphema (inquit) haeresis foret, quod si major pars talium sententiae cuicumque consenserit, tunc est verax’. I have not been able to find any of the following passages of Wyclif quoted by Netter in Loserth’s printed edition of Wyclif’s works. For Netter’s detailed knowledge of Wyclif’s works, see Hudson, PR, pp. 53–54. For his use of earlier compilations of Wyclif’s errors, see Hudson, ‘Notes of an Early Fifteenth-Century Research Assistant, and the Emergence of the 267 Articles against Wyclif’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 685–97 (pp. 695–96). 26

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 378: ‘Non quaeramus ergo superflue Concilium qualiter facere debeamus, cum verbum Dei, quod est Scriptura Sacra et impulsus Spiritus in recte viventibus satis doceat’.

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consensus in the Church. Jerome and Augustine were called into the ring on his side. Paul did not address the Galatians in his own name alone, but called upon all his brothers as witnesses of the faith. He did this, in the words of an authority taken to be Jerome, ‘so that he should not be considered unworthy to bring forth the doctrine alone’.27 Netter then cites Augustine’s answer to the Donatists and uses it as an answer to Wyclif. The only reason that Cyprian of Carthage dared to question the instruction of the bishop of Rome about the rebaptism of heretics was that a general council of the whole world had not yet put the matter beyond dispute.28 Netter’s emphasis on communal values soon gave way to a firm defence of hierarchical principles, however. This defence shows us just how far Netter was from sharing the views of the conciliarists. It also suggests why he chose to distance himself from them. A comparison of Gerson’s and Netter’s treatment of the key texts pertaining to papal authority will show us why the basic contentions of conciliarism were unacceptable to Netter. In Matthew 16. 19, Christ granted Peter the keys of binding and loosing within heaven and earth. Gerson glossed this text to mean that the ‘keys were given not to one man, but to the whole church’.29 Further, he alluded to the text in which Paul had admonished Peter to his face, for having kept the Jewish rites hypocritically. Gerson declared: ‘Disquiet was caused in the church by Peter’s hypocrisy, and so he was compelled to follow the doctrine that he himself had taught in his writings, and he appeared in front of the church to account for his actions on matters touching the faith. Had he not done so, the church would not have trusted him’.30 Gerson takes this scriptural example as an

27

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, col. 379. ‘Ne (inquit) solus indigne ferre putaretur, suam conculcari doctrinam, Apostolus objurgaturus Galatas propter conversationem suam, non tantum ex sua persona scribit ad eos, sed ex omnium fratrum’. In fact, the passage is not by Jerome, but had been mistakenly attributed to him. See Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi […] operum tomus primus, ed. by D. Vallarsi, 11 vols (Verona, 1734–42), XI, cols 835–36 for an explanation and col. 980 for the passage itself. 28

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 380. See Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas in PL, XLIII, col. 129. ‘Nec nos ipsi tale aliquid auderemus asserere, nisi universae Ecclesiae concordissima auctoritate firmati; cui et ipse [Cyprian] sine dubio cederet’. 29

Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, III, 301: ‘Claves datae sunt nedum uni sed unitate’. 30

Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, III, 302: ‘Subortum est murmur in Ecclesia ita ut compulsus sit Petrus doctrinam insequi quam scriptis tradidit, ut scilicet paratus esset coram tota Ecclesia rationem reddere de ea quae in ipso erat fide et spe; alioquin non sibi credidisset Ecclesia’.

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indication that the pope may be disciplined by his subjects. Other popes have also had to account for their actions to their church, Gerson points out, and he states that they did this ‘by no means out of humble condescension as some pretend, but out of necessity and obligation’.31 Unfortunately for the conciliarist cause in England, Wyclif had made similar use of the same passages of scripture. It must have been with no small unease that Netter read Wyclif’s comments on Matthew 16. 18, where Christ told Peter that he was the rock upon which he would build his Church: It should not be understood that Peter personally was this rock, but that the rock referred to Peter figuratively, so that the true rock upon which the Catholic church must be built is Christ.32

This interpretation had, of course, originally been advanced by Augustine.33 But Wyclif and Gerson were both using it to undermine papal pretensions to unlimited authority within the Church. When Netter read Wyclif’s comments on Matthew he must have been struck that an argument which had been used by orthodox theologians to solve a very unusual crisis in the government of the church was also being used by a heretic to further his savage attack upon the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy. This was a worrying sign, and Netter could not afford to mince his words in response. He runs through all the texts of the New Testament referring to Peter’s place among the Apostles and glosses them to show that, in his own words, Peter is ‘the master of all causes, he is the master of the whole faith [...] and there will be no virtue of which Peter is not the guardian and the master’.34 Netter’s commentary on the passage in which Paul rebuked Peter to his face is worth quoting in full, because it sheds light on the triangular relationship between conciliarism, heresy and the conservative reaction in England. Wyclif had used the

31

Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, III, 302: ‘sic alii plures judicium subiere concilii; nequaquam ex humili condescensione, sicut fingunt aliqui, sed ex debito et obligatione’. 32

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 262: ‘non intelligendo quod Petrus erat personaliter illa petra, sed quod Petrus figurative dicebatur a Petra, quae est Christus, super quam petram est Ecclesia catholica erigenda’. 33

Augustine, Retractiones in PL, XXXII, col. 618: ‘ac sic Petrus ab hac petra appellatus personam Ecclesiae figuraret […] Non enim dictum est illi, Tu es petra; sed, Tu es Petrus. Petra autem erat Christus’. 34

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 263: ‘Petrus magister ergo est omnis fidei, innocentiae, castitatis, parsimoniae, charitatis, tolerantiae: et nulla erit virtus, cujus custos, cujus magister non fuerit Sanctus Petrus’.

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passage to make much the same point as Gerson: papal authority could be overruled if it worked against the interests of the Church. In Netter’s words, [Wyclif] recounts how Paul rebuked Peter concerning his deceitful observance of the laws. If he wishes to demote Peter from pre-eminence with this excuse and to equate Paul’s authority with Peter’s, he knows that he has taken no authority away from the true pastors of the church who are occasionally humbly subjected to the reproaches of their subjects, indeed who are willingly laid low [...] Peter showed his superiority and his humility joined together at one and the same time, for afterwards in his second letter, in the manner of a mild superior and prelate who had been willingly humiliated, he approved and defended the letters of Paul, even those passages in which Paul relates his being rebuked.35

Gerson may have agreed with Netter’s basic assertion here: that no power was taken away from Peter by Paul’s act of criticism. But he would not have agreed that Paul’s rebuke was only validated by Peter’s acceptance of it. As we have seen, Gerson had emphasized in direct contrast that on occasion popes were obliged to account for their actions. It is not difficult to understand why Netter defended the doctrine of Petrine supremacy so uncompromisingly. An attack on the pre-eminence of Peter was, for Netter, an attack on the entire hierarchy of priestly offices in the church. He reacts with horror to Wyclif’s suggestion that all the Apostles possessed a plenitude of power: What are you doing Wyclif? If you destroy the priestly order, you destroy the Church. Nor do the snares that you lay aim only to undermine the primacy of Peter, but without cause bishops will be made priests, and if bishops should be made equal with priests, their superiority will be nullified.36

Netter never mentions any conciliarists by name in the Doctrinale, and never enters into an explicit rejection of their doctrines. This would hardly have been a very diplomatic move in the circumstances of the 1420s when the Church was trying to heal the wounds of the schism. But I cannot believe that a theologian of Netter’s 35

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 255: ‘Commemorat item, quomodo Paulus Petrum reprehenderit de observatione simulata legalium. Quod si velit ex hoc colore Petrum a Principatu dejicere, et aequare illi Paulum, sciat a veris ecclesiae pastoribus nihil authoritativae potestatis imminui, quod subditorum suorum interdum increpationibus humiliter sunt subjecti, sponte prostrati […] immo significans Petrus majoritatem suam simul et humilitatem esse conjunctas, postmodum Epistola sua secunda, Pauli authorizat et defendit Epistolas, tamquam Major mitis, et Praelatus sponte dejectus, etiam illas, in quibus eum Paulus commemorat reprehensum’. 36

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 249: ‘Quod facis Wicleff? Si tollis ordinem, tollis Ecclesiam. Nec tantum contra Primatum Petri proficit quod moliris; sed sine causa Episcopi, sine causa Presbyteri fiunt, si Episcopi ad Presbyterum statuatur aequalitas, majoritas abscindatur’.

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calibre, who had attended the Council of Pisa, could have been unaware of what the conciliarists were saying. I think that he was afraid that if he were to accept the conciliarist tenets about the conditional basis of papal authority he would play into the hands of the heretics. After all, there were signs that authors inspired by Wyclif could also find canonistic texts which contradicted the prevailing interpretation of the papal monarchy. Entries in Wycliffite commonplace books pointed to passages from the canon law which said that the pope should not necessarily presume to call himself the vicar of Peter. They also made clear that popes were under obligation to act as good pastors and that wicked popes, such as the heretical Pope Anastasius II, had been punished in their own lifetimes by God.37 Other canonistic texts were cited to demonstrate that the pope could not create new laws which contradicted the Gospel or the words of the apostles.38 These Wycliffite scholars often drew on much the same material as the conciliarists, but used it with the more subversive aim of questioning the legitimacy of the Church hierarchy.39 For those, like Netter, who saw themselves as warriors for the traditional Church, to accept the arguments of Gerson was to give the game away in England. On the issue of conciliarism, Wyclif had forced his hand. At this point we come back to the question which was posed at the outset. Why was the general council largely absent from Gascoigne’s vision of church reform?40 One answer is that he was writing as the Council of Basel was finally drawing to its ignominious end. It had put the most extreme pretensions of the conciliarists into practice by ignoring the pope’s bull of dissolution in 1431 and by refusing to acknowledge his transfer of the council to Ferrara in 1437. It had further appalled conservatives and moderates alike by suspending the pope from his duties in 1438. The English government had developed a complicated relationship with the council. It had been extremely wary of its extremism, but for diplomatic reasons could not 37

The Wycliffite Floretum made this point. See London, British Library, MS Harley 401, fol. 209 . For studies of the Floretum and its English translations see Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 13–29 and Christina von Nolcken, The Middle English Translation of the Rosarium Theologie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979). For the reference to Pope Anastasius in the Decretum, see D. 19 c. 9. r

38

MS Harley 401, fol. 316 v : ‘Iudicet ergo militans ecclesia si papa sit [...] domino et legi sue obedientissimus, maxime de legis sue limitibus contentatus, non presumens ad legem suam addere vel ab ea minuere’. 39

For the place of Pope Anastasius II in canonistic thought, see Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 38, 42–45. 40

For some illuminating comments on the reception of conciliarism in England during the fifteenth century, see Harvey, England, Rome and the Papacy, pp. 214–46.

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afford to absent itself entirely. Its main intention had been to use the council as a forum for the condemnation of the Hussite heresy, and the views of its English spokesman, Peter Payne.41 But it appears from the surviving documents that as far as the English government was concerned, reform of the Church was never really on the agenda.42 The disaster of the Council of Basel must have crushed the expectation of reformers that they could bring about the purification of the Church through a general council. The lesson was not lost on Thomas Gascoigne. After having condemned the fiscal abuses of papal government, he pointed out that the Council of Basel had recently tried to abolish the payment of annates. But in England, despite the bitterness that annates aroused, this decree had proved a dead-letter. Gascoigne observed that in his own country ‘we do not see this remedy being put into place, and whether it is being carried out in France, I do not know’.43 So much for the prospects of conciliar reform. In Gascoigne’s off-hand comment it appears a distant enterprise, whose success was by no means guaranteed even in those places where secular rulers were sympathetic towards it. After having fleetingly surveyed the intellectual context in which Gascoigne wrote, I hope that we are in a better position to make sense of his pessimism. The English had been hesitant about conciliarism from the beginning, and their hesitation stemmed in large part from their fear that its doctrines were too close for comfort to the heretical attacks, real and imagined, upon the Church hierarchy in England.44 Although Gascoigne did not entirely agree with this view, he seems to have recognized that its strength in England had dampened the establishment’s enthusiasm to make use of the general council as a tool for reform. No-one with influence in England could be expected to support a self-assertive general council in its drive towards reforming the Church. In such circumstances, there was nothing left to Thomas Gascoigne, the self-styled prophet in the wilderness, but to lift up his voice to the Creator: ‘O God: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit the vine of your Church’!45

41

Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, pp. 24–25.

42

Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, pp. 55–57.

43

MS Lat. 117, p. 438: ‘Consilium enim basiliense [...] statuit et ordinavit remedium contra ista annata que anglici vocant primos fructus episcopatuum sed illud remedium non vidimus excecutum [sic] an sit exsecutum in francia nescio’. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 52. 44

For the view that English loyalty to the papacy was strengthened during the Schism by fears of heresy, see Harvey, ‘Lollardy and the Great Schism: Some Contemporary Perceptions’, in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. by Anne Hudson and M. Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 385–96. 45

15.

MS Lat. 117, p. 438: ‘Deus respice de celo et vide et visita vineam ecclesie tue’. Cf. Psalm 79.

‘L ET T HEM P RAISE H IM IN C HURCH ’*: O RTHODOX R EFORM AT S ALISBURY C ATHEDRAL IN THE F IRST H ALF OF THE F IFTEENTH C ENTURY David Lepine

S

ecular cathedrals had an important place in the early fifteenth-century reform programmes of the English Church. Reformers, recognizing the potential and importance of the pastoral role of theologians and canon lawyers, envisaged cathedrals as centres of learning and renewal for their dioceses staffed by resident, university-educated clergy. One of the first to do so was the Oxford theologian Richard Ullerston. Article V of the Petitiones quoad reformationem ecclesiae militantis, which he drew up for Bishop Hallum in 1408 for the Council of Pisa, proposed that the prebends in cathedrals reserved for theologians should not be given to the ignorant so that preaching would flourish.1 The Articuli de reformatione ecclesiae drawn up by Oxford University in 1414 were more concerned to correct abuses. Three of its forty-six articles addressed those particularly found in cathedrals: the appointment of younger sons of the aristocracy, often under age and not in orders, to prebends; pluralism, especially the accumulation of richer prebends in a few hands; and the high cost of residence which prevented poorer canons from residing and thereby reduced the level of ‘divine worship’.2 The most far-reaching programme, De collationibus beneficiorum pro natione Anglicana, discussed at the Council of Konstanz in 1417, proposed that every fourth vacant

* Psalm 106. 32, the text used by Richard Ullerston for his sermon on the canonization of St Osmund. 1 Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1126–70. In most cathedrals it was the chancellor’s duty to lecture or preach. 2

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 362.

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dignity or prebend should be reserved for unbeneficed doctors, bachelors or licentiates of theology and canon law from the diocese, and insisted they reside, preach, and teach.3 As the petition of Oxford and Cambridge universities to the Commons in 1416 put it, the lack of promotion for university graduates had resulted in ‘great and intolerable sins and heresies against God […] and rebellion and defiance against you, most sovereign lord’.4

Salisbury’s Role in the Reform Movement Salisbury played the most prominent role of the nine secular cathedrals in the reform movement. Its liturgy, the Sarum Use, and its campaign to canonize St Osmund were used as vehicles of orthodox reform, and its chapter, which included many leading reformers, lived up to the reformers’ ideal of a scholarly resident community in the first half of the fifteenth century. But it is also important to note that reform at Salisbury had its own dynamic which predates the reforms of Arundel, Ullerston, Chichele, and Henry V by twenty years. Only in the early fifteenth century did the Salisbury and national trends converge. The beginning of reform at Salisbury can be precisely dated to the calling of a general chapter on 29 July 1387 by the new dean, Thomas Montagu.5 By the early 1380s the cathedral had reached its medieval nadir. In the forty years after the Black Death, during Bishop Wyville’s later years and the episcopate of Bishop Erghum (1375–88), the chapter was largely undistinguished, with few scholars or clerics of more than diocesan significance, the core of whom comprised middleranking crown servants and ecclesiastical administrators. Several dignities, the deanery, treasurership, and two of the four archdeaconries, were held by absentee French and Italian papal provisors for much of this period and some of the richest prebends were also in their hands or were disputed.6 A succession of absentee deans left the chapter without leadership. This was of critical importance during

3 Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1076–77; Ernest F. Jacob, ‘A Note on the English Concordat of 1418’, in Medieval Studies Presented to Aubrey Gwynn SJ, ed. by John A. Watt, John B. Morrall, and Francis X. Martin (Dublin: Lochlainn, 1961), pp. 349–58. 4

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, ed. by Christopher Given-Wilson, 16 vols (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), IX , 160. 5 6

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Coman, p. 70.

John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300–1541: III, Salisbury Diocese, comp. by Joyce M. Horn (London: Athlone, 1962), pp. 3–4, 7, 9, 19, 41–42, 59, 73.

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Erghum’s episcopate. He ended the good relations Wyville had with the chapter by seeking to recover the exemption from episcopal visitation that it had been granted in 1262. This began a protracted, bitter, and expensive dispute that involved appeals to Canterbury and Rome and was not finally settled until 1392.7 Furthermore the fabric of the cathedral was in serious disrepair, with the bell tower in danger of collapse. The election of Thomas Montagu as dean in 1381/2 was a turning point, though his position was not secure until 1383 and was challenged as late as 1390–91.8 Montagu, the first resident dean of the fourteenth century, is a neglected reformer who undertook wide-ranging reforms in the cathedral which laid the foundations for its distinction in the first half of the fifteenth century. Of aristocratic birth, he was the nephew and brother of earls of Salisbury and was, perhaps, brought up in the household of John Grandisson, bishop of Exeter, his great uncle and a formidable episcopal role model.9 Grandisson presented him to his first two benefices, prebends in the Cornish collegiate churches of Glasney and St Probus in 1364, and the dean owned a missal that had once belonged to him.10 Montagu was educated at Oxford, had graduated as a bachelor of civil law by 1371 and remained there for most of the rest of the decade, engaged in further study. Oxford also gave him an awareness of the danger of heresy. The teachings of his contemporary Wyclif were censured by the pope only a few months before he acted as visitor of Exeter College in September 1378. A decade later, in 1387, he had personal experience of heresy when his brother Sir John Montagu was accused of Lollardy.11 Something of the nature of his piety emerges from his will; indeed, some aspects of it, for example the request for an absence of funeral pomp, might once have been

7

The Register of John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury 1388–95, ed. by T. C. B. Timmins, Canterbury and York Society, 80 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), pp. xix–xx. 8

Le Neve, Fasti: III, Salisbury, p. 4.

9

BRUO, II, 1296–97.

10

The Register of John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter (AD 1327–1369), with Some Account of the Episcopate of James de Berkeley (AD 1327), ed. by Francis C. Hingeston-Randolph, Episcopal Registers of the Diocese of Exeter, 3–5, 3 vols (London: Bell, 1894–97), III, 1495; London, The National Archives, PROB 11/2A. 11

K. B. McFarlane, Wycliffe and English Non-Conformity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 131. Montagu was accused of removing images in his chapel, and of sheltering Lollard preachers. The term Lollard is used in this paper to describe the heterodox beliefs that originated in the ideas of Wyclif.

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interpreted as Lollard.12 His devotion to Our Lady, the cathedral’s patron, was well known and is recorded in the chapter act book.13 The invocation of his will describes her not just as the glorious Virgin but as the ‘most’ glorious. It also lists his four patron saints, Michael, Peter, Paul, and Andrew. His fervent belief in the resurrection was expressed in the inscription he wished to be incised on his tomb slab, based on Job 19. 25–27, a revealing and unusual text: I believe that my redeemer liveth and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth and in my flesh I shall see my God whom I shall see and my eyes shall behold [him] and not another; this is my hope laid up in my bosom.

As dean he was a forceful presence at Salisbury. His grand formal entry into residence on 11 July 1390 is described at length in the chapter act book. He was received at Palace Gate with the full honour due his rank, with the choir robed in silk copes as on a double feast and the bells pealing, where he was asperged and censed and then made a solemn procession round the Close entering the cathedral through the great west door.14 The Westminster Chronicle records his reputation for ‘varied and elegant entertainment’ at the deanery which helped settle the dispute which had arisen between Bishop Waltham and Archbishop Courtenay over the latter’s visitation rights.15 On his death in 1404 the chapter praised him for his ‘zeal for the church of Salisbury’.16 Montagu’s reforms began with the 1387 general chapter which was called to consider three specific issues: the canonization of St Osmund, the dangerous condition of the bell tower, and the escalating dispute with Bishop Erghum.17 Twenty-two canons attended, double the average at this time, and agreed that all members of the chapter would contribute a seventh of the value of their prebends for seven years to fund the difficulties it faced. Despite the bishop’s opposition, the chapter decided to seek royal support for Osmund’s canonization. Erghum did, however, agree to grant indulgences to raise funds for repairs and was willing to enter negotiations with the chapter to resolve their dispute. The general chapter

12

London, National Archives, PROB 11/2A.

13

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Draper, p. 48.

14

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Dunham, p. 141.

15

The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. by L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 438. 16

Register Draper, p. 48.

17

Register Coman, pp. 70–77.

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began a decade of reform by Montagu that extended to most aspects of the cathedral: its liturgy, the minor clergy, the library, muniments and archives, and the chapter farms and property. There were visitations of the altars, chantries, and library, inventories were compiled, surveys made of chapter farms and prebends, and statements drawn up of the chapter’s rights and privileges in what Kathleen Edwards has described as ‘a great overhaul of the cathedral’s administration’.18 While these reforms were to some extent driven by the imminent prospect of an episcopal visitation after the settlement of 1392, they were already well-established by then. Montagu’s reforms culminated in his revision of the statutes in 1399. Fourteen modest ‘additions’, mainly administrative efficiencies, were made to the comprehensive statutes drawn up by Bishop Martival in 1319.19 One of Montagu’s principal aims was to raise liturgical standards. In October 1387, within three months of the general chapter, and his second major act as dean, he began a visitation of the cathedral altars and chantries to ensure they were properly equipped; a second visitation took place in May 1396.20 Under his leadership the chapter undertook a sustained campaign to raise the standards of the vicars choral. The disciplining of unruly, tavern-going, fornicating minor clergy to ensure their presence and appropriate behaviour in the choir was a routine part of capitular life at all medieval secular cathedrals. Montagu, however, went further than this. He was particularly concerned with their musical skill. It was standard practice at all cathedrals for vicars to be required to learn the psalter, hymnal, and antiphoner by heart by the end of their probationary year when their skill and suitability were examined. Such mundane, routine chapter business is usually recorded briefly, if at all, in formulaic entries. At Salisbury in the early 1390s, however, there was an increase in the importance and rigour of the examination process which is reflected in the fuller records made of it in the chapter act book. Both William Jakis and Robert Everad were ‘examined rigorously’ before their appointment in October 1393 and Thomas Forest was considered suitable because of his ‘good character and commendable skill’.21 At a special meeting after vespers on 27 January 1394 the dean warned all the vicars about the quality of their singing and ordered the succentor to discipline those who did not reach an acceptable 18

Kathleen Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, in Victoria County History: Wiltshire, III, ed. by R . B. Pugh and Elizabeth Crittall (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 156–210 (p. 176). 19 Statutes and Customs of the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Salisbury, ed. by Christopher Wordsworth and Douglas Macleane (London: Clowes, 1915), pp. 306–07. 20

Register Coman, p. 94; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Holme, p. 40.

21

Register Dunham, pp. 241, 252–53.

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standard.22 Wider recruitment was also used to raise standards, with the appointment of vicars from as far as Hereford and Worcester dioceses, rather than the Salisbury region from which most were drawn.23 Montagu sought to raise liturgical standards in other ways too: repeated steps were taken in 1387, 1388, 1389, and again in 1395 to ensure that chantry masses were celebrated in succession, not simultaneously, so that visitors would always be able to hear one, and in 1394 the chantry chaplains were warned to attend all the offices on feasts of nine lessons to carry out the more elaborate ceremonies.24 This revival of liturgical standards in the 1390s laid the foundations for the later promotion of the Sarum Use in the early fifteenth century. These reforms led to a period of sustained liturgical development over the next twenty years. The cult of Our Lady, to whom the cathedral was dedicated, was enhanced twice: in 1395 when the chapter established a Marian antiphon, Sancta Maria Virgo, to be sung by the choristers each evening after compline ‘in honour of the glorious Virgin’ and for Bishop Waltham, and in 1406 when the feast of her Conception was raised to the rank of a double feast.25 Later the same year the feast of Corpus Christi was also upgraded.26 The celebration of mass was dignified and elaborated also in 1406: two torches were to be lit at the elevation of the host at high mass on double feasts and those with nine lessons and the obit masses at St John’s altar were to be celebrated by a priest, deacon, and subdeacon with four additional vicars present to chant.27 Two residentiaries made generous bequests explicitly to sustain and enhance the performance of the liturgy. In 1410 the executors of John Maidenith gave £40 to support the minor clergy ‘on account of his devotion to the liturgy and wishing to increase divine service’, to which the chapter added a further £20.28 Five years later, in May 1415, William Loring added £20 to his obit endowment on the same terms.29 To ‘increase divine service’ was

22

Register Dunham, p. 259.

23

Register Holme, p. 6.

24

Register Coman, p. 92; Register Dunham, pp. 26, 100; Register Holme, p. 32.

25

Register Holme, p. 10; Register Draper, p. 65.

26

Register Draper, p. 66.

27

Register Draper, pp. 56, 65.

28

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Viring, fols 20v–21 v.

29

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Pountney, fol. 9v.

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also the reason Archbishop Arundel gave when he established his obit in 1414, though he had no other connection with the cathedral.30 The scale of Montagu’s achievement was made clear in Bishop Waltham’s 1394 visitation when only minor faults were found.31 Thereafter, regular episcopal visitations helped maintain standards. Having lost its exemption from episcopal visitation in 1392, Salisbury became one of the most visited English cathedrals. There were ten visitations between 1394 and 1454, at roughly the seven-year intervals set out in the 1392 composition.32 In 1418 Bishop Chandler found twenty-six faults, most of them relatively minor and over half relating to the conduct of individual vicars.33 This impression of generally good order was confirmed by Archbishop Chichele’s visitation in 1423 which found so little wrong that verbal corrections sufficed.34 However, it proved hard to maintain this standard. Bishop Aiscough’s visitation in 1440 listed sixty-eight faults which reveal considerable slackness in the performance of the liturgy and, although there had been a significant improvement by the time of his next visitation in 1447, Bishop Beauchamp found ninety faults in 1454.35

Promoting the Chapter Personnel Montagu’s reforms were paralleled by changes in the membership of the chapter. Half a century ago E. F. Jacob and Kathleen Edwards noted how unusually distinguished the Salisbury chapter was in the early fifteenth century.36 The transformation of the personnel of the chapter from an undistinguished, if worthy, provincial corporation into a dynamic, learned body with wide horizons is more complex than it first appears. It was not simply the result of enlightened episcopal policy. In theory the right to appoint to all prebends and dignities except the dean, who was elected by the chapter, belonged to the bishop. However, his patronage 30

Register Pountney, fol. 4v .

31

Register Dunham, pp. 290–91.

32

In 1394, 1397, 1404, 1411, 1418, 1425, 1432, 1440, 1447, 1454.

33

Register Pountney, fols 51r–53r.

34

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, III, 512–15.

35

Trowbridge, Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, D1/2/10 ii, fols 80v –85r , 86r–87v ; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Burgh, fols 47r–52v . 36

Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, pp. 176–79; Ernest F. Jacob, ‘The Medieval Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral’, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 51 (1947), 479–95.

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was considerably circumscribed. A new bishop found the chapter full of his predecessor’s men and had to wait for vacancies. Direct intervention by the pope and the king still took place in the late fourteenth century and although the former largely ceased in the early fifteenth century, royal pressure continued, if more covertly. Exchanges of benefices between clerics also diminished episcopal patronage; this was the era of ‘chop churches’ when exchanges reached their peak. In 1404, an exceptional year, there were as many as thirteen at Salisbury.37 Bishop Erghum’s translation to Bath and Wells in 1388 allowed a fresh start in the dispute between the bishop and chapter which was finally settled in the bishop’s favour in 1392 and good relations between the two were resumed. Erghum’s successors, John Waltham (1388–95) and Richard Mitford (1395–1407), began the transformation of the chapter. Waltham, though he had remarkably few opportunities (there were vacancies in only a quarter of the dignities and prebends during his episcopate) appointed Robert Hallum and two members of Archbishop Arundel’s circle of clerks, Richard Pittes and Ralph Selby.38 Two other prominent members of the chapter, John Chandler and Robert Ragenhull, sought and acquired prebends by exchange during Waltham’s episcopate. Mitford, with far more vacancies to fill, had a greater impact and most notably brought Henry Chichele to the cathedral and diocese. He began to collate more scholars, the theologians Robert Broun, Roger Corringham, and Richard Dereham.39 By the mid-1390s there was a core of active learned residentiaries in sympathy with Montagu’s reforms. Thomas Southam (d. 1404) and John Turk (d. 1397) were experienced clerics of an older generation. Southam had been in the service of Archbishop Langham and had been active in the suppression of heresy in the 1380s, and Turk was a theologian, former fellow of Merton College, and chancellor of Oxford University.40 William Loring (d. 1416) and John Maidenith (d. 1407) were, as we have seen, generous benefactors of the liturgy.41 Richard Pittes (d. 1415) combined assiduous residence with an active pastoral role as examiner general in the diocesan consistory court. Robert Ragenhull (d. 1407), like Pittes a protégé of Bishop Arundel at Cambridge and Ely before following Bishop

37

Le Neve, Fasti: III, Salisbury, pp. 10–12, 17, 20, 24, 27, 51–52, 67.

38

BRUC, pp. 467, 517.

39

BRUO, I, 280–81, 494–95; BRUC, pp. 184–85.

40

BRUO, III, 1733, 1916–17.

41

BRUO, II, 1163, 1246–47.

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Waltham to Salisbury, combined parish ministry and preaching.42 The most distinguished member of this group was John Chandler (d. 1426) who was active both in royal service and as a residentiary canon.43 A diligent pastor, he was elected dean in 1404 and bishop twice, first (unsuccessfully) in 1407 and again in 1417, and proved himself a worthy successor to both Montagu as dean and Hallum as bishop. Although not as distinguished as the next generation of canons, they had a wider experience of the Church and greater learning than their immediate predecessors and together made a significant contribution to the revival of the 1390s. It was Robert Hallum, however, who brought the chapter to its full eminence in the second decade of the fifteenth century, a position it held for at least the next fifty years. The appointment of scholars, particularly theologians, reached its apogee during his episcopate. He appointed five leading Oxford theologians, three of whom, John Fyton, John Luke, and Richard Ullerston, entered residence.44 He also appointed the canonist William Lyndwood, and senior papal servants and royal diplomats such as Thomas Polton and Nicholas Ryssheton.45 Hallum’s successors, Bishops Chandler (1417–26), Neville (1427–38) and Aiscough (1438–50) continued this trend. They collated many future leaders of the Church, among them Thomas Bourgchier, Thomas Brouns, John Chedworth, and John Stafford, but Andrew Holes and Gilbert Kymer, two of the chapter’s most loyal and distinguished members, were royal appointments.46 A disproportionately large number of the English delegates to the church councils of the early fifteenth century were members of the Salisbury chapter; there were three at Pisa, seven at Konstanz and four at Basel.47 Salisbury was the only chapter to appoint its own representatives at the Council of Konstanz, two resident and two non-resident.48 The presence of so many of the leading clerics of their generation among the chapter further enhanced the cathedral’s status and reputation which was already

42

BRUC, p. 470.

43

BRUO, I, 397–98.

44

BRUO, II, 737–38, 1175–76; III, 1928–29.

45

BRUO, III, 1494–95, 1619–20.

46

BRUO, I, 230–32, 281–82, 401–02; III, 1750–52; II, 949–50, 1068–69.

47

Henry Chichele, Richard Dereham, and Nicholas Ryssheton at Pisa; William Chichele, William Clint, Richard Dereham, John Fitton, Hugh Holbeach, Thomas Polton, and Thomas Teynton at Konstanz; and Thomas Brouns, Reginald Kentwode, Alexander Sparrow, and John Symondsburgh at Basel. 48

Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, p. 177; Register Pountney, fol. 8r.

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high, even if some had only a nominal connection.49 As a result of the late fourteenth-century reforms, Ullerston’s ideal of a resident scholarly cathedral chapter was to a large degree achieved in the first half of the fifteenth century, guided by a succession of distinguished resident deans from Thomas Montagu to Gilbert Kymer. This was a period of stable and relatively high levels of residence: from the 1390s to the mid-1430s between twelve and sixteen resided and in the 1440s between ten and twelve.50 However, although there were scholars among the resident canons, it is much harder to establish how active they were and the extent to which residence was simply comfortable retirement. There is little direct evidence to answer this question. Book ownership, even when it can be definitively established, is notoriously unreliable. While there are examples of residentiaries with significant libraries, for example Nicholas Wykeham, who had twenty-five volumes, it is much harder to establish the use of these manuscripts at Salisbury.51 For some, though, a convincing case can be made. Richard Ullerston himself was one of the most distinguished members of the early fifteenth-century chapter.52 For him residence was at least partial retirement from his engagement at the heart of the most important religious controversies of the day: the battle against Wyclif, the Schism, conciliarism, and the translation of scripture. His major theological works were written at Oxford before he moved to Salisbury. But he brought this experience to the Close where he put the reformers’ ideals into practice by keeping assiduous residence and promoting two reformist causes, the canonization of St Osmund and the Sarum Use. Perhaps the most attractive and admirable of the Salisbury canons was Andrew Holes, resident for nearly twenty years from 1446 to 1467 and probably until his death in 1470, apart from a two-year absence in 1450–52 when he was keeper of the privy seal.53 He settled at Salisbury soon after his return from royal and papal service in Italy late in 1444 with a library so large that it required a ship rather than

49

They spent little, if any, time at Salisbury, sometimes not even being personally installed in their prebend, a detachment reflected in their surviving wills, which often make no mention of the cathedral. 50

David N. Lepine, A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 211–15. 51

BRUO, III, 2111–12.

52

BRUO, III, 1928–29.

53

BRUO, II, 949–50; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Communar’s Accounts nos 48a–60 and Registers Burgh and Newton passim.

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the customary cart to transport it to England.54 Once thought almost entirely lost, Margaret Harvey has recently identified twenty-five of his books.55 They reflect the wide range of his intellectual horizons. The emphasis was on law, both civil and canon law texts as well as commentaries; several of the latter were recent works by Italian masters. There was a limited amount of theology but of greater interest is his collection of Christian humanist texts and works of the early Christian fathers. Holes had a love of poetry and a habit of noting verses in the margins of his books. Many have signs of heavy use, probably mainly in Italy. During his time in Italy Holes gained a very high reputation. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, usually a critical observer, praised his ‘great learning’ and ‘holy way of life’: ‘after saying the office he would spend two or three hours on his knees in prayer, and the rest of his time reading. He gave alms freely and he and his household fared very soberly’. Vespasiano says that on his return to England he withdrew from service and took his books to a benefice, presumably Salisbury, ‘putting aside all temporal cares as one who wishes to be dead to the world for the love of God’. Holes’s life at Salisbury suggests he broadly deserves this encomium. His copy of Petrarch’s De vita solitaria is heavily and revealingly annotated, particularly the passages on the merits of serving God through study, meditation, and writing. He resided at Salisbury most of the year, well above the minimum requirement, promoted scholarship as patron of the library and its lectures, and his post mortem almsgiving was generous. However, his ‘frugality’ is best understood in relative terms; he lived at Leadenhall, one of the grandest houses in the Close, and his will refers to a substantial amount of plate and some Italian ‘designer clothing’, a long scarlet cloak made in Rome of Florentine cloth using English wool.56 Like most late medieval higher clergy he made a careful distinction between the ownership of wealth and the misuse of it.57 There was already a notable scholar at Salisbury when Holes arrived, Gilbert Kymer. Treasurer from 1427, elected dean in 1449 and resident from 1440 until his death in 1463, Kymer was a leading physician in the service of Humphrey, duke

54 Josephine W. Bennett, ‘Andrew Holes: A Neglected Harbinger of the English Renaissance’, Speculum, 19 (1944), 314–35. 55

Margaret Harvey, ‘An Englishman at the Roman Curia during the Council of Basel: Andrew Holes, his Sermon of 1433 and his Books’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 42 (1991), 19–38 (pp. 30–34). 56

Anon., ‘Will of Andrew Holes, AD 1470’, Wiltshire Notes and Queries, 4 (1902–04), 566–71; original will at London, National Archives, PROB 11/5. 57

Harvey, ‘An Englishman at the Roman Curia’, p. 29.

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of Gloucester and served as chancellor of Oxford University in 1431–34 and again from 1447 to 1453.58 During his second term he combined residence at Salisbury and Oxford.59 At Salisbury he was an active patron of book production. Four medical texts he commissioned between 1448 and 1460 from Herman Zurke, a German scribe working in Dragon Street, have survived.60 He also supervised the building of the new library.61 Thomas Cyrcetur was a much less remarkable man but more typical of the chapter as a whole.62 A conservative, anti-Wyclifite theologian, as R. M. Ball has shown, he was an indefatigable preacher; ‘among all the works of mercy’, he wrote in his copy of a sermon collection, ‘preaching is the most pleasing to God’.63 He was partially resident in 1431–35 and fully resident from 1440 until his death in 1453.64 The annotations in his books, fourteen of which are still in the cathedral library, reveal that he used them at Salisbury in the 1430s and 1440s. Cyrcetur’s predecessor Robert Ragenhull (d. 1407) was probably as active but we know much less about his preaching simply because his books have not survived.65 Those listed in his will show that he was well equipped to preach.66 As well as three popular collections of Sunday sermons he owned an ‘exposition of words of the Bible’ and a treatise on the seven deadly sins and the sins of the tongue which together suggest an audience of lay parishioners. After training as one of Arundel’s clerks, a fellowship at King’s Hall, Cambridge, and diocesan service for Bishop Waltham, Ragenhull combined cathedral and parish life. In October 1395, seven months after his appointment to the provostship of St Edmund’s church, one of the three Salisbury parish churches, he entered residence at the cathedral

58

BRUO, II, 1068–69.

59

Communar’s Accounts nos 48b–57 and Registers Burgh and Newton passim.

60

Andrew G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 435–1600 in Oxford Libraries, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) I, nos 80–81, 610, 843. 61

Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, p. 178.

62

BRUO, I, 531–32.

63

R. M. Ball, ‘Thomas Cyrcetur, a Fifteenth Century Theologian and Preacher’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 205–39. 64

Communar’s Accounts nos 48a–b; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Registers Harding, Hutchins and Burgh passim. 65 66

BRUC, p. 470.

The Register of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury 1404–1417, ed. by T. C. B. Timmins, Wilstshire Record Society, 39 (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1983), no. 449.

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and remained a residentiary until his death.67 His generous bequests to St Edmund’s and its parishioners and his wish to be buried in its churchyard rather than the cathedral also suggest that he was an active pastor and preacher there. During the last decade of his life Ragenhull embodied the reformer’s ideal of a scholarly resident chapter, disseminating university learning at parish level to raise pastoral standards. He bequeathed all his books to the chaplains of St Edmund’s, including a contemplative work, the Stimulus amoris, Walter Hilton’s reworking of the meditation on the Passion and the spiritual life by James of Milan ( Jacopo da Milano). Further detailed study of surviving manuscripts at Salisbury would probably identify other scholarly residentiaries. Even the much poorer, more remote and less distinguished Hereford chapter had active resident scholars in the fifteenth century.68 Collectively, the chapter promoted learning by building a new library and lecture room above the east walk of the cloisters in January 1445 ‘for the increase of faith, knowledge and virtue […] for the use of those wishing to study there’.69 This was a major undertaking. It occupied all ten bays of the cloister, approximately 165 feet (50 m), and cost £447 18s. 8d., a substantial outlay on top of an expensive canonization campaign.70 The scale of the library may have been in anticipation of the arrival of Holes’s library. Although the decision to build it was taken before he entered residence, it was soon after his return to England, and he was already well known to the chapter as chancellor and active on their behalf on canonization business. Holes was certainly a benefactor of the library and instrumental in developing its use; in 1454 the lectures held there were increased to once a fortnight at his expense.71 If his books were placed there it was only during his lifetime. In accordance with his will, his library was dispersed after his death. How much use was made of the library is hard to ascertain, but Thomas Cyrcetur’s annotations of its copy of a thirteenth-century book of sermons demonstrates some at least. The chapter also promoted learning through its patronage of De Vaux

67

Register Holme, p. 27.

68

David N. Lepine, ‘A Long Way from University: Cathedral Canons and Learning at Hereford in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Jenny Stratford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 11 (Donington: Tyas, 2002), pp. 178–95. 69

Register Hutchins, fol. 40.

70

Register Burgh, p. 99.

71

Sarah Brown, Sumptuous and Richly Adorn’d: The Decoration of Salisbury Cathedral (London: The Stationery Office, 1999), pp. 91, 94.

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College, whose warden was a resident canon. This thirteenth-century foundation was unique to Salisbury and was once thought to be a nascent university college. Originally intended as a chantry and to provide for twenty poor scholars to study theology and the liberal arts, the limited surviving evidence suggests that it supported scholars until the Reformation but on a smaller scale.72 Its modest endowments resulted in fewer fellows, about a dozen, and meagre fellowships. Even so, it gave educational opportunities to able local clerics from the diocese of Salisbury, several of whom went to university, predominantly Oxford, including some who later played an important role in cathedral administration as chapter clerks.

Promotion of the Sarum Use and Attempts to Canonize St Osmund In the early fifteenth century Salisbury and national reform trends combined in two closely related reform campaigns, the promotion of the Sarum Use and ongoing attempts to canonize St Osmund. The context of this convergence was the growing crisis of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: endemic plague; popular revolt in 1381; political crisis in the 1380s and 1390s, culminating in Henry IV’s usurpation in 1399; schism within the Church; Wyclif’s attack on its most fundamental doctrine, the mass; and the threat of Lollardy.73 In response there was a vigorous reassertion of orthodoxy in its most fundamental and efficacious form, the liturgy, especially the celebration of the mass. There was a renewed emphasis on its importance, enhancement, and augmentation, often simply expressed in the familiar but opaque phrase ‘for the increase of divine service’. This rested on the belief that the worship of God, in essence the performance of the liturgy to the highest standard, was a paramount duty of all Christians. It was the best means to secure God’s blessing and ensure good order in society. Its vigorous performance would reinforce orthodoxy and satisfy lay spiritual demands. The growth in importance of the liturgy was accelerated by two developments in the political theology of kingship: the belief that the king was God’s vicar and that the English were God’s chosen people. Henry V, a monarch

72

Kathleen Edwards, ‘The College of De Vaux Salisbury’, in Victoria County History: Wiltshire, III, pp. 369–85. 73

Clive Burgess, ‘An Institution for all Seasons: The Late Medieval English College’, in The Late Medieval College and its Context, ed. by Clive Burgess and Martin Heale (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 3–27.

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of unusual piety, enhanced the cults of ‘national’ saints such as St George and placed a new emphasis on the Virgin as England’s special protector; both of which reflected the growing national consciousness and sense of Englishness.74 Salisbury was at the heart of this revival of orthodoxy and enhancement of the liturgy in the early fifteenth century: there was a renewed promotion of its Use, the Virgin was the cathedral’s patron and the king was a member of its fraternity. The importance of liturgy, the pre-eminence of the Sarum Use and its Englishness were major themes of a sermon Richard Ullerston preached in the cathedral in May 1416 to promote the canonization of St Osmund, and were put forward as evidence of his saintliness. He commended Osmund as the founder of what he called the ‘incomparable’ Sarum liturgy and praised him for increasing and embellishing the cultum Dei. The Englishness of the Sarum rite and its superiority are stressed.75 Ullerston argued that it eliminated earlier errors by selecting the best elements of other rites, quoting Pope Gregory’s instruction to St Augustine to collect what was pleasing to God from ‘pious, holy, and righteous’ English churches. It followed therefore, that English rites were ‘more perfect’ than any other in Christendom and that the Sarum Use was pre-eminent in the world. This hyperbole was at least partly shared by the authors of two Wycliffite tracts, The Order of Priesthood and Of Feigned Contemplative Life.76 They were vehement in their condemnation not only of elaborate liturgy but specifically of the Salisbury Use, its principal vehicle. The use was one of ‘sathanas disceitis’, devised by ‘proude prestis, coueitous, lecherous & dronkelewe’.77 It was a hindrance to faith because it prevented preaching; instead, if priests say their ‘matynes, masse & euensong aftir salisbury vsse’ it is considered enough.78 This remained a theme in Lollard sermons:

74

Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, pp. 97–115.

75

A. R. Malden, The Canonization of St Osmund (Salisbury: Wiltshire Record Society, 1901), pp. 236–42. 76

Wyclif himself had more complex views on liturgical elaboration; see Ian C. Levy, ‘Wyclif and the Christian Life’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. by Ian C. Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 293–363. 77

The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. by F. D. Matthew, EETS, O. S. 74 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1880), pp. 193–94. 78

The English Works of Wyclif, ed. by Matthew, p. 193.

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‘for Salusbury us […] be not nedfulle to come to heuene’.79 Indeed a Lollard plot in 1431 sought to raze the cathedral to the ground.80 The response to such criticism was to promote the liturgy as a bulwark against heresy that would also satisfy lay spiritual demands. Although Nigel Morgan has convincingly argued that the Sarum Use had largely been adopted in the province of Canterbury by about 1325, rather than the mid-fifteenth century, it is equally clear that there was a second campaign to promote it during Archbishop Chichele’s primacy, particularly in the reign of Henry V.81 Four key promoters can be identified: Richard Ullerston, probably at the instigation of Bishop Hallum, though there is no direct evidence of this, Archbishop Chichele himself, Richard Clifford, bishop of London, and the canonist William Lyndwood. All four had close connections with the cathedral. The first to promote it was Bishop Clifford who introduced it to St Paul’s cathedral in 1414 as a means of ensuring uniformity. During his visitation he found that the St Paul’s Use was followed in the choir but elsewhere, in chantries, the Sarum Use was favoured.82 Clifford had been a canon of Salisbury, and was resident in 1392 and an occasional visitor in 1393 and 1395, when he was the chapter’s choice to succeed Bishop Waltham.83 He witnessed the liturgical revival of the mid-1390s. The most influential and important promoter was Archbishop Chichele. His strong ties with both the cathedral and diocese of Salisbury consisted of a succession of four prebends, two archdeaconries, and the chancellorship between 1397 and 1409 and service to Bishop Mitford from April 1397 to March 1399.84 Brief periods of residence in 1398 and 1405–06 and a house in the Close from 1400 until 1420 made him familiar with the revived liturgical standards resulting from Montagu’s reforms.85 He held the use in particularly high regard, describing

79

English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–96), II, ed. by Pamela Gradon, pp. 362–63. 80

Ball, ‘Thomas Cyrcetur’, p. 235.

81

Nigel Morgan, ‘The Introduction of the Sarum Calendar into the Dioceses of England in the Thirteenth Century’, in Thirteenth Century England, 8: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1999, ed. by Michael Prestwich, Richard H. Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 179–206. 82

William S. Simpson, ‘A Mandate of Bishop Clifford’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 2nd ser., 14 (1891–93), 118–28. 83

Richard G. Davies, ‘Clifford, Richard (d. 1421)’, entry in ODNB.

84

BRUO, I, 410–12; Wiltshire and Swindon Archives D1/2/6, fols 17, 64.

85

Communar’s Account no. 17 and Register Draper passim; Wiltshire and Swindon Archives D1/2/6, fol. 160r; D1/2/8, fol. 25r.

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it in 1425 as ‘renowned and praiseworthy’, and actively promoted it.86 Following a visitation of Chichester cathedral in 1423 he persuaded the chapter to adopt it.87 The following year the dean of Chichester, William Milton, a former registrar of Chichele and active canon of Salisbury, bequeathed the cathedral a great missal of the Sarum Use.88 However, there is some doubt about whether the use was fully introduced. Both Milton’s bequest of Sarum liturgical books and a later bequest by Simon Northlew in 1429 were conditional on the adoption of the new use.89 It was probably at Chichele’s behest that Bishop Heyworth introduced the Sarum Use at Lichfield cathedral in 1428; though, as at Chichester, there is subsequent evidence of incomplete adoption.90 Sarum’s established high status is evident in its use as the model for liturgical developments. When the cults of Sts George, John of Beverley, Chad, David, and Winifrid were raised to double feasts across the whole province of Canterbury in 1415–16 the Sarum liturgy was prescribed.91 Its authority was confirmed and enhanced by William Lyndwood’s Provinciale of 1434, which cited the Sarum Use as the ultimate liturgical authority.92 Lyndwood seems to have been responsible for strengthening its authority with a spurious justification, that the bishop of Salisbury was the precentor of the college of bishops and therefore responsible for the celebration of the divine offices. Like Chichele, Lyndwood was familiar with the use having started his career in the service of Bishop Hallum from 1408 to 1411; he was a canon for twenty years and regularly visited the cathedral in 1412.93 Clifford and Chichele were primarily concerned with the adoption of the Sarum Use at cathedrals. At much the same time, the early fifteenth century, its influence at parish level was strengthened by the spread of the Sarum Manuale, the book 86

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, IV , 274.

87

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, III, 505.

88

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, II, 287.

89

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, II, 401.

90

Ann J. Kettle and D. A. Johnson, ‘The Cathedral of Lichfield’, in Victoria County History: Staffordshire, III, ed. by Michael W. Greenslade (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 140–99 (p. 161). 91

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, III, 28–29, 256.

92

William Lyndwood, Provinciale (seu Constitutiones Angliæ) (Oxford: Hall, 1679), pp. 103–04. 93

BRUO, II, 1191–93; The Register of Robert Hallum, Bishop of Salisbury 1407–17, ed. by Joyce M. Horn, Canterbury and York Society, 72 (Torquay: Devonshire, 1982), nos 129, 166, 864, 945, 1130 on pp. 18, 22–23, 114, 139 and 215; Communars’ Accounts nos 31–32.

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containing the services used in parishes rather than greater churches. Its popularity contributed to the growing sophistication of parish liturgy, especially in wealthier urban parishes. The campaign to canonize St Osmund, first begun in 1228, revived in 1387, but not finally achieved until 1457, was initially a local concern. However, the second revival by Bishop Hallum in 1411–12 took on a wider dimension. As well as the usual generic claims of a virtuous life and miracles, other arguments were put forward as evidence of his sanctity which reflected the reform debate within the Church. Richard Ullerston’s canonization sermon in May 1416 firmly placed Osmund in the wider context of church reform at the Council of Konstanz.94 It began with prayers for the Emperor Sigismund and Henry V and portrays Osmund as a vigorous reforming bishop, a model of episcopal leadership in the service of renewal. Osmund is commended for his foundation of the cathedral, which is likened to Pope Gregory the Great’s foundation of seven monasteries, and justified by St Birgitta’s revelation that Christ sanctioned endowments to the church so that the clergy would have quiet places in which to pray. Ullerston is remarkably specific about the details of Osmund’s foundation, giving the date, 1091, location at Old Sarum, and the number of prebends, thirty-two. Such an explicit defence of church property was a direct response to Wyclif’s and Lollard calls for disestablishment and to recent events, namely the proposal to disendow the Church made at the 1410 parliament, and Oldcastle’s revolt in 1413–14. Ullerston had already written a strong defence of church property, the Defensiorum dotacionis ecclesiae, in 1401, a copy of which was in the cathedral library at Salisbury.

Conclusions Cathedrals had an important role in orthodox reform in the early fifteenth century as centres of learning and renewal staffed by resident university-educated clergy. Many of the English chapters, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, and Wells among them, were active centres of learning. What was unique about Salisbury was that as well as fulfilling its role at diocesan level it had national significance. Reform at Salisbury started earlier than elsewhere and was self-generated. Dean Montagu and a succession of learned, active deans in conjunction with vigorous, pastorally committed bishops, raised the cathedral chapter from comfortable complacency

94

Malden, Canonization of St Osmund, pp. 236–42.

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to far-sighted distinction. At the core of its reforms were Montagu’s revival of liturgical standards in the 1390s and the building of a scholarly community of resident canons. This community had close connections with the universities, especially Oxford, a strong commitment to the transmission of scholarship to achieve pastoral renewal and an awareness of the problems of the wider Church. Salisbury’s distinctively English liturgy was a counter to the threat of heresy and the leading members of its chapter played a significant role in reform, both nationally in the reforms of Archbishops Arundel and Chichele, and internationally in the church councils of the early fifteenth century.

L ONDON AFTER A RUNDEL: L EARNED R ECTORS AND THE S TRATEGIES OF O RTHODOX R EFORM Sheila Lindenbaum

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eginning in the 1430s, the city of London’s ecclesiastical landscape was perceptibly altered by a cohort of learned rectors arriving to take up benefices in parish churches. Prior to this time, most of the London rectors who were university graduates had been absentees, leaving the pastoral work to less qualified substitutes while seeking higher preferment as churchmen or officers of the crown.1 The London rectors that are my subject here were a different breed. A special branch of the Church Militant, animated by missionary zeal, they committed themselves fully to London, determined to enact the programme of orthodox reform being promoted by their universities: namely, ‘the extirpation of heresies and errors, the augmentation of the faith, the dignity of the clergy, and the security of the holy mother church’.2 The strategies they pursued in executing this project were consistent with Arundel’s Constitutions, but were far more diverse,

1

In keeping with this pattern, Alison K. McHardy finds that the graduate rectors of Chaucer’s time were non-resident ‘high flyers’, while the others were ‘undistinguished and obscure’:‘The Churchmen of Chaucer’s London: The Seculars’, Medieval Prosopography, 16 (1995), 57–87 (pp. 65, 63). A list of the ‘high flyers’ in the 1430s and 1440s would include a number of future bishops and statesmen (Thomas Beckington, Adam Moleyns) and the early humanists Andrew Holes and Vincent Clement. 2

In 1446, Queens’ College Cambridge was dedicated ‘ad [...] extirpationem heresium et errorum, fidei augmentum, clerique decorem ac stabilimentum sacrosancte matris ecclesie’. W. G. Searle, The History of the Queens’ College of St Margaret and St Bernard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1867), pp. 4, 8. The dedication reflects the goals of all the reform foundations, starting with Lincoln College in 1427.

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theologically inventive, and appealing to local parishioners than such conformity might suggest.3 These strategies were addressed, first of all, to securing an influential position in the city, and then to shaping a distinctive theology and mode of preaching that would eradicate all forms of controversy in religion. The campaign that ensued, which produced a remarkable body of theological writing, proved to be the most important intervention in London’s religious life in the generation after Arundel, one which brought the universities to the city in an immediate, practical way. The ‘pastoral imperative’ that energized the new rectors had been gaining strength since the time of Archbishop Arundel. As the conciliar era began, it was clear to English churchmen that the necessary work of reform was not only a matter of rooting out heretics, but also of curbing the clerical abuses that provided dissidents with ammunition for their cause. High on the list was the evil of nonresidence: a pastor’s failure to care for his flock because he was simultaneously in possession of a better job elsewhere. In a convocation of clergy in 1410, nonresidence was judged ‘scandalum manifestum’ because it deprived parishioners of the preaching and moral example which were needed for salvation (the pastor’s presence ‘verbo et exemplo’) and also, it was implied, because Wycliffite preachers could more easily gain access to parish churches when the pastor was negligent or just not there.4 The remedy was to be a new generation of priests, who would not only reside in the parishes but be a match for Wycliffite preachers in learning, and who would be cleansed of heretical views by new forms of academic censorship, such as the ones proposed for Oxford in Arundel’s Constitutions. Between 1410 and 1439, the need to put orthodox graduates into parish livings was a continuing theme in

3

The Constitutions were readily accessible to London clergy in William Lyndwood’s Provinciale, a digest of ecclesiastical law compiled in 1422–34 while he was rector of All Hallows Bread Street and officiating in the Court of Arches. Quotations from the Constitutions in this paper are taken from the version in Lyndwood, Provinciale (seu Constitutiones Angliæ) (Oxford: Hall, 1679), which includes Lyndwood’s important glosses noting clarifications and exceptions. 4 R . M. Ball emphasizes the London rectors’ commitment to a ‘pastoral imperative’ in his seminal article on their ‘common theological culture’: ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecok’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), 230–62 (pp. 234, 261, 230). For ‘scandalum manifestum’, see Records of Convocation, ed. by Gerald Lewis Bray (Woodbridge: Boydell in association with the Church of England Record Society, 2005), IV : Canterbury 1377–1414, p. 371. A quota of graduates to be appointed to vacant benefices was established in 1418 but frequently ignored: Records of Convocation, ed. by Bray, V : Canterbury 1414–1443, p. 65.

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the Canterbury convocations of clergy, and by the end of this period, it had become full-blown ideology within the English church. As envisioned by Thomas Gascoigne, the Oxford chancellor, whose job it was to produce the desired personnel, the new priests would exemplify a life of Christian morality illuminated by learning. They would stay clear of the trade in benefices whereby church livings were used for financial speculation, to be accumulated, sold, or exchanged. They would recruit and educate young men for the priesthood. Above all, they would be Christ-like preachers, full of spiritual and prophetic insight.5 This vision of a learned, evangelical priesthood explains the new London rectors’ remarkable unanimity of purpose (Reginald Pecock always excepted) and the shared strategies they pursued in their urban campaign. By their time, the ideal had become implicit in the education of promising students, ready to be put into practice by a select few, either as conscious intent or an internalized guide to behaviour, whenever the pressure of events should call them into action. And that is what happened in the early 1430s. It has been said that by this time, the English church was no longer seriously threatened by dissent: ‘a devoutly orthodox nation, […] willing to obey the ecclesiastical law and to accept the pattern of worship and private devotion approved by government, must have appeared to be achieved’.6 But the clergy in London parishes, working at the grass-roots level, would not have seen things this way. Schism and anticlericalism were everywhere in the air. In 1431, the year Reginald Pecock became a London rector, Wycliffite priests could still be found in the heart of the city, as Bishop Gray’s recent showtrials had taken pains to reveal. In that same year, it was the execution of a Wycliffite priest from the London diocese, Thomas Bagley, which set off the revolt of ‘Jack Straw’, whose brief was to ‘take owte the temperalteys of Hooly Chyrche’. Handbills in the parishes of St Clement Danes and St Giles Cripplegate revived the Lollard disendowment bill of 1410, this time naming actual workmen from London neighbourhoods who would soon be taking over the lands and titles of great prelates and noble lords. As the revolt spread, it resonated strongly with the terrible religious wars abroad. In Bohemia, the London clergy knew, the Hussites had cast priests out of their parishes, confiscated their goods, and slaughtered

5

Records of Convocation, IV : Canterbury 1377–1414 and V : Canterbury 1414–1443, passim (promotion of graduates). Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 198, 188–89, 58. 6

Jeremy I. Catto, ‘The World of Henry Chichele and the Foundation of All Souls’, in Unarmed Soldiery: Studies in the Early History of All Souls College (Oxford: All Souls College, 1996), pp. 1–13 (p. 7).

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civilians by the thousands in the process. Now it seemed that English insurgents, acting on similar principles, were on the verge of doing the same thing.7 The London rectors were not prepared to take up arms, like the pope’s soldiers against the Hussites, but they could respond to anticlericalism according to the script they had learned at the universities. Their first course of action was therefore to take up residence in their London parishes — to exemplify the ‘dignity of the clergy’ in the flesh. And they appeared in significant numbers. The list of graduate rectors in Appendix A may seem small in view of London’s more than one hundred churches, but it is probably not complete, and even as it is, there were enough new rectors to have a considerable impact within a city that did not occupy much more than a square mile. Until the fall of Pecock in 1457, which concluded the initial phase of their campaign, learned rectors became increasingly more numerous in London, their impact enhanced because many of them stayed for very long periods and in many cases moved into parishes where there had formerly been disgraced clergy.8 In 1428, the rector of St Leonard Foster Lane was John Scarle, who was indicted by his own parishioners ‘for a Paratour (pandar) and a scolde and a discurer of confessioun of the which women that wole not asent to his lecheri. [...] He presentith hym self a surgeoun & a visicioun to disseive the people with his false connynge, […] by the which craft he hath slayn many a man’. By the 1440s, the same parish was served by the young Edmund Coningsburgh, a canon lawyer of promise on his way to a bishopric, but resident in London at that point in his

7 For Ralph Mungyn, a London priest prosecuted in 1428 for opposing the killing of Hussites, see Charles Kightly, ‘The Early Lollards’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of York, 1975), pp. 537–44. On the uprising of 1431, see Maureen Jurkowski, ‘Lollardy in Coventry and the Revolt of 1431’, in Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 145–64; Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition 1381–1431’, Past and Present, 12 (1960), 1–44 (pp. 24–28); and the continuation of ‘Gregory’s’ chronicle, which is possibly the work of a London rector: The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by James Gairdner, Camden Society, n.s., 17 (London: Camden Society, 1876), p. 172. Londoners were well aware that the Hussites had an English leader, the Oxford master, Peter Payne (Historical Collections, p. 176). 8

I have focused on university graduates whose London benefice was their primary concern. Included are a few learned rectors not known to have taken a degree. For their churches and dates, see George Leyden Hennessy, Novum repertorium ecclesiasticum parochiale Londinense, or, London Diocesan Clergy Succession from the Earliest Times to the Year 1898 (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898). The trend to appoint graduates to London benefices can be seen in Hennessy’s data, starting around 1430. The presentations were mainly in the hands of religious houses or ecclesiastical bodies (e.g., St Paul’s), but also other patrons: for example, the Merchant Tailors (St Martin Outwich) and Balliol College, which held the rectory of St Lawrence Jewry.

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career. Similarly, the university graduate Robert Briggham took over a parish where a predecessor had been taken in adultery with the wife of the parish clerk; and John Greene moved into St Clement Danes, where the insurgents of 1431 had been allowed to post bills and the parishioners had strongly defended a man brought up for heresy by Bishop Gray.9 As in these instances, the learned rectors strove to replace incontinence, blatant venality, and ‘false conynge’ with professional credentials and an austere style of life. Like their fellow professionals, the learned physicians, they configured themselves as a recognized group with earned qualifications, standards of excellence to be met, and mechanisms for self-regulation — the last of which they would brutally deploy in attacks on their former colleague, Reginald Pecock. They could be seen about the city in their professional role, visiting the bookshops of Thomas Veysey and John Pye, who specialized in ‘books of divinity’, or Peter Bylton’s, where Richard Hopton of St Alban Wood Street shopped, or John Scot’s, where Thomas Faux bought a Bible. To judge from their wide reading, they made good use of the city’s important theological libraries — the Carmelites’ was strong in the patristic works they favoured, and they frequented the study centre at St Paul’s, where from 1423 to 1449 their fellow rector, Thomas Chace, and later William Ive, supervised the training of new clergy.10 Their idea of recreation, unlike the scurrilous Scarle’s, was to gather in literary clubs to compose Latin epigrams or enjoy Christian-classical poems about Lady Liberal Arts lamenting the decline of Grammar.11 Thus established and esteemed, the rectors were positioned to take

9 London Metropolitan Archives, Corporation of London, Plea and Memoranda Rolls A50, memb. 6 (Scarle). The city had jurisdiction over the clergy in disturbances of the peace and sexual offences. Briggham’s errant predecessor is mentioned in an incomplete list of offenders from 1400–39: Corporation of London, Letter Book I, fols cclxxxvi–ccxc. In 1428 Bishop Gray ordered an all-purpose round-up of suspected clergy, which included sexual offenders, heretics, and nonresident pastors: Irene Zadnik, ‘The Administration of the Diocese of London: Bishops William Gray, Robert Fitzhugh and Robert Gilbert: 1426–1448’ (unpublished D Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1993), chap. 5, pp. 188–227. 10

For the bookshops, C. Paul Christianson, ‘Evidence for the Study of London’s Late Medieval Manuscript Book Trade’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 87–108 (p. 104). Thomas Eborall bought London, British Library, MS Royal 5 C. iii, an important collection indicative of the learned rectors’ interests, from Pye. For London’s scholarly libraries, see Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship, pp. 26–28. 11

The rectors’ interest in grammar, rhetoric, and versification can be traced from somewhat earlier in the fifteenth century. The master ‘J W’ to whom the London schoolmaster John Seward

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high forms of collective action, such as their petition to the king for more grammar schools in London, or their ban on Margery Kempe, whom they shut out of their churches because of her overly enthusiastic spirituality. They could also claim exceptional authority to mediate theology and biblical exegesis for the city’s elite: this can be deduced from the book of Chrysostom that David Fyfyan copied for his patroness Margery Nerford, and the Wycliffite Bible that Thomas Eborall and William Ive licensed for a wealthy female owner to read.12 In the petition for more grammar schools, the rectors claim to act on behalf of ‘all vertue and ordre of well puplik’. This is professionalism of a very high order, much like that of our modern public intellectual who achieves celebrity by using his academic expertise to illuminate a problem of society at large. The most eminent London rectors — John Cote, Thomas Eborall, Gilbert Worthington, John Pynchbeck — earned this kind of celebrity with their sermons to large crowds at St Paul’s and St Mary Spital, which were lauded in the city chronicles for improving public morality. They also became social critics in a political sense, launching blistering attacks on the royal court or city governors when commissioned to preach before those bodies. William Ive was once deprived of his fee because he dared to touch on things ‘that longyd unto the comyn wele’ in a sermon at court; in 1445 another rector was censured by the Common Council for speaking against the mayor, aldermen, judges, and civic organization.13 Normally it was the rectors’ strategy, however, to cultivate profitable associations with the civic elite. There was a social affinity between them that made them natural allies, beyond their shared interest in prosecuting heretics. Both were at the top of their respective hierarchies: the city clergy and the London citizenry. Both

addressed some of his epigrams is almost certainly John Whitby, rector of St Peter Cornhill, where Seward kept a school until 1435. For Christian classicism in that milieu, see Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans, pp. 218–26. See also London, British Library, MS Royal 10 B. x, which includes a document of 1437–38 naming the London rector Thomas Faux, together with mythological letters regarding the empress Sapientia, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 496 Part A, written mainly by the London rector Thomas Graunt (St Margaret Lothbury 1450–54), which contains Latin satirical and religious verse and fables. 12

The Parliament Rolls, ed. by Given-Wilson, XII, 26. For Kempe’s persecution by the ‘curates’ of London (meaning the rectors, those with a cure of souls), see The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, Book Two, chapter 9, lines 602–07, available online at: [accessed 15 June 2010]. On David Fyfyan, see Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety, pp. 48–67 (p. 60). The licensed New Testament is Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng. 77. 13

The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, ed. by Gairdner, p. 210. I thank Caroline Barron for the reference to the fined preacher.

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were experienced in the running of corporate bodies: the learned rectors had served on university governing committees and had helped to manage the considerable estates that supported their colleges. So, in the split between the city’s merchants and artisans that was coming to an impasse in the 1430s, the rectors identified with the merchants, the governing elite, making a distinction between the worthies of the parish, for whom they procured special privileges — like the right to sit in the chancel, which was by invitation of the rector only — and the ordinary parishioners.14 On their part, the merchant elite had every reason to welcome a more learned and sober clergy with whom they could interact on terms of equality and mutual respect; and they employed the rectors in a number of secular capacities: to inspect a jail, serve on a piracy commission, or negotiate with Lancastrians holding out in the Tower in the civil wars.15 The most frequent associations, however, were financial, for the elite had customarily employed the city’s rectors as executors of their wills and feoffees of their worldly wealth, entrusting them with money to be given to charities, including the parish churches, in exchange for prayers and masses for their souls. Especially if the rector was a distinguished man, the sums could be vast. Even after donating substantially to the Cambridge college of Godeshouse founded by his parish rector, William Byngham, the rich draper John Brokley was said to have around five thousand pounds left over to bestow on local charities in his will.16 It was such bequests that fuelled the prodigious development of intercessory ritual in London’s parish churches — an endless round of commemorative masses featuring new service books, endowed choirs, and stipendiary priests. Robert Rook of St Lawrence Jewry had around sixteen of the latter in his parish, all practising the rites endorsed in the ninth article of Arundel’s Constitutions: adoration of the glorious cross, veneration of saints and images, worship by ‘processionibus,

14

For a heresy trial in which rectors and civic authorities were both accusers, see Kightly, ‘The Early Lollards’, pp. 538–39, 541, 543. Maureen Jurkowski explains the kinds of administrative and financial experience that university students could acquire in ‘Heresy and Factionalism at Merton College in the Early Fifteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), 658–81 (p. 660). 15

London Metropolitan Archives, Corporation of London, Letter Book L, fol. 22 v (on jails); Plea and Memoranda Rolls A59, memb. 5 (on piracy); Journals of the Common Council 6, fol. 252v (on the Lancastrians). 16

Hundreds of documents concerning the rectors’ administration of bequeathed property can be found in the city’s Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls, and in formularies such as London, British Library, MS Royal 17 B. xlvii. See A. H. Lloyd, The Early History of Christ’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 385.

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Genuflexionibus, Inclinationibus, Thurificationibus, Deosculationibus, Oblationibus, Luminarium accessionibus’.17 The downside of the rectors’ financial activities was, of course, their conspicuous and ethically questionable involvement in the London property market, whether as trustees of real property or recipients of an income from tithes, which in London were based on rents. Prior to the Reformation, the clergy’s ownership of personal property, together with their profits from fees and rewards, remained the major source of anticlericalism in London; and the resentment was understandable. London tithes, when they were paid as assessed, were actually 17 per cent not 10 per cent; Thomas Eborall was given four pounds for overseeing William Gregory’s will, that gift alone adding 50 per cent to the annual income he had from his church.18 But the rectors had a strategy to address this problem as well. They modelled both themselves and the laity in pious terms as would-be contemplatives, involved in worldly affairs out of necessity in order to support a life of meditation and prayer. An adaptation of the Ancrene Wisse attributed to the London rector William Lichfield explains that, just as laymen must often tear themselves away ‘fro the messe heryng or fro the sermon’ to return to their daily occupations, priests with cures of souls must often go from their ‘dedis of contemplacion as redyng and preying’ to ‘actiue dedes for thir owne nede’.19 Given that some of the learned rectors eventually became brethren of Syon, this was a powerful form of selfrepresentation, one that tapped the London laity’s longstanding attraction to the idea of a mixed life. And if the mass and parish sermon (which included prayers) were the laity’s own forms of contemplation, as Lichfield seems to suggest, it

17

The Church in London, 1375–1392, ed. by Alison K. McHardy, London Record Society Publications, 13 (London: London Record Society, 1977), pp. i–xvii; Lyndwood, Provinciale, p. 298. 18 Richard Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1981), pp. 108–13 (on tithes); The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, ed. by Gairdner, p. xlviii. 19

The English Text of the ‘Ancrene Riwle’ Edited from British Museum MS. Royal 8 C. I, ed. by Albert C. Baugh, EETS, O. S. 232 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1956), p. 58. This adaptation has sometimes been considered too early to be Lichfield’s, despite the near-contemporary attribution in the single surviving manuscript. Anne Hudson suggests that Lichfield may just have owned the book: ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), chap. XV , pp. 1–18 (p. 7). The rectors’ affinity with Syon is best explained by the brethren’s ‘highminded evangelicalism’ and the ‘patristic clerical idealism’ reflected in their books, for which see Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard’, pp. 131–62.

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follows that the parish church could now be attractively figured as a centre of contemplative practice. In what we have seen so far, then, the learned rectors found the city a hospitable place. They were able to execute an important aspect of their programme — to restore the dignity of the clergy, or at least their small segment of the clergy — by taking advantage of urban patterns of professionalization and affinities with the civic elite. They also strengthened the English church by providing responsible oversight of its London endowments and enhancing the appeal of intercessory ritual. But this successful work of acculturation and development of resources was only preliminary to their intellectual work, the exercise of their learning that would increase the orthodox faith among the people and banish dangerous heresies from their minds.20 That work, as I have said, amounted to an active campaign of theologizing in the capital, undertaken at the same time as Pecock’s better known theological project. It consisted of two kinds of religious writing: theological compilations for the clergy in Latin, and sermons for the laity in English. Both bodies of work promoted a distinctive theology: patristic in orientation, free of speculation and doubt, relentlessly focused on the moral life, but cautiously open to affective spirituality. To appreciate the freshness of these productions, it helps to consider how they depart in important respects from the rectors’ university training. There were places in the city, such as the ‘schools’ for educating clergy at St Paul’s, where the learned rectors could dispute formally with opponents, much as they had at the university, and where they put on spectacular displays of academic learning, first against Reginald Pecock on the value of preaching and later against the friars on the issue of tithes. The procedure was for two opponents to raise objections to one another’s positions prior to a master making a determination, or for a single scholar to consider opposing opinions before arriving at a conclusion. But these disputations were specialist productions in Latin for an audience of clerics, and, to judge from the extended debate between the rectors and Reginald Pecock on the 20

A letter from Oxford to the Canterbury Convocation of Clergy, dated 1439, requests the promotion of learned graduates so that ‘cultus unius Dei ortodoxaque fides indies magis ac magis in populo Christiano accrescat, idolatria necnon hereses procul a fidelium mentibus expellantur’ (the worship of the one God and the orthodox faith may be increased more and more daily among Christian people, and idolatry and heresies expelled from the minds of the faithful): Epistolae academicae Oxon., registrum F: A Collection of Letters and Other Miscellaneous Documents Illustrative of Academical Life and Studies at Oxford in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Henry Anstey, Oxford Historical Society Publications, 35–36, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), I, Part I (1421–1457), 169.

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subject, it was still not clear to many orthodox reformers, even in the 1430s and 1440s, how the skills they required might legitimately be translated to a parish setting. The rectors were of course opposed to the solution represented by the Lollard classroom, where the laity were encouraged to appropriate, along with the techniques of biblical exegesis, the posture of questioning and examining positions that characterized academic argument.21 Such practices were notoriously productive of heretical thinking; thus it was against the eighth article of Arundel’s Constitutions for anyone, lay or clerical, to advance theological propositions or conclusions except in the context of university teaching.22 But the alternative to the Lollard classroom that Pecock developed in his London ministry was unacceptable as well. The rectors were in harmony with the anti-Lollard features of his programme, whereby Pecock assumed the superiority of the clergy, disapproved lay biblical study, and refused to teach the laity the ‘hiõ est, hardist and suttilist treuþis to be vnderstode which ben tretid in scolis and bokis of dyuynyte’. But they stopped short of teaching their parishioners to use syllogistic logic — the special vocabulary of deduction and proofs used in theologizing for a university degree — to confirm the fundamentals of the Christian faith.23 In their view, even this limited use of logical argument was dangerous for the laity, and, except in a strictly academic context, also dangerous for the priest. When Pecock later used logic to argue against certain parts of the Creed, they considered it heretical for him

21 For the London disputations, see Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecok’, p. 242, and F. R. H. du Boulay, ‘The Quarrel between the Carmelite Friars and the Secular Clergy of London, 1464–1468’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 6 (1955), 156–74 (p. 162). The major study of the Lollard classroom is Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22

Arundel’s eighth constitution stipulates: ‘ne quis […] conclusiones aut propositiones de fide Catholica […] praeter necessariam doctrinam facultatis suae […] asserat vel proponat’ (that no one maintain or put forward conclusions or propositions concerning the Catholic faith unless [it be done in the course of] teaching required by his [university] faculty): Lyndwood, Provinciale, pp. 286–87 (with such extensive glosses as to indicate difficulty of interpretation). 23

Reginald Pecock, The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. by William Cabell Greet, EETS, O. S. 171 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1927), p. 21; see also Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by J. L. Morison (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1909), p. 126: ‘the leernyng and knowing of ech treuthe and conclusioun of feith muste nedis be hadde and gete bi argument, which is a sillogisme’. Pecock refers to his disagreement with ‘sad and wel leerned divinis’ (the learned rectors) on this point in Book of Faith, pp. 138–39.

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to prefer ‘the iugghement of naturall resinz’ to scriptural truth and the church’s approved doctrine.24 The solution the London rectors proposed to this dilemma might not have been predicted from such highly trained university graduates, some of them doctors of divinity with extensive scholarly libraries and deeply read in speculative theology. Their basic strategy — not only when addressing the laity, as might be expected, but, surprisingly, when defining their own theology for themselves in their Latin compilations — is to put much of their university training aside, replacing academic exercises with more widely diffused literary genres and skills, and drawing energy from an inspired priesthood rather than rational argument. By agreeing to avoid argument in their own academic work, they carve out a segment of discursive ground where clergy and laity can meet to consider the subject matter of theology, without either involving the laity in prohibited textual practices or sacrificing the clergy’s academic charisma. The three books whose contents are listed in Appendix B are unusually purposeful examples of the user-produced compilation, conceived with this strategy in mind. They are books of Robert Whyte (London, British Library, MS Harley 5436, from c. 1451), Walter Crome (Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee. I. 25, from c. 1442) and Robert Rook (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 220, from before 1458). All three compilations were produced by London rectors, in practically adjacent parishes just south of the Guildhall, and they are strikingly similar in content, comprising items that when brought together in each book define the same distinctive theology.25 They all look to the early church for

24

John Benet’s Chronicle for the Years 1400 to 1462, ed. by Gerald L. Harriss, Camden Miscellany, 24. 3 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1972), p. 219. For the Lollards’ ‘attitude of intellectual questioning and criticism’ and Pecock’s utter reliance on the rational faculties of the soul, see Kantik Ghosh, ‘Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Idea of “Lollardy”’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, 251–65 (pp. 265, 264). 25

Appendix B lists the contents of the three books. Robert Whyte, owner of the first, incepted as an MA at Oxford around 1424 (BRUO, III, 2042–43); his church in London was St Peter Cheapside. The dating of his book is problematic, as the original dates are written over with ciphers, possibly by his executors in the process of transferring his other books to Merton College. Walter Crome, owner of the second book, was a doctor of theology (University of Cambridge) by 1427 and became rector of St Benet Sherehog in 1442, the same year he dated the pseudo-Augustinian Quaestiones in his compilation. His book is one of 93 volumes that he bequeathed to Cambridge University (BRUC, p. 168). The third book, Rook’s, differs from the others in lacking sections written in the owner’s own hand, but it is reasonably clear from his will of 1458 that Rook had it put together (‘cum diversis contentis’) in London, with the intention of leaving it to Balliol. Rook was

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Christian testimony as it was communicated by inspired teachers to their students and correspondents: hence the dominant presence of Augustine and Jerome. They all include a handbook that supplies a basic narrative of salvation history — the redemption of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgement, with an emphasis on the moral life of a Christian within this great scheme. All treat the faculties of the soul and its capacity to be saved. In form, they all favour dialogues, specifically the vertical kind, between a superior informant and an ardent disciple, in which the teacher often poses the questions (stated as topics in the quaestiones and handbooks) as well as the answers. As Valerie Flint says of the Elucidarium, they are dialogues that do not seek to encourage inquiry but to lay questions to rest, that ‘substitute the answers of learning for its process and [...] render that process unnecessary by the deft finding of shortcuts’.26 In selecting these texts, the compilers establish a strategic relationship to academic discourse. The books’ many user-friendly devices — indices, dictionaries, tables of contents, chapter summaries — bear the marks of intensive scholarly work; but the texts themselves stand at a distance from university disputations and their written equivalent, the kind of question and answer commentaries that involve opposition to a proposed thesis or consideration of a possibly incorrect or even heretical conclusion. Thus the Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti in Crome’s book includes much of the same doctrinal material as Lombard’s Sentences, the theology student’s basic text, but presents it in the mode of a handbook, without speculative discussion of such topics as the Trinity and the Incarnation. When a classroom is evoked, as in the teacher-student dialogues, it is on a lower level of the curriculum than theological study, one more suited to artful exposition than argument. Whyte includes a short accessus to Jerome’s letter to Paulinus, possibly his own composition, which explains the author’s intent, how the letter came to be written, and how the work divides into three parts; and he supplies a phrase by phrase explication of difficult words and concepts. In other

MA by 1426 (BRUO, III, 1589) and was presented to St Lawrence Jewry by Balliol in 1438. I have not listed the last three items in the manuscript which, on evidence of the table of contents, were added after the others; but they are consistent with the other choices. 26

Valerie Flint, ‘Heinricus of Augsburg and Honorius Augustodunensis: Are They the Same Person?’, Revue Bénédictine, 92 (1982), 148–58 (pp. 150–51). Mishtooni Bose finds fifteenthcentury scholars themselves making just this distinction between a ‘disputative theology’ and an ‘affective theology whose literary modes were essentially confirmatory rather than analytical’. See Bose, ‘The Issue of Theological Style in Late Medieval Disputations’, Disputatio, 5 (2002), 1–21 (p. 11).

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words, he writes the kind of commentary made possible by the study of grammar, a favourite preoccupation of the rectors, as we have seen, despite their more advanced learning. There is also a pervasive rhetorical aspect to the compilations, not just in the Mary Magdalene sermon, which famously uses all the standard figures of speech to produce emotion, but more importantly in the selections from Augustine and Jerome, which invest instruction in the faith with a simple, persuasive eloquence. In this intimate version of the academic classroom, the teacher seems inspired or wise, rather than a product of advanced theological schooling. It is not argument that animates the texts, but the affecting style of the teacher–student encounter, the master so patiently explaining doctrinal matters to the student, the listener so anxious to learn and delighted to have a guide to show him the way, as Jerome does for Paulinus. In the Enchiridion ad Laurentium included by Robert Rook, the master points out that the best way to acquire religious instruction is not through academic study at all, but ‘grandi studio pectus accendi’ (to have a great zeal kindled in one’s heart), presumably by a feeling teacher, for the familiar matter of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, elements of the faith on which various texts in the compilations expound.27 As always with the rectors, however, there is a larger ecclesiological dimension to their thinking; according to De disciplina christiana, also in Rook’s book, the ultimate classroom is the church and the teacher Christ himself. These are not, then, the usual compilations of sermon materials, made to be mined for exempla and scriptural interpretation to suit a wide range of purposes; instead, a highly specific theological position is built into the books’ ensemble of texts and methods. They could not be Lollard work because of the radically unequal teacher–student relationship and lack of controversy. Nor could they belong to one of the city’s alternative orthodoxies: they could not be Pecock’s because he valued the Fathers much less and rational proofs more, and the rectors’ spirituality is more austere and more dogmatically based than we might expect from the London mendicants. The rectors remained focused on doctrine, even when zeal was kindled in the heart. They were not influenced by the antiintellectual drift of Arundel’s Constitutions to make an intensely affective popular devotion the main vehicle of their urban campaign — as we have seen, they disapproved of Margery Kempe. And they remained a world apart from the 27

I quote the texts of the compilations from modern editions and translations: Enchiridion ad Laurentium, in PL, XL, col. 235; On Christian Doctrine, The Enchiridion, trans. by J. F. Shaw (Edinburgh: Clark, 1873), p. 239.

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popular religion being practised by the London vicar, Thomas Vyrby, a nongraduate whose mistaken idea of orthodoxy was to organize a saint’s cult around the perfumed ashes of the heretic, Richard Wyche.28 It is fascinating to see — and this is the art of these compilations — how each of the included texts is drawn into the desired theological orbit by its relation to the others in the volume. The compilers use a variety of textual strategies to bring these relationships to the fore: most obviously, the dictionary that opens Whyte’s book moves from Abstinence to Zeal, focusing the entire compilation on these two poles of the learned priest’s existence. Such pointers often encourage a specific reading of texts that were elsewhere subject to widely different interpretations. The verses on the unwordly qualities of a good priest that Whyte appends to the Mary Magdalene sermon call attention to the mixed-life reading that can be given to that text, whereby the Magdalene is the pure soul in search of its saviour, contemplative by choice, but often so hampered by the demands of the world that it cannot see or find God. In Rook’s book, the Enchiridion’s uncontroversial doctrine tells us how to interpret signs of controversy in the other texts. The reader understands that the heretical opinions to which Anselm responds in Cur deus homo do not challenge Christian doctrine so much as they prompt him to assert the true faith as a matter not to be disputed. Boso, the student who voices the infidels’ views for this purpose, is actually the most faithful of Christians, whose role is to concur at every point with what his master says: ‘Non possum negare.’ [...] ‘Ita credimus.’ [...] ‘Non possum aliter intelligere’ (I cannot deny it. [...] Thus we believe. [...] I cannot think otherwise).29 Most often in these books, it is a patristic text that exerts a pull on the others. In the Epistola ad Paulinum included by Whyte, St Jerome regrets that he is writing rather than speaking: ‘Habet nescio quid latentis energiae viva vox; et in aures discipuli de auctoris ore transfusa fortius sonat’ (Spoken words possess an indefinable hidden power; teachings that pass directly from the mouth of the speaker into the ears of the disciples are more important than any other). This is our cue to hear the voices of the teacher in that compilation’s other texts: the kind

28

Vyrby was allowed to keep his benefice; see Caroline M. Barron’s review of J. A. F. Thomson’s The Later Lollards, in Journal of the Society of Archivists, 3 (1967), 257–59. 29

See the edition and translation of ‘The Homily of Origen Concerning the Lamentation of the Magdalene at the Tomb of the Lord’ (from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 137), by Rodney K. Delasanta and Constance M. Rousseau, ‘Chaucer’s Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne: A Translation’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1996), 319–42 (pp. 324–42); and see Sancti Anselmi libri duo: Cur Deus Homo, in PL, CLVIII, cols 377C, 377D.

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magister in the Elucidarium, the gentle confessor who gives the Mary Magdalene sermon, St Paul conveying ‘sublimiores et venerabiles sensus’ (exalted and venerable thoughts) about Christianity to Seneca. One can see how textual ‘dragging’ of this kind may have controlled the Wycliffite texts that have been discovered in some of the London rectors’ books.30 However successfully these compilations defined the rectors’ theology, they were nevertheless in Latin and intended for use only by the clergy. It remains to be seen how the rectors’ theological work carried over to their preaching, which the compilations were intended to inspire and assist (‘bona pro predicacione’, as Whyte notes of his dictionary of terms). The rectors’ parochial sermons were their main work in the vernacular, their great motive for coming to the city, and along with their preaching in the public sphere, the crowning activity of their priesthood. They formed a massive corpus of applied theology that has practically disappeared, since, as will be seen, the rectors had a disinclination for publishing their work. Some remarkable sermons do survive, however, in the notebooks of John Dygon, one of the rectors to arrive in the 1430s, and, although recorded in Latin rather than the language of delivery, these examples vividly suggest how the group captured a lay audience for their distinctive theology.31 A sermon Dygon wrote for the feast of the Annunciation manages to encompass all the rectors’ social and textual strategies at once. Dygon came to London from a troubled Essex parish where a later rector was murdered by Lollards, and he ended his career as a recluse at Sheen: hence the anti-heretical zeal and desire for spiritual purity that we discover in his writings. His use of sermon form is highly strategic: he abandons the elaborate thematic divisions and subdivisions of the ‘modern’ sermon practised at the universities for a simple

30 Epistola LIII ad Paulinum, in PL, XXII, col. 542; The Principal Works of St Jerome, trans. by W. H. Fremantle (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1893), p. 97; L. Annaei Senecae opera quae supersunt, ed. by Friedrich Haase, 3 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), III, 478; The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. and trans. by M. R . James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 482. For Wyclif texts owned by London rectors, see Jeremy I. Catto, ‘A Radical Preacher’s Handbook, c. 1383’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 893–904, and Hudson, ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’. 31

For Dygon’s manuscripts, see Ralph Hanna’s ground-breaking work in ‘Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93’, Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 142–55, and ‘John Dygon, Fifth Recluse of Sheen: His Career, Books, and Acquaintance’, in Imagining the Book, ed. by Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 127–44.

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treatment of the biblical text, the ‘ancient’ form used by the church fathers.32 He takes up the text ‘singillatim’ (step by step) and relates it briefly at each point to the moral virtues exemplified by the Virgin.33 Strikingly, the effect of the verse by verse explanation, preacher to audience, is to replicate the teacher–student dyad we have seen in the rectors’ compilations. This occurs within the sermon as well: the Angel Gabriel initiates a friendly dialogue with Mary, and kindly offers her vital information about the Incarnation which she is grateful to receive. Like the ardent student in the compilations, the Virgin seeks answers, but not because she wavers in her belief; her ‘doubts’ merely prompt the Angel to explain the Incarnation in terms appropriate to simple faith. There is no need for the Angel, or the preacher, in his similar role, to deal with difficult theological issues like the precise mechanics of the Incarnation (the ‘modum in particulari de materio tam sublimi’) — the Angel himself declares such an investigation out of his purview. Rather, the sermon is like a review session on the Bible led by a distinguished expert, covering a good deal of exegetical ground, but introducing only the kind of erudition that can be expressed non-technically in the mother tongue. The preacher notes, for example, when referring to the house of David, that the divine scriptures do not customarily give the pedigrees of women.34 Many of Dygon’s readings in this sermon, like the Virgin’s doubts, come from standard commentaries, but they are shaped by the London rectors’ characteristic preoccupations. At ‘hail full of grace’, for instance, all present in the church are asked to imitate the Virgin, who is found in her chamber, devoutly praying for the redemption of all mankind. Here, the parish church becomes a place for would-be contemplatives to offer their prayers. Then, when the preacher reaches the Messianic verse ‘and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever’, that is his cue to explain, with rhetorical zeal, the crucial role the institutional church plays in salvation. For grace rules only ‘in veris catholicis […] in Ecclesia militante’ (in true catholics, in the Church Militant). Only within the church can one fight ‘strenue’

32

Gascoigne recommends the ‘ancient’ form in Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 179.

33

The learned rectors typically had served in other parishes before coming to London. For Dygon’s troubled Essex parish, Sible Hedingham, see Larry R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 259, 264–69. 34

I am most grateful to Professor Siegfried Wenzel for providing me with his transcription of the Latin text of Dygon’s sermon from Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 79. I have quoted from his transcription and from his modern English translation of the text in Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation (Washington, DC : Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 165–81.

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against the devil and ‘viriliter’ overcome temptations. Finally, in the sermon’s two endings, the rectors’ customary social distinctions come into play: there is a general review of the Virgin’s virtues ‘pro morali instruccione vulgarium’ (for the moral instruction of the common people), but a fierce admonition to the ruling elite to imitate her humility and mercy, in the mode of the rectors’ public sermons. From the perspective of contemporaries like Thomas Gascoigne, the theological campaign represented by this sermon was an evident success. The rectors became the unchallenged face of orthodoxy in the city, tirelessly revalidating their theology in hundreds of sermons, while Pecock’s books were consigned to the fire. Only in the 1460s, when they became embroiled in an unseemly controversy with the friars over tithes, did their enterprise falter; the issue of tithes would haunt them until the Reformation, as would the distinction they created between an elite priesthood of preachers and ordinary priests, whose consequent neglect of preaching contributed to its later parochial decline. Whether the rectors banished heretical views from the minds of their parishioners is harder to say. Perhaps the best evidence of their considerable impact on belief lies in Pecock’s bitter complaints about the great popularity of the city’s preachers — those ‘sad and wel leerned divinis’, his former colleagues, who successfully convinced the laity that their sermons were ‘substancial divinitie’, even though the religious truths they preached were put forward as untested conclusions.35 From our own perspective, it is tempting to agree with Pecock on both points: the rectors’ success, and also the questionable way they achieved it. Certainly the rectors infantilized the laity by restricting their access to intellectual resources, and arguably they infantilized themselves at the same time by self-censoring practices, such as venturing into the vernacular only in sermons and narrowing the range of academic inquiry, in keeping with Arundel’s Constitutions. These aspects of the rectors’ work require further comment, however, since practices that were the effects of censorship in earlier years can have a rather different explanation in midcentury London; they can become strategies to be used by orthodox reformers for other ends, such as the self-representation and cultural positioning the rectors found so essential to their London campaign. This would seem to be the case when we consider the rectors’ puzzling disinclination to circulate their written work. Because the rectors themselves loved

35

For Gascoigne on London preachers, see Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 188–89. For Pecock’s complaints, see Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison, pp. 138–39. The number of heresy trials in London falls off in mid-century, but that is not the best evidence of belief.

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to collect and copy the books of other clerical authors, one might have expected them to follow the example of their French counterpart, Jean Gerson, who exploited every opportunity for publication available to a person of his time, or their English counterpart, the Oxford rector, John Felton, whose sermons (as recorded in Latin) could be purchased in bookshops specializing in divinity. Yet they took a different course. The three compilations that have been discussed were all passed by bequest to Oxford or Cambridge libraries, for the use of a highly select group of clergy. As for the sermons, in only a few cases are copies known to have passed out of their hands, notably some by William Lichfield and Hugh Damlett, now lost, that went to Syon, and a copy of Damlett’s that was bequeathed to a fellow rector, William Storey. Typically, Lichfield’s immense corpus of 3083 sermons had only the narrowest circulation, some reaching Syon, but the main body of them simply left in his own copies to be found after his death.36 Fear of prosecution on religious grounds is not a likely reason for this reticence, since the compilations did not include prohibited works, such as Wyclif’s, or speculative theology. Sermons were normally circulated in Latin, even if originally delivered in the vernacular, so there was no risk of prosecution for including translations of the Bible into English (these were exempt from prohibition in oral sermons but not in writing). Instead, it would seem that, when it came to their own work, the rectors had a deeply felt, ideological preference for word of mouth teaching and preaching over the written word, one that marked them as evangelists on the patristic model and sharply distinguished them from Pecock, who vigorously supported lay study of written books of instruction in preference to attendance at sermons.37 The London location may also have been a factor, for the great size of the metropolis paradoxically inhibited widespread distribution of written work. The city’s complex social hierarchies, and the fear of unstable texts moving far beyond the author’s control, as Pecock claimed his writings had done, dictated a more strictly controlled circulation to special groups.

36

Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecock’, p. 240; Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, English Historical Literature of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 296. The same reticence may lie behind Eborall’s directive that London, British Library, MS Royal 5 C. iii never be put up for sale. There may have been fear of political repercussions, however, of the kind reported by Gascoigne in Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 191. 37

Pecock, The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. by Greet, pp. 9–10, 21, and elsewhere in his œuvre. On Gascoigne’s preference for preaching over the written word, see Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecock’, p. 238.

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The rectors’ failure to produce theology in English, other than for oral delivery in their sermons, is a similarly complex question. The prohibitions against vernacular theology in ecclesiastical law do not fully explain it. Pecock wrote for the laity in English for twenty years before being stopped, primarily on other grounds, and one of the rectors, William Lichfield, did not hesitate to produce at least one poem in English: his ‘Complaint of God to Sinful Man’, which translates the scheme of redemption in the rectors’ handbooks into the vernacular, in the manner of a morality play.38 Along with Lichfield’s adaptation of the Ancrene Wisse, which has already been discussed, this poem points to the vast possibilities for influencing the laity through English writings that the London rectors might easily have exploited, had they been inclined that way. Indeed, it would have been a very short step for them to take, since certain items in their compilations like the Elucidarium and the Mary Magdalene sermon had already been translated into English (the latter by Chaucer, according to the Legend of Good Women). The rectors’ stubborn Latinity makes a kind of sense, however, if we consider that a new group entering a complex environment of literate professionals, such as London presented in the 1430s, inevitably sets off a train of adjustments, a slight reformulation of roles, in the kind of cultural work being done. It is likely that, because their Latinity was practically unrivalled in the city, the learned rectors became the new placeholders for the Latin standard that prevailed in all aspects of the city’s textual life, freeing up other groups (chroniclers, aureate poets, clerks of the city companies) to write in English while still deferring to the Latin tongue. If that is the case, however, what can be made of the learned rectors’ apparent under-utilization of their university skills, so at odds with their claim to be a highly trained professional elite? The rectors may seem to exemplify the current view that, when it came to theology, orthodox reformers beat a retreat from Wyclif’s speculative mode to take refuge in doctrinal simplicity and recycling the works of earlier scholars. To think of their work only in this way, however, would be to underestimate the pressure it put on Pecock to define his more obviously intellectual position, and the theological vibrancy the rectors helped to create among alternative orthodoxies in London, despite the lack of controversy in their own teaching and preaching. It would also undervalue the inventiveness of their productions, which were only deceptively simple, requiring as they did a virtuoso

38

Only Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 174/95, fol. 525 has the Lichfield attribution, but it tellingly refers to the poem as a theological production: ‘tractatus compilatus p(er) Mag(is)t(ru)m Will(elmu)m lychefelde doctorem theologie’. The poem survives in fourteen manuscripts, indicating wide distribution, but possibly not in Lichfield’s lifetime.

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command of theological materials and academic styles. Although not speculative thinkers, the rectors were nevertheless innovators in the academic sphere, anticipating the rehabilitation of grammar and rhetoric, as opposed to logic, in the university curriculum, as well as the ‘declarative’ theological style preferred by sixteenth-century theologians.39 In at least one respect, the willingness to move beyond scholastic modes of argument, they were more innovative than Pecock, and they represent a strand of Christian humanism, centred on moral education and the perfectibility of mankind, that would come to fruition in the Oxford circle of Thomas Chaundler. Of all their strategies, those that tested the boundaries of academe are perhaps the most worthy of our attention. Far from disengaging from the challenges of theology, the London rectors were bravely redefining what theology should be.

39

Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecock’, p. 261, finds the orthodox reformers’ theology disappointing for a different reason, in that it fails to pursue ‘patristic theology’ far enough; this, I have suggested, is not true for the rectors’ compilations. For ‘declarative’ theology, see Bose, ‘The Issue of Theological Style’, p. 11.

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Appendix A I: London Rectors Arriving in the 1430s (University Graduates) Robert Briggham (St Andrew Hubbard, 1428–42 d.) Robert Oppy (All Hallows Honey Lane, 1429–64 d.) John Daventre alias Horne (St Mary at Hill, 1430–39 d.) Reginald Pecock (St Michael Paternoster Ryole, 1431–44) Robert Whyte (St Peter and Paul Westcheap, 1433–61 d.) William Kyrkeby (St John the Baptist Walbrook, 1433–45) John Dygon (St Andrew Holborn, 1433–35) John Greene (St Clement Danes, 1434–45) Robert Rooke (perpetual vicar, St Lawrence Jewry, 1438–58 d.) Thomas Faux (St Bride Fleet Street, 1436?–59 d.) *Gilbert Worthington (St Andrew Holborn, 1439–47 d.)

II: Other Rectors (In Order of Mention) William Lyndwood (All Hallows Bread Street, 1418–33) *Thomas Gascoigne (St Peter upon Cornhill, 1445) John Scarle (St Leonard Foster Lane, 1421–29) Edmund Coningsburgh (St Leonard Foster Lane, 1448–49) Thomas Chace (St Gregory by St Paul, 1426–1438; Chancellor of St Paul’s, 1423–49 d.) *William Ive (St Michael Paternoster Ryole, 1464–70) David Fyfyan (perpetual curate, St Benet Fink, 1420–51 d.) *Thomas Eborall (St Michael Paternoster Ryole, 1444–64 and All Hallows Honey Lane 1464–71 d.) John Cote (St Peter upon Cornhill, 1446–47 d.) *John Pynchbeck (St Mary Abchurch, 1457–59) William Byngham (St John Zachary, 1424–51 d.) *William Lichfield (All Hallows the Great, 1425–48 d.) Walter Crome (St Benet Sherehog, 1442–53 d.) Thomas Chaundler (All Hallows the Great, 1467–70) *denotes an opponent of Pecock

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Appendix B I: Robert Whyte’s book: London, British Library, MS Harley 5436 (c. 1451) Dictionary (‘tabula’) of theological concepts A–Z, with illustrative biblical personages Pseudo-Origen, sermon on Mary Magdalene (with verses at end by Whyte) Jerome, letter to Paulinus, with commentary (signed Whyte) Elucidarium, sive dialogus de summa totius christianae theologiae Apocryphal correspondence between Seneca and St Paul

II: Walter Crome’s book: Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee. I. 25 (c. 1442) Treatise analysing the soul, with articles of the faith Poem, ‘Ad mensam magnam sedisti’ Pseudo-Grosseteste, portion of Dialogus inter corpus et animam Pseudo-Augustine, Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti (with table of chapters at end, signed Crome) Augustine, Questiones evangeliorum (signed Crome) In-progress index to Questiones veteris et novi testamenti, A–Z

III: Robert Rooke’s book: Oxford, Balliol College, MS 220 (before 1458) Anselm, Cur deus homo Anselm, De similitudinibus Pseudo-Augustine, Tractatus de spiritu et anima Pupilla oculi, with table of contents Augustine, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, preceded by list of chapters Pseudo-Augustine, De conflictu viciorum atque virtutum Augustine, De disciplina christiana, with summary of chapters Pseudo-Augustine, De igne purgatorio Augustine, De agone christiano Augustine, De sermone domini in monte

C OMMON L IBRARIES IN F IFTEENTH-C ENTURY E NGLAND : A N E PISCOPAL B ENEFACTION James Willoughby

E

ndowed libraries that were the free resort of any who could make use of them were rarely encountered in medieval England. Assembling even a small collection of books was a significant expense; ensuring their safe preservation for posterity required the institutional support of an undying corporation, and books held in such a way were not normally available to readers outside that body corporate. At the two English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the need for books was felt most intensely and where a corporate will could impose itself, central reference collections were established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but access to them was restricted.1 Outside the universities, arrangements were made on an ad hoc basis. Small collections of useful texts might be chained in a parish church or oratory, and lending arrangements were sometimes available, usually under the caution of a pledge for the book’s value.2 But what would be

1

At Oxford and Cambridge, access to these collections came further to be restricted to secular clerks, who could not draw on the resources of a conventual library; see most recently Roger Lovatt, ‘College and University Book Collections and Libraries’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 1, to 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 152–77 (pp. 170–71). 2

For example, seven books were chained in the oratory of the priest’s house at Saffron Walden (Essex) by the founders of the almshouse he was to serve. They were to be freely available for consultation by any priest of the town, and could be borrowed by priests in the surrounding district after a proper pledge had been received, to be returned after three months (Saffron Walden, Town Council, D/B2/CHR11/13, fols 17v –18v ); text edited by Nigel Ramsay and James M. W. Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues,

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recognizable as the ancestor of all modern public libraries — in other words, a staffed building containing a reference collection that was made freely available to any reader able to make use of it — was a rare bird indeed. The most famous example of such a library was at the Guildhall in London, the first library in England to be administered by a civic authority. Two others certainly existed, at Worcester and Bristol, and I should argue for a fourth, at Norwich.3 All of these were fifteenthcentury foundations, all were staffed by a librarian and open to readers at set hours in the day, all were theological in character, and all seem to have been intended to buttress the orthodoxy of the local clergy. What they also had in common was the nature of their formal organization, since each was founded on a pre-existing chantry college, the simplest means by which a collection of books might be incorporated to ensure its permanent stability as a resource. The foundations are so plainly kindred that one might naturally suspect a relation between their founders, and that is indeed the way the evidence tends. It is the intention of this paper to tease out these interrelations, and to suggest the manner in which these libraries can be understood as having been conceived and founded together as institutions of reform, with a concern for right teaching at their core. The most celebrated of this small clutch of common libraries was established in London between 1423 and 1425, in the collegiate chapel of the Guildhall.4 It was an endowed foundation open to all readers at specified times, and, according to John Stow, adjoining the south side of the Guildhall chapel was built what he 14 (London: British Library in association with The British Academy, 2009), pp. 368–70 (SH88). The library that Walter Smyth of Eton College left to the church at Saltfleetby in 1524 was to be a lending stock available for a year’s lease to the learned of the district, this time with no pledge specified (Eton, Eton College Records, 60/3/2, Register 1 (1457–1536), p. 144, fol. 72 v). On parish libraries in general, see Arnold Hunt, ‘Clerical and Parish Libraries’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 1, to 1640, ed. by Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 400–19 (esp. pp. 410–14). 3

I have discussed these foundations at greater length in Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions (n. 2 above). 4

The library’s pre-Reformation history has been often rehearsed. A useful initial summary was given by Charles Welch, ‘The Guildhall Library and its Work’, The Library, 1 (1889), 320–34; some of the salient facts were set forth by Raymond Smith, ‘The Library at Guildhall in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Guildhall Miscellany, no. 1 (1952), 3–9, and no. 6 (1956), 2–6. Another summary, including archaeological observations, was given by Nick Bateman, ‘John Carpenter’s Library: Corporate Charity and London’s Guildhall’, in The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580, ed. by David R. M. Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003), pp. 356–70. The building history of the library was established by Caroline M. Barron, The Medieval Guildhall of London (London: Corporation of London, 1974), pp. 33–35.

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described as ‘a fayre and large library, furnished with books’.5 Only two of these books are known to survive, both containing theological texts: the first is an early fourteenth-century copy of Book II of the Sentences-commentary by Thomas Aquinas, now London, British Library, MS Harley 32, reported in an inscription (fol. 253r) to have been bought for twenty shillings and given to be chained in the library; and secondly, London, Guildhall Library, MS 3042, an early thirteenthcentury copy of Petrus de Riga’s Aurora, recovered for the modern (refounded) library in 1926.6 That the library collection was chiefly intended for the instruction of the local clergy is established by a report of July 1549, part of a petition by the City for the purchase of the premises after the chantry’s suppression, which stated that it was ‘a house appointed by the saied Maior and cominalitie for […] resorte of all students for their education in Diuine Scriptures’.7 These readers were admitted under the eye of a librarian who was a secular priest, one of the chaplains of the small chantry college that served the chapel. His duties were apparently quite onerous: in 1444, Master John Clipstone, described as ‘Capellanus et Custos librarie’, petitioned the mayor and aldermen to be confirmed in his office and in his occupation of the house and garden that went with it, in consideration of ‘greet attendaunce and charge’ upon him.8 It must be the first time in England that a professional librarian has commented on his situation. The foundation of the Guildhall library, as is well known, is connected with the name of London’s benevolent grandee, Richard Whittington, who during his lifetime had stood patron to the new library of the London Greyfriars, erecting and largely furnishing at his own expense a magnificent building 128 feet in length and 31 feet across (approx. 39 m × 9 m), wainscoted throughout and fitted with

5 John Stow (writing in 1598): A Survey of London by John Stow, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908; repr. with additions 1971), I, 275. 6

Neil R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd edn (London: Royal Historical Society, 1964), pp. 126–27. These two are survivors from the library, as distinct from the office books of the City that were kept in the record-room of the Corporation of London housed in the camera of the Guildhall, a room between the Mayor’s Court and Inner Council Chamber (Ker did not distinguish between the two collections). On these separate libraries, see Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, pp. 148–65. 7

John E. Price, A Descriptive Account of the Guildhall of the City of London (London: Blades, 1886), pp. 138–39. 8

London, Corporation of London Record Office, Letter-Book K, fol. 219r. Master Clipstone’s request was well received and in view of ‘the merits of the petitioner and his great diligence’ he was granted the office for life. He died in 1457 and, according to Stow, was buried in the Guildhall chapel.

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twenty-eight desks and eight double settles equipped with books.9 The Guildhall library was therefore directly in the line of Whittington’s philanthropic interests, but it went up after his death, largely with capital from his estate.10 In 1421 he had left his entire estate to good works and full discretionary powers to his executors, and although it is inconceivable that he would not have discussed desirable projects before his death, the library was properly a project of his executors, to whom was granted blanket residual authority. The moving spirit in the library’s foundation seems to have been John Carpenter, Whittington’s chief executor.11 Carpenter was a considerable figure, the common clerk of London from 1417 to 1438, twice the City’s representative in parliament, and the compiler of the Liber albus, the great memorial of the City’s customs and ordinances, completed in November 1419 when Whittington was mayor.12 By his own testament of 8 March 1442, Carpenter left to the common library at Guildhall any books which might be thought beneficial, as he put it, ‘for the profit of the students there and those discoursing to the common people’; he owned an interesting collection, to which it will be necessary to return in due course.13 Two similar libraries were established later in the century, at Worcester and Bristol, by the Common Clerk’s namesake, John Carpenter (c. 1402–1476), the redoubtable bishop of Worcester. The two men were in fact close associates and almost certainly kinsmen: John Carpenter the churchman was named supervisor of the citizen’s executors, and they were associated in the royal grant of the Hertfordshire estate of Theobalds to the hospital of St Anthony of Vienne in London’s Threadneedle Street.14 John Carpenter the churchman was at this time (between

9

Survey of London by John Stow, ed. by Kingsford, I, 318.

10

Whittington’s place in the nexus of London citizens and clerics who sought to promote sound reading is set out in a valuable forthcoming article by Anne F. Sutton, ‘Mercers and the Written Word: Books for Worship and Pleasure in the Later Middle Ages’. On Whittington’s career see Caroline M. Barron, ‘Richard Whittington: The Man Behind the Myth’, Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edmund Jones, ed. by Albert E. J. Hollaender and William Kellaway (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), pp. 197–248; and the biography by Anne F. Sutton in ODNB. 11

Carpenter’s biography is given most accessibly in the article by Matthew Davies in ODNB.

12

William Kellaway, ‘John Carpenter’s Liber albus’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 3 (1977–79), 67–84. 13 14

For references, see below, n. 47.

Cal. Pat. Rolls 1436–1441, pp. 510–11. By John Carpenter’s testament, the junior man was to receive the book on architecture that had been given to the testator by the chaplain and architect William Cleve.

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1433 and 1444) the warden of St Anthony’s, and he therefore had the oversight of one of London’s most important schools, attached to the institution, for which he provided an annual stipend of sixteen marks to employ a grammar master.15 It was also during his term of office that the hospital acquired the manor of Povyngton in Dorset for the exhibition of five scholars in the arts course at Oxford, with the proviso that the boys should previously have been given the rudiments of the arts course at the college of Eton.16 As chaplain-confessor to Henry VI in the 1430s Carpenter would have been well abreast of the king’s plans for the promotion of English education, and particularly his hopes for Eton; it is not possible to gauge the degree to which he himself was in a position to promote and encourage the king’s plans, however much the extent of his influence might be suspected. Carpenter was consecrated bishop of Worcester in the chapel of Eton College on 22 March 1444. Carpenter carried this concern to promote the education of the clergy with him into his diocese. Since Worcester was a monastic cathedral priory it offered no equivalent to the secular dignity of chancellor, and so there was no one formally charged with lecturing in theology or canon law to the local clergy. Bishop Carpenter responded by setting up arrangements of his own. Both of his new common libraries were to serve as centres for orthodox study and preaching. Both seem to have incepted at about the same time, in the 1450s, but they were each given their formal statutes in 1464. At Worcester, for premises Carpenter fastened on to the chapel of St Thomas, a detached building that had been built by Bishop Blois (1218–36) on the north side of the cathedral before the entrance to the bishop’s palace (now the deanery).17 It was called the Carnary Chapel (Capella carnaria) after the charnel-house which it contained for the bones of the city’s dead. The original chantry of six priests had by the time of Carpenter’s refoundation dwindled to one, and this priest became the librarian. Between 1458

15

Discussed by Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education in Fifteenth-Century London’, pp. 219–45 (pp. 228–29). From 1439 the church of St Benet Fink, London, was appropriated to the hospital, its revenues taken over for this purpose (Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1436–1441, pp. 238, 279–80). 16 17

Cal. Pat. Rolls 1441–1446, p. 43.

The Worcester library was first noticed by John Willis Clark, The Care of Books: An Essay on the Development of Libraries and their Fittings, from the Earliest Times to the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), pp. 126–28, and it was also considered by Roy M. Haines, ‘Aspects of the Episcopate of John Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester 1444–1476’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 19 (1968), 11–40 (pp. 33–34), and by Nicholas I. Orme, ‘The Medieval Schools of Worcestershire’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 3rd ser., 6 (1978), 43–51 (pp. 44–45), revised and reprinted in his Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon, 1989), pp. 33–48 (pp. 36–37).

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and 1464 the chapel was rebuilt to include a chained library and at the end of it a set of chambers, upper and lower, for the chaplain-librarian to live in. The appointment of the chaplain, now under the supervision of the bishop, was vested in the sacrist of the priory, whose ancient responsibility for the upkeep of the chapel was acknowledged by the bishop at the beginning of his regulations. At Bristol, where there was no cathedral, premises were found in the guild-house belonging to the Guild of Kalendars, where the new library was fitted out at the bishop’s own expense.18 This house abutted All Saints church, where the guild met, which was in the centre of the city and had been rebuilt in 1443; the library was apparently housed in the attic over the north aisle of the church. The guild at this time was supporting four permanent chantry priests, who together formed an administrative body that elected its own membership. The holder of the first chantry served as prior of this little college of priests, and it was the prior who was to administer the new library. Ordinances for the libraries in Bristol and Worcester are preserved in the registers of Bishops Carpenter and Silvestro de Gigli respectively.19 They were issued in 1464 and are couched in nearly identical terms. They state that the rooms were to stand open every weekday, for two hours before noon and two after noon for the use of any who wished to enter in order to learn. For each collection an inventory was to be drawn up in triplicate: at Worcester, copies were to be held by the bishop, the sacrist of the cathedral, and the library-keeper, and at Bristol by the

18 The history of the guild, with a full discussion of the library, was written by Nicholas I. Orme, ‘The Guild of Kalendars, Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 96 (1978), 32–52 (abbreviated in his Education and Society, pp. 209–19). Many of the records pertaining to the guild were printed by Francis B. Bickley, The Little Red Book of Bristol, 2 vols (Bristol: Crofton Hemmons, 1900), I, 186–89, 202–11; II, 129–30, 133; and those pertaining to the church of All Saints by Clive Burgess, The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’, Bristol, Bristol Record Society, 46, 53, 56 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1995–2004). 19

The library ordinances for Bristol were originally set forth in an indenture of 5 April 1464, subscribed by the prior and the mayor on 17 April, in a composition settling the matter of the regulation of chantries in Bristol (in favour of the mayor and commonalty): Worcester, Worcestershire Record Office, Register of Bishop John Carpenter, I, fols 197 r –198r; the ordinances were ‘Englished’ and printed by William Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (Bristol: Pine, 1789), pp. 453–55, and from there by Henry John Wilkins, Westbury College from a. 1194 to 1544 AD (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1917), pp. 158–59. The Worcester library ordinances were recited in the record of an inquiry in 1513, when the priory sacrist was summoned for neglect, and therefore survive in a later episcopal register: Worcestershire Record Office, Register of Bishop Silvestro de Gigli, fols 132r–133v; references to the library’s building are in the Register of Bishop John Carpenter, I, fols 167v, 175r–v.

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mayor, the rural dean, and the prior. Under the supervision of the same men, new accessions were to be fairly valued within three days of receipt and then chained in the library, and a record made in the inventory with a note of the book’s value. There were to be annual audits performed in the autumn, at Worcester by the sacrist and librarian, and at Bristol by the prior, rural dean, and a deputy of the mayor’s. At the audit, if a book was found to be missing through the librarian’s carelessness then he was to replace it or the value of it within one month, under penalty of forty shillings. This fine, together with the cost of replacing the book, was to be taken from his stipend. The unusual and important part of the bishop’s reform affected the status of the library-keeper, for he was to be as much a custodian of orthodoxy as he was to be keeper of the books. Whenever the library was open, the keeper was to remain on hand to supervise the room and be ready to explain obscure points of scripture. In addition, he was also required to lecture once or twice a week on the Old or New Testament to any who wished to come, and also to preach publicly. His educational background had therefore to be competent to this demand, so Carpenter stipulated that the librarian should be a university graduate and preferably a bachelor of theology. The bishop’s reorganization of the guild chantry at Bristol was formally carried out in 1464 but, as Nicholas Orme has shown, the appointment of John Hemming as prior in September 1451 marked a significant first step, for Hemming was an Oxford Master of Arts, where previously the guild had been served by non-graduate priests.20 In 1454, Bishop Carpenter gave Hemming leave of absence to study at Oxford, and it is likely that his subject was theology since he had already completed the arts course.21 The Oxford theologian John Harlow, Reginald Pecock’s secretary, was collated to a chaplaincy in the house of Kalendars in April 1458, and was prior by 1466.22 Subsequent holders of the office were most often men of similar academic distinction.23

20

Orme, ‘Guild of Kalendars’, p. 41.

21

He was licensed for the degree of Master of Arts on 10 December 1449; BRUO, II, 906.

22

BRUO, II, 875. The date of collation is significant; Carpenter was doubtless rescuing Harlow after Pecock’s conviction for heresy in November 1457 had made Harlow vulnerable, he being refused admission, on royal orders, to the degree of doctor of theology; see further Orme, ‘Guild of Kalendars’, p. 41, and Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, in HUO, II, 263–80 (p. 278). 23

For instance, Roger Edgeworth, who held the priorate in the 1520s, was a fellow of Oriel College and doctor of theology and, as well as being a noted preacher (his sermons were printed), he was a strong conservative, thus amply filling the role set out for the prior by Bishop Carpenter (see Janet M. Wilson, Sermons very fruitfull, godly and learned by Roger Edgeworth: Preaching in the Reformation, c. 1535–c. 1553 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), p. 22.

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To set alongside these three common libraries is suggestive evidence for a fourth, established within the precinct of the cathedral priory at Norwich. The telling remark is found in the testament, dated 26 February 1462, of John Leystofte, vicar of St Stephen’s in Norwich.24 He requested that if a library was begun in Norwich within two years of his death then it was to have his copy of the sermons of Philip Repingdon.25 If the library was not built, then his executors were to sell the book and distribute the money for the sake of his soul. The first scholar to notice this interesting bequest was the Norfolk antiquary John Kirkpatrick (1687–1728), who found no sign that the library had ever come into being or the legacy into effect.26 More recently Norman Tanner has drawn the same conclusion.27 But some sort of library certainly did exist by the end of the century and it existed — as at Worcester — in the Carnary Chapel of the cathedral. This comes by another piece of testamentary evidence, a bequest by James Goldwell, bishop of Norwich (1472–99), of a clutch of legal works, which he directed should be chained ‘in the library’ at the Carnary so as to be accessible to those engaged in legal work in the consistory as well as to others who wished to go there to study.28 In this way, the

24

Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court Register of Wills, Brosyard, fol. 272v . On Leystofte’s career, see BRUC, pp. 367–68. His testament is dated Friday after St Mathias apostle 1461 (i.e. the Friday after 24 February 1462), but ‘Mathie’ has previously always been misread as ‘Mathei’, for Matthew (21 September) and the document consequently dated to 1461. Probate was granted on 12 March 1462. Leystofte bequeathed his ‘books of philosophy and rhetoric’ and a copy of Nicholas de Gorran’s Commentary on the Psalms to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, where he had been a fellow from 1444 until 1457/8; see The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. by Peter D. Clarke, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 10 (London: British Library in association with The British Academy, 2002), p. 714 (UC144). 25 ‘… volo quod si incipiat fieri librarium in Norwico infra duos annos post obitum meum, lego eidem librum meum vocatum Repyngton’. 26

John Kirkpatrick, History of the Religious Orders and Communities, and of the Hospitals and Castle, of Norwich: Written about the Year 1725 (Yarmouth: Sloman, 1845), p. 80. 27

Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532, Studies and Texts, 66 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), p. 35. 28

‘Item lego Domui Carnarie infra cepta ecclesie mee Cathedralis Norwicensis situat’ Abbatem super decretalibus et Henricum Bohyc’ vna cum libro decretalium, cathenand’ in libraria ibidem ad vtilitatem eorundem qui Consistorio laborant in decisionibus causarum et aliorum studere volencium. Et lego magistro et fratribus eiusdem Carnarie xl s.’; PRO, PCC Will Registers, PROB 11/11 (35 Horne), fol. 283v. The bishop’s testament is dated 15 June 1497; there is no note of probate. The named works of canon law are the Lectura in Decretales by Nicholaus de Tudeschis (known as Abbas), the Distinctiones in libros V Decretalium by Henry Bohic, and the Decretals, promulgated in 1234 by Gregory IX.

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principle is clear that this library in the Carnary was the free resort of readers who did not need to be priests of the foundation; it must therefore have been a separate proposition to whatever books were owned corporately and privately by the chantry college itself.29 The consistory court of Norwich normally met in the Bauchun Chapel in the cathedral, for which the Carnary College, standing by the cathedral’s west front, was conveniently close at hand.30 The other advantage of the building was that it offered a stable curatorial environment and the safe husbandry provided by a permanent staff, since chantry priests were tied to the altars at which they were required to celebrate and would have been a part of the life of the cathedral close in a way that the canons and lawyers of the bishop’s household were not. Even though Bishop Goldwell is the sole known donor to the library, he was surely not its instigator. The words of his bequest indicate that he was adding to the collection of a library that was already in existence: he gave the books ‘to be chained in the library there’.31 He claimed nothing of the foundation for himself, which he surely would have done had it been his; instead he troubled to specify that the books would be of use to those engaged in legal work, which may suggest that he was adding to the utility of an existing collection that was more theological in scope. John

29 A small stock of service-books owned by the Carnary was inventoried in 1478 (Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Dean and Chapter records, DCN 3/4) and others were mentioned in a deed of gift made over by the master, Ralph Pulvertoft, in 1497 (ibid. dorse) and in his testament of 1505 (Norwich Consistory Court will registers, Register Ryxe, fol. 208r); but there is no list of library books known to survive. For these booklists, see James M. W. Willoughby, The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (forthcoming). 30

Roberta Gilchrist in her discussion of the Carnary chapel (Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 100–05) has argued, from the same evidence, that the Carnary had become an ‘inn of court’ by the late fifteenth century, providing accommodation for the lawyers working in the consistory court. But inns of court were used by common, not canon, lawyers, and it should be noted that the Carnary continued to be described as a collegiate chantry and was staffed by a master and chantry priests until the time of its surrender under the terms of the Chantries Act. 31

Had there not already been a library to which the local clergy had free access, then Goldwell need merely to have chained the books in the cathedral, following the example of Haimo Hethe, bishop of Rochester, who established in 1346 a chained collection of key texts in the church of his cathedral priory for the use of the local secular clerks (Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, Register of Bishop Haimo Hethe, DRb Ar1/1, fol. 223r). Closer in time to Goldwell’s benefaction, in 1469 the lawyer Thomas Kent left twenty-seven law books, canon and civil, to the lawyers of the Court of Arches in London, that they might ‘conveniently have access at proper times’ (PRO, PCC Will Registers, PROB 11/5 (26 Godyn), fols 205r–206v ). For all this, see further Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns and the Professions, pp. 230–33, 123–30 (SH61, SH38).

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Leystofte’s testament shows that a public library was being discussed in Norwich at least as early as 1462, which was in the time of Goldwell’s predecessor, Walter Lyhert, bishop of Norwich from 1446 until his death in 1472. That the choice of the Carnary College at Norwich so precisely parallels the situation at Worcester is suggestive. For if the library was indeed an initiative of Lyhert’s, then there are leading clues that the notion belonged to his long-standing friendship with Bishop Carpenter.32 In his earlier career Lyhert moved entirely in Carpenter’s shadow, and when Carpenter vacated one benefice for a greater preferment Lyhert often filled the vacancy. It is impossible to see Lyhert’s various promotions as having been bestowed independently of the senior man’s influence. The two men had in fact been friends since their university days. Lyhert first encountered Carpenter in July 1425 when he was admitted a fellow of Oriel College. Carpenter was provost of Oriel from 1428 until 1435, and when he vacated the position it was Lyhert who took it over, setting the pattern for his subsequent career by jumping for the first time into Carpenter’s empty shoes.33 When Carpenter was raised to the bishops’ bench in 1444 he vacated the wardenship of St Anthony’s, and his place there was filled immediately by Lyhert.34 That was a significant preferment but it was attended by political difficulties, since a technicality of their admission to the wardenship — both men being secular priests — was their admission to the Augustinian order. The pope conceded that Carpenter need only wear the habit within the hospital precincts, but none the less it seems highly unlikely that either man would seriously have considered taking vows. In fact, Carpenter’s holding of the wardenship was impugned by papal

32

Another piece of evidence that might be mentioned in support of Lyhert’s claim is that the bishop stood sponsor for the construction of a fine new entrance porch for the south side of the Carnary, the so-called Lyhert Porch (showing the bishop’s rebus in the central boss), which made a new, common entrance to all the buildings — college, chapel, and carnary together — and perhaps also provided access to a library. The Lyhert Porch intervenes at the point where the collegiate range abuts the west end of the chapel; at Worcester’s Carnary the library colonized part of the west end of the chapel. Lyhert also set up a preaching-yard at Norwich next to the Carnary, mirroring the situation at Worcester (preaching yards were also sited by the charnel chapels at Exeter and St Paul’s). 33 34

BRUO, I, 360–61 and II, 1187–88.

Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1441–1446, p. 266; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, 20 vols (London: H.M.S.O., 1893–; hereafter Cal. Papal Letters), IX (1912), 497. It had proved impossible to keep the preceptory of St Anthony’s in French hands under the pressures of the Hundred Years’ War and by the end of the fourteenth century the prebends were being farmed to royal clerks and servants; Cal. Papal Letters, IV (1902), 430; VII (1906), 374; Adalbert Mischlewski, Un Ordre hospitalier au Moyen Âge: les chanoines réguliers de Saint-Antoine-en-Viennois (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1995), p. 70.

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mandate in 1438, and the archbishop was directed to assign it to the preceptor of the sister house at Rouen.35 But Carpenter not only held on to this office until raised to the episcopate, he must also have ensured his succession: to have passed the wardenship to a friend who was also a secular, in the teeth of papal opposition, implies a loyal friendship as well as powerful support. In this case, the men were sheltering under the protective wing of royal patronage: where Carpenter had been the king’s confessor, Lyhert was Queen Margaret’s.36 Following this promotion Lyhert was advanced quickly once more, and again he followed the same trajectory as his friend; he vacated the wardenship in 1446 when elevated to Norwich.37 The close alliance between these two conservative court bishops strengthens the proposition that the common library established in Norwich belonged to Lyhert’s initiative; and that proposition in turn suggests that these endowed common libraries were established as a deliberate, allied act of policy. In making available free access to sound texts, and in Carpenter’s injunctions that the learned keepers should preach and publicly expound doctrine, these libraries carry the savour of the same desire for good teaching that underlies the provision of common-profit books; they were seeded in the same atmosphere, and in a condition of life in which the texts most needful for the priestly proletariat to know were prohibitively expensive to own.38 In an important article Wendy Scase has illuminated the circle of churchmen and civic leaders in London who were concerned with common-profits.39 Her identified circle included John Carpenter the Common Clerk, and by extension his namesake, along with a group of thrusting London rectors that included William Lichfield, John Colop, and Reginald Pecock. London has always been taken to be the locus of this community of scholars and clerics united in their attitudes to the ownership and circulation of religious texts, and of correct texts as guarantors of orthodoxy.40 However, with a separate centre of gravity discernible around Lyhert 35

Cal. Papal Letters, VIII (1909), 504; IX (1912), 3–4, 219.

36

References cited in BRUO, I, 361 and II, 1188.

37

His seat on the episcopal bench was in fact secured by William de la Pole, then Marquess of Suffolk, in supersession of the king’s original candidate. 38

In that condition must also stand the parish library established at St Peter upon Cornhill in London by its rector, Hugh Damlett, another theologically conservative, graduate rector and ultimately an opponent of Pecock’s; see further Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, p. 162. 39 40

Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, pp. 261–74.

A picture that now stands in need of some small adjustment, since even Colop’s book contains certain devotional material that blurs the line between orthodox and heterodox. On this subject in general, see further the essay by Kelly and Perry in the present volume.

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and Carpenter, together with their old Oriel ally Pecock, one would be entitled to make a separate case that an Oxford milieu, at Oriel College, had been an important seed-bed. With regard to the common libraries themselves, while simple chronological determinism would argue that it was London’s Guildhall library that was the progenitor of the three episcopal foundations that followed later in the century, and that accordingly the two churchmen must have encountered, and been inspired by, the Guildhall library during the periods of their wardenship of St Anthony’s, it is instead a real possibility that the fuse had been lit earlier, in Oxford, which happened to produce the first visible ignition in London. Oriel had briefly been Archbishop Arundel’s own college, although the turbulent fellows at the time of Arundel’s visitation of the university in 1411 were not minded to show him fellow-feeling; their behaviour brought on the college a subsequent inquisition whose detecta survive at Oriel.41 As is so often the case, it appears that the inquisition managed only further to embed the factions that it should have reconciled. After the initial visitation, the fractious dean John Rote — later elected provost — was reported to have said of the Archbishop, ‘May the devil go with him and break his neck!’ Although Arundel’s commissaries had encountered and reproved sufficient extra-mural misbehaviour to provoke individual outcry among the fellows, what had divided the fellowship as a whole was the question of Arundel’s authority within the university.42 The fellow John Birch, proctor, was charged with having brought forward a motion in the greater congregation to deprive of their power the council of twelve elected to examine heretical writings.43 In a disputed election for provost in 1417, Carpenter put his vote behind Thomas Leintwardine, who was an upholder of Arundel’s authority.44 Along with Carpenter, Leintwardine’s faction included Reginald Pecock among its number.45 Both men eventually lifted themselves out of this divided society, and Pecock

41

Printed by H. E. Salter, Snappe’s Formulary and Other Records, Oxford Historical Society, 80 (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1924), pp. 194–215. 42

The business is set out by David Watson Rannie, Oriel College (London: Robinson, 1900), pp. 41–48; and in greater detail by Salter, Snappe’s Formulary, pp. 95–115, 194–96. 43

Snappe’s Formulary, p. 198.

44

Leintwardine’s support for the archbishop can be seen at the time of the inquisition when he argued against John Rote’s opinions; see Snappe’s Formulary, p. 201. In 1402 Arundel had protected Leintwardine from molestation by certain enemies and the attempt that had been made to remove him from his fellowship; see Rannie, Oriel College, p. 41. On Leintwardine’s career, see the article by Jeremy I. Catto in ODNB. 45

Rannie, Oriel College, p. 48.

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became in 1431 master and rector of the recently founded Whittington College of St Michael Paternoster Royal.46 At that time Whittington College was under the supervision of John Carpenter the common clerk, and Pecock must have been commended for the post by the other Carpenter, his old Oriel ally, then warden of St Anthony’s. John Carpenter the citizen certainly approved of his controversialist rector. He requested by his testament of 8 March 1442 that Pecock, with William Lichfield, supervise the disposal of his choicer books to the Guildhall library, which he bequeathed, as mentioned above, ‘for the profit of the students there and those discoursing to the common people’. He otherwise bequeathed to friends twenty-six books named by title (including Roger Dymock’s treatise against Lollardy, and the Philobiblon, a suggestive text).47 This clause naming Pecock, as Wendy Scase has pointed out, is even more interesting given that one of the thrusts in Pecock’s preaching was that the scarcity of books in lay hands was a potential cause of error; he argued that prelates should distribute authoritative copies of texts among laymen since books could teach perpetually and were much less likely to be misinterpreted than sermons.48 Again, there is the savour here of what both John Carpenters and Walter Lyhert accomplished in their promotion of common libraries of orthodox texts, attended by learned custodians. What they managed to do chimes naturally with Arundelian concerns for correct teaching under episcopal supervision. Chained libraries in this respect may be considered to be an expansion of the common-profit culture, and — remembering London’s particularity — they were perhaps the way to establish a common-profit culture in provincial cities that could not match the capital’s magnificent accumulation of reading communities. If we are entitled to site the locus of discussion at Oriel College in the second decade of the fifteenth century, then these finished libraries were the accomplishment of a long-cherished plan. None of them, however, was greatly long lived. At the

46

He held the mastership until promoted to the bishopric of St Asaph in 1444; BRUO, III,

1447. 47

London, Guildhall Library, Commissary Court of London, Register 4 (Prowet), MS 9171/4, fols 84r–85v . A translation of the entire document was printed by Thomas Brewer, Memoir of the Life and Times of John Carpenter, Town Clerk of London (London: Taylor, 1856), pp. 131–44, with a discussion of Carpenter’s books at pp. 121–30. This list of books has been often discussed; the most recent, and fruitful, discussion, along with many insights on the circle of clerics that included Pecock and William Lichfield, has been by Hudson, ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’. 48

Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, pp. 265–67.

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time of the Reformation they might have been enabled to continue in some altered form within the new evangelical Church of England as bases for instruction in the new orthodoxy. As it was, they were bound in too tightly to institutions offering intercessory prayers, with no future in protestant England; the evangelism they existed to further was of an older type, intended to improve the education of the clergy and anchor them in the faith. It was not until Humphrey Chetham, by his will of 1653, established an endowed town library for Manchester with a full-time librarian and funds for purchasing books, that England could claim to possess anything comparable to its pre-Reformation public libraries.49

49

On Chetham’s Library, see Michael Powell, ‘Endowed Libraries for Towns’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 2, 1640–1850, ed. by Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 83–101 (pp. 85, 90–100); also The Life of Humphrey Chetham, ed. by Francis Robert Raines and Charles W. Sutton, Chetham Society, n.s., 49–50 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1903).

Part IV Ecclesiastical Humanism

R ELIGION , H UMANISM , AND H UMANITY: C HAUNDLER ’S D IALOGUES AND THE W INCHESTER S ECRETUM * Daniel Wakelin

F

ifteenth-century England often seems most vividly characterized by its Church: by wonderful stained glass and illuminations, or by sporadic extirpations of Lollards. Yet during the fifteenth century scholarship of secular, indeed pagan, literature also thrived in England, if not reborn, then reorganized and galvanized under the banner of the studia humanitatis. What was the relationship between these two trends? They need not have been mutually exclusive or even hostile discourses: of course, few humanist scholars were ever truly irreligious; rather, as Paul Oskar Kristeller put it, they had ‘nonreligious intellectual interests’ alongside their faith. If humanism is defined closely as the studia humanitatis, the study and imitation of antiquity or ‘the humanities’, then this humanism is merely a scholarly pursuit, distinct from Christian belief, and thus able to co-exist with Christianity in the lives of its adepts.1 Yet did coexistence result in combination? It sometimes seems not, for, unlike the renowned Christian humanism of the sixteenth century, fifteenth-century English humanism has more often been noted for nurturing secular thought instead, such as reverence for political ideas of the commonweal or res publica, or secular skills, in practical

* Besides the editors and conference respondents, I must thank Richard Beadle and Kathleen Tonry for useful advice on this essay. 1

Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 71–72; although Kristeller adds that humanist activities were thus ‘competing’ for people’s ‘attention’.

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governance.2 Such secular influences on practical governance have even been observed astutely in the Church itself, in what Andrew Cole tentatively and insightfully titles ‘ecclesiastical humanism’. Cole argues that in the mid-fifteenth century many English ecclesiastics turned aside from fighting heresy and embraced the humanities for ‘new models of identity that are not “theological,” “religious,” or preoccupied with heresy, but rather resonant with the secular virtues and germane to the obligations of running institutions of the ecclesia successfully’.3 This is to locate humanism well, for most men interested in the studia humanitatis in fifteenthcentury England spent most of their time in the church or in the educational institutions it supported (the milieux of the works discussed in this essay). Yet it is important to remember that alongside their considerable secular activities — indeed, administering the commonweal on behalf of English kings — churchmen also drew on humanist scholarship in their devotion, pastoral care, and theology. Just because they turned to Virgil, they did not turn away from the Virgin. Many patrons of humanist studies or owners of humanist books could be as fierily devout as their peers. For example, Bishop William Waynflete had given to him a grammar based on Perotti and Valla and a translation from Cicero, but also a work by an Italian humanist on the Triumphus amoris Domini nostri Jesu Christi (the triumph of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ).4 Moreover, such churchmen were also involved in trying heretics or preaching against heresy, when piety was in danger: many bishops who received humanist dedications or owned humanist books, such as Thomas Bekynton, John Chedworth, Richard Fox, William Gray, John Morton, Thomas Rotherham, and John Russell, are also all recorded interrogating heretics suspected of Lollardy.5 Even if they were humanists — and it is not clear how far

2 Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 20, 91–92, 122–25; Strohm, Politique, pp. 3, 18; David Rundle, ‘Was There a Renaissance Style of Politics in Fifteenth-Century England?’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, ed. by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 15–32. 3

Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, pp. 421–37 (p. 426).

4

Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 97, 132–34, 141, and on Traversagni’s Triumphus amoris in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 450, see Virginia Davis, William Waynflete: Bishop and Educationalist (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), pp. 91–99, and P. R. Robinson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts in London Libraries c. 888–1600, 2 vols (London: British Library, 2003), no. 83 (noting an oddity in the dedication). 5

John A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards 1414–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 68–72 (Chedworth), 86 (Chedworth, Russell), 132 (Chedworth), 134 (Fox), 135, 182, 184, 188 (Morton), 212 (Rotherham), 218 (Russell), 225 (Bekynton), 226, 232 (Gray), 233 (Fox),

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owning a few books or having books dedicated to them might characterize these men as humanists — there was nothing unorthodox about this group. But they might also be cast as inhumane, as closed-minded or hypocritical, in discouraging thinking for oneself in religious matters, despite themselves pursuing intellectual openings in the studia humanitatis. For instance, another noble ecclesiast, William Sellyng, prior of Christ Church Canterbury, managed to combine humanist interests with attacks on heresy too. Sellyng studied in Italy, read and loaned Livy’s Ab urbe condita and translated Greek texts into Latin.6 Yet he also gave sermons, of course, such as one against a local Lollard,7 and one on John 10. 16 made to a convocation of the clergy in 1483 on the importance of unity in the Church in the face of attacks by John ‘Wikliff’ who is ‘ab iniqua vita suorum sequentium rectissime nominatus’ (aptly named for the wicked life of his followers) and Reginald Pecock, the ‘Pauo Cicestrensis / cum suis anglicis (ne angelicis dicam plumis)’ (peacock of Chichester, with his English works, and let’s not say angelic feathers).8 Yet despite the need for orthodoxy, Sellyng can dabble in humanist studies even on this occasion. He addresses the clergymen as ‘litteratissimi viri’ (most literary men) and at the outset as ‘patres conscripti’ (conscript fathers), the Roman senators. One possible source for this mode of address is a miscellany of model letters and classical works owned by an earlier monk of Sellyng’s priory, Henry Cranebroke, for the miscellany includes some speeches to the senate, excerpted from Livy’s Ab urbe condita, which include such phrasing.9 And another sermon copied into Cranebroke’s book, and once

and on Italian humanist comments p. 251; for these men, see the index to Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, ideally in the 4th edition. 6 Canterbury College, Oxford, ed. by W. A. Pantin, Oxford Historical Society, n.s., 6–8, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–44), III, no. 134 (letter about Livy); Josephine W. Bennett, ‘John Morer’s Will: Thomas Linacre and Prior Sellyng’s Greek Teaching’, Studies in the Renaissance, 15 (1968), 70–91 (p. 79). 7 Christ Church, Canterbury: The Chronicle of John Stone, ed. by William George Searle, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Publications, octavo series, 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1902), pp. 108–09; for reference to another sermon by Sellyng see p. 105. 8

London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 116v–117r (following the most recent, pencil foliation in the bottom-right corners of rectos). All transcriptions from manuscripts expand abbreviations silently; all translations are my own. 9

BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 108r–112v , 115r–118r, esp. fol. 108r echoing Livy, Ab urbe condita, ed. and trans. by B. O. Foster and others, 14 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–59), XXVIII. 40. 3 to XXVII. 42. 22, or XXVIII. 43. 2 to XXVII. 44. 18, excerpted in London, British Library, MS Royal 10 B. ix, fols 53v –55r, in the hand of Henry

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more on John 10. 16, also addresses its auditors as ‘senatores’ and makes many classical allusions, possibly including one to Vitruvius.10 So Sellyng and others from Christ Church Canterbury could indulge in humanist imitation even while caught up in English ecclesiastical business. Nevertheless, humanists in England did not completely shed their ‘fear of supernatural anticiceronian warnings’ — as Roberto Weiss once said the good humanist should.11 Italians writing humanist educational books in England did sometimes have to defend their study of secular classical literature as something useful to salvation; so for example did the aforementioned Traversagni.12 Others, such as the English scholar John Doget of King’s College, Cambridge, tried to erase the difference between classical paganism and Christian studies. When Doget wrote a commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, using Leonardo Bruni’s Latin translation, in his prologue he defended his topic for commentary: Mihi igitur quum aliquando plato esset in manibus illicque de animorum immortalitate preclara legissem : dignus mihi uisus fuit in quem ocium transferrem meum . et si que sancte ac religiose dixerit : ea uerbis meis probarem et exaggerarem . que uero aliena : aut exploderem . aut castigata dimitterem 13 (Whenever I had Plato’s work to hand and I read there very clear statements of the immortality of souls, it seemed to me worthy to spend my leisure on; and I will demonstrate and amplify in my own words whatever he has said that is holy or religious, and anything not like that I will explode or castigate and dismiss.)

The same idea of purifying classical learning in order to study it in Christian schools recurs later in his commentary:

Cranebroke, on whom see Weiss, pp. 131, 154, and on which manuscript see Canterbury College, ed. by Pantin, III, nos 14–15, 83, 107, 123–25. Other drafts and notes in Sellyng’s hand in MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 119r–134 v, make classical allusions. 10

BL, MS Royal 10 B. ix, fols 124v –126r (not in Cranebroke’s hand): a reference to De Architectura by ‘Victorinus’ might be to Vitruvius. 11

Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, p. 1.

12

Lorenzo Traversagni, Margarita eloquentiae castigatae, ed. by Giovanni Farris (Savona: Sabatelli, 1978), pp. 26–30, 168–69, discussed by Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 141–43, and Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 15–16. 13

John Doget, In examinatorium in Phedonem Platonis (c. 1473–86), in London, British Library, MS Additional 10344, here citing fol. 5r, printed by James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, 17, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990), II, 500.

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Mirificus sepe plato et ad christianam philosophiam uerbis quam proxime accedens . ut adhibita castigacione sentencias prope modum ad nostras aptemus scholas14 (How remarkably often Plato approaches Christian philosophy in his writings, so that we might admit his sayings to our schools after some castigation of them.)

These passages, one carefully placed at the start of Doget’s work like a disclaimer, are indeed defensive in their overemphatic synonyms and adjectives. Reading Plato needs justifying: the question of how far one can sharpen Christian beliefs by reading the pagan classics was especially vexed with Plato, as opposed to, say, Aristotle or Cicero who had long been better known.15 Yet the passage is not merely defensive, for what Doget describes is a reading-process which is very aggressive — certainly an ahistorical or solipsistic one. Doget reads Plato’s work and finds in it things that he already knows; and what he finds different (‘aliena’) he will chasten or castigate — a word which evokes textual emendation, schoolmasterly spanking, and strict sexual purity. The differences between Plato’s thought and Christian thought have been spotted — this is why Doget does need some defence — but they are to be interpreted away, in an act of hermeneutics that erases difference and sees Plato ‘proxime accedens’ (closely approaching) Christianity. The humanities and theology have been combined into one. To accomplish this, Doget not only presents Plato looking like a Christian but also presents the Christian authors looking towards the pagans for help: lege si placet cum reliquorum catholicorum plurium tum Iheronimi augustinique libros : tam eos philosophorum sentencijs poetarumque carminibus abundare perspexeris : quasi omnem Graecorum . poetarumque bibliothecam reuoluissent16 (If you like, read the books of Jerome and Augustine as well as of many more Catholics, and you will see that they abound in sayings of the philosophers and the songs of the poets, as if they had pored over the whole library, as it were, of the Greeks and of the poets.)

He adds that St Paul also makes use of poetry in his Epistle to Titus 1. 12, and wisely neglects to note that St Paul then goes on to reject ‘fabulis’ or ‘fictions’. For Doget here invokes the Fathers and the Apostle as models for studying the

14

BL, MS Additional 10344, fol. 59v.

15

Hankins, Plato, I, 49–51, 360–61 and Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Gianozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 11–12 note that Bruni’s translation of Phaedo, Doget’s source, began with its own pious and defensive preface. 16

BL, MS Additional 10344, fol. 5v, printed by Hankins, Plato, II, 500.

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humanities — poetry and philosophy. Doget was not alone among fifteenth-century humanists in drawing on patristic precedents to justify his studies. For example, among the texts by Italian humanists which argued for the study of pagan authors, one of the most widely diffused was Leonardo Bruni’s Latin translation from the Greek Ad iuvenes by as saintly a scholar as St Basil. It circulated widely in England: it was available, for example, copied by Cranebroke of Sellyng’s monastery, and in many other manuscripts circulating in England.17 Moreover, the patristic authors — notably Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Lactantius — were widely available to fifteenth-century English humanists: the books given by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester to Oxford included patristic works alongside pagan and Italian secular ones;18 a member of Humfrey’s household, Antonio Beccaria, translated the Greek works of Athanasius against heretics;19 and the surviving Greek scholarship by the aforementioned William Sellyng is a translation not of a Platonic dialogue, say, but of a sermon by Chrysostom.20 A few English writers also offered some nicely explicit attempts to justify the study of pagan antiquity by putting it alongside the study of patristics. Most interesting are two works (on which the rest of this essay will focus) by writers influenced by the studia humanitatis: the Collocutiones and Allocutiones of Thomas Chaundler and the anonymous translation into Middle English of part of Petrarch’s Secretum. For example, Chaundler, in his Allocutiones, speaks of studying patristic texts with his patron Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells:

17

BL, MS Royal 10 B. ix, fols 68r–70v , and others described by A. C. de la Mare and Stanley Gillam, in Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School 1488–1988 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1988), nos 37, 74, 76–80. Botley, Latin Translation, pp. 7–8, and Hankins, Plato, pp. 49–58, contextualize Bruni’s translation amid defensiveness about studying pagan texts in the early 1400s. 18

As importantly noted by Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Conclusion: Scholars and Studies in Renaissance Oxford’, in HUO, II, 769–83 (p. 772). 19

To be discussed by David Rundle, ‘From Greenwich to Verona: Antonio Beccaria, St Athanasius and the Translation of Orthodoxy’, forthcoming in the journal Humanistica. 20

London, British Library, MS Additional 47675, fols 2 r–28 r, and MS Additional 15673, fols 3 –28 v (translation from Chrysostom, discussed by J. B. Trapp, ‘Notes on Manuscripts Written by Peter Meghen’, The Book Collector, 24 (1975), 80–96, no. 17). The patristic authors crop up in Sellyng’s sermons too: The Chronicle of John Stone, ed. by Searle, pp. 108–09 (sermon citing ‘sacram scripturam et sanctorum ecclesie ortodoxorum dicta’ and ‘auctoritatibus quamplurium doctorum sanctarum’ [sic]; ‘holy scripture and sayings of the orthodox saints of the Church’, ‘so many authorities of the holy doctors’); MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fol. 110v (sermon citing St Augustine). r

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Nam uti cum sepe apud te hospes essem catholicos doctores feceras manibus interdum et lingua sumi ; ita apud me non oblitus tui quidem exempli plerumque sanctissimum Aurelium Augustinum . et ceteros interea quos rapere possem ; catholice fidei doctores inspicio (fol. 32v)21 (Because, whenever I often stayed with you, you had the Catholic doctors at hand and on your lips, and so, for my part I have not forgotten your example; and I study in particular the most saintly Augustine and also the other doctors of the Catholic faith I can lay my hands on.)

These lines offer the imagery of scholarly amicitia and of hunting books that it is hard to ‘get one’s hands on’ which is habitually used to describe secular studies — but here these images characterize patristic studies too.22 As with Doget, the study of Christian texts is fully integrated into the humanist vision of scholarship. Chaundler’s pair of works from which these words come, his Collocutiones and accompanying Allocutiones, worry in several places about studying and imitating pagan antiquity and they direct such studies to patristic antiquity and Christian teaching. These Latin colloquies and addresses were completed after 15 May 1461, when Chaundler ceased to be chancellor of the University of Oxford, an event noted in the prologue, and before the death of Bekynton, the dedicatee, on 14 January 1465.23 Despite relinquishing the chancellorship of Oxford, Chaundler seems in these works still to be wrapped up in education, both practically — in his involvement with New College in Oxford and with Winchester College, a school in southern England — and imaginatively.24 He says that the Collocutiones were written by a pupil, but that he, the teacher, has rewritten them and given them to Bishop Bekynton. He seems to imply that the Collocutiones were spoken ‘publicly’, 21 Thomas Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones (c. 1461–64) are cited from Oxford, New College, MS 288, fols 5r–45 v, with parenthetical folio-references. They also appear in London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A. xxiv, fols 15r–63 r, which lacks folios between fol. 51v and fol. 52r, losing most of the last of the seven Collocutiones and the first of the two Allocutiones, besides other eye-skips and small divergences. 22

Though compare David Rundle, ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss: Humanist Texts in England during the Fifteenth Century’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Diana E. S. Dunn, Fifteenth Century Series, 4 (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), pp. 181–203 (pp. 184–87). 23 24

M. R. James, The Chaundler MSS (London: Nichols, 1916), p. 30.

On the milieu, see Guy Fitch Lytle, ‘“Wykehamist Culture” in Pre-Reformation England’, in Winchester College: Sixth-centenary Essays, ed. by Roger Custance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 129–66, and Virginia Davis, William Wykeham: A Life (London: Continuum, 2007).

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as if in a game or even an interlude before ‘the king of festivities’ (‘publice coram Rege solatii’, fol. 7r).25 That seems possible, because the Collocutiones are colloquies or dialogues between two young men, later joined by the ‘chancellor’, Chaundler himself, who wraps up the debate. Then, in the Allocutiones, Chaundler writes two addresses or speeches in his own voice to Bekynton on the same theme. The theme is the nature of virtue, and especially the virtue of William Wykeham, founder of New College and Winchester. The model seems to be the dialogues of Italian humanists on moral questions, or perhaps such works as Leonardo Bruni’s Isagogicon moralis discipline (‘introduction to moral learning’) which digested classical wisdom into pithy form. The Collocutiones and Allocutiones are full of quotations from both classical and patristic authors in order to illustrate what virtue is. The quotations are so long — even pages long — that some stretches of the works largely consist of quotations, with only a few sentences joining them. Chaundler habitually writes this way: for example, his charming Libellus de laudibus duarum civitatum (‘little book in praise of two cities’) is in many places silently plagiarized from Italian humanist texts.26 In the Collocutiones and Allocutiones, though, Chaundler does not plagiarize his sources: with one exception, he identifies them carefully and openly. The exception is a supposed quotation from Cicero’s then lost work De republica which he takes from Augustine’s De civitate Dei but presents in wording that suggests that he is paraphrasing Cicero directly (‘Hec Cicero’, fol. 42r), as did other fifteenth-century English scholars.27 This is revealing: for Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones offer instead of silent borrowing an explicit demonstration of the act of borrowing — of how, why, and what one might borrow and learn — from the pagan or Christian classics. At one point in his own voice Chaundler advises his young pupils,

25

Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. by George Williams, Rolls Series, 56, 2 vols (London: Longman and Trübner, 1872), II, 315–26 (here citing p. 320), prints the prologue and a few unrepresentative excerpts; James, The Chaundler MSS, pp. 47–56, prints two short excerpts and a codicological description. 26

Thomas Chaundler, ‘Libellus de laudibus duarum civitatum […]’, ed. by George Williams, Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 19 (1873), 99–121, discussed by Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 163–65, and David Rundle, ‘Humanist Eloquence among the Barbarians in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Charles Burnett and Nicholas Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 2005), pp. 68–85 (pp. 70–71). See also the useful edition of Thomas Chaundler, Liber apologeticus de omni statu humanae naturae, ed. by Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri (London: MHRA, 1974). 27

Compare Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 101–02, 115–16.

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‘Ciceronem legendum esse uolo . item Aristotili ceteris que preterea studendum et innitendum esse philosophis’ (I want you to read Cicero and to apply yourself to and rely upon Aristotle and other philosophers; fols 21v–22r). Yet it seems that this course of study runs too far for Chaundler, for the very next clause retracts the former: he wants us, he continues, ‘secularibus deinde litteris et autoribus omnibus tamen doctores christianos maxime ; augustinum anteferre’ (then, however, to prefer best the Christian doctors, especially Augustine before all secular works and authors; fol. 22 r). It seems that he feels obliged to add a Christian modification of the humanist programme, and elsewhere in his Collocutiones and Allocutiones he repeatedly stresses this hierarchy: classical, pagan authors are good but not as good as patristic, Christian ones.28 For example, at one point he notes that his works happily include quotations from classical philosophers but stresses that the ‘perfect praise’ of William Wykeham requires the help of Christian writers: Quoniam tamen in hisce dumtaxat moribus quos tradunt philosophi non stat perfecta viri laus ; habet rursum libellus iste pro reliqua sui parte allocuciones tibi O. pater electissime alciori quidem tractas principio de catholicorum doctorum collectas apicibus (fol. 7r)29 (However, because the perfect praise of this man rests not only on those morals which the philosophers teach, on the contrary this little book has in its final section some speeches for you, O most select father, drawn indeed from a higher source, and collected from the writings of the Catholic doctors.)

Christian works are here drawn from an ‘alciori’ or ‘higher’ source and ‘apicibus’, a word which is often used to mean ‘writings’ in late Latin but which literally means ‘high points’. Because of this opening statement by Chaundler that the ‘final section’ of his work is more Christian, we might expect the seven dialogues to be pagan and the two addresses which follow to be a sort of Christian palinode or retraction. But in fact the Collocutiones and Allocutiones do not follow a retrograde movement, beginning in ‘Renaissance’ humanism and reverting to ‘medieval’ faith; rather, they constantly shift back and forth between pagan and Christian wisdom. Moreover, because this statement about the ‘final section’ occurs in the prologue, it looks suspiciously like a pious disclaimer. Occurring in the prologue, it frames

28

Oxford, New College, MS 288, fols 33r, 34r , 38 v . Ironically, the pastedowns of this manuscript now are fragments of a table indexing St Jerome’s letters; so at some point in history patristic learning was cut up to preserve Chaundler’s learning. 29

Printed in regularized spelling in Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. by Williams, p. 320.

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the rest of the work within a debate about the merits of two intellectual traditions; and the repeated statements about this debate — indeed, once using very similar wording at the start of the Allocutiones — emphasize it as a theme to be kept in mind.30 Chaundler himself pops up as a character as early as the fifth dialogue in the Collocutiones to debate the limits of classical scholarship for inculcating virtue, not in rejection but in constant exploration. There is a complex counterpoising of advice to read Cicero and Aristotle with reminders that such reading is futile, reminders based themselves, nevertheless, on reading — but on reading patristic texts. For Chaundler turns to St Augustine and Lactantius, whose De civitate Dei and Divinae institutiones respectively fit into a long history of intellectually capacious Christian responses to classical thought: Age . imperfectum hominis intellectum esse . eleuatum preterea nobiliter ab Aristotile . a .M. tullio . a ceteris denique philosophi“ preceptoribus ostendit Lactancius . Inter philosophos tamen non ciceronem . imo nullum sapientem esse tam lactantius quam Augustinus fatetur . Verum quia suis in libris clarissime docent non nisi diuinis scripturis et gracia perfectum esse quemquam (fol. 22r) (Well, Lactantius shows that the intellect of humankind is imperfect, despite being nobly elevated by Aristotle, Cicero and indeed other teachers of philosophy. However, both Lactantius and Augustine claim that neither Cicero nor anybody among the philosophers was wise. Moreover, in their books they very clearly teach that nobody can be made perfect except by Holy Scripture and grace.)

Several such passages are direct quotations from patristic sources, and always duly identified as such, as in this quotation from the opening of Lactantius’s Divinae institutiones: neque adepti sunt id quod uolebant ; et operam simul atque industriam perdiderunt . quia veritas . id est archanum summi dei qui fecit omnia ingenio ac propriis sensibus non potest comprehendi . Alioquin nihil inter deum hominem que distaret . si consilia et dispositiones ipsius maiestatis eterne . cogitacio assequeretur humana (fol. 21r)31 (They did not achieve what they wanted and all at once lost their work and industry, because the truth — that is, the secret of the highest God who made all things — cannot be comprehended with wit or our own senses, otherwise there would be no difference

30

Compare the previous quotation with New College, MS 288, fol. 32v: ‘Verumtamen in hisce dumtaxat moribus . non stat perfecta uiri laus . Idcirco philosophiam ueluti minus perfectam transuolans ; tecum insignissime pontifex nitar temptare sanctorum doctorum rimari apices’. 31

L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, Divinarum institutionum libri septem: 1. Libri I et II, ed. by Eberhard Heck and Antonie Wlosok (München: Saur, 2005), I. i. 5 (identical, except that the printed edition has ‘illius’ for ‘ipsius’).

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between God and humankind, if human thought could reach the thoughts and plans of his eternal majesty.)

Given such intelligent sources, it is interesting to see Chaundler’s explanation for the limits of pagan wisdom. Their understanding of virtue was limited because they relied on human learning, and the human mind and its thinking processes are limited — ‘the intellect of humankind is imperfect’ in comparison with the mind of God. So if pagan philosophy had taught us too much, there would have been a sort of lèse-majesté, the studia humanitatis as a human rivalling of God. Yet although conceived of as limited, there is at least a conception of the human mind here. The idea that the human mind might rival God is denied, but also echoes as a possibility in that subjunctive verb ‘distaret’ (‘there would be no difference’). And the following lines from Lactantius, which Chaundler continues to quote word-for-word, and with which he concludes his quotation, proceed to state that because the human intellect was too feeble to comprehend the divine alone, God in fact helped to open humanity’s eyes (‘Aperuit oculos’, fol. 21r). The metaphor of eye-opening is suddenly optimistic and also gives human intelligence a plausible, experiential feel. And the human mind becomes a very plausible thing to contemplate thanks to the repetition throughout the text of psychological vocabulary such as intellectum and cogitatio as well as the words homo and humanus (the noun ‘human being’, the adjective ‘human’) — which seem used advisedly in contrast to the word vir for an individual or somebody specifically male.32 Describing the human mind’s limit, faced with divinity, does at least require Chaundler to begin to conceptualize and describe that mind. Moreover, while the penultimate few pages do quote Lactantius on the need for divine aid in saving humankind, the quotation in fact offers hope in the ability of humankind to save itself. This is because Lactantius describes the incarnated Christ not as winning our salvation by his sacrifice in some cosmic righting of wrongs, but by serving as a ‘doctor e celo missus’ (a teacher sent from heaven; fol. 44r). Lactantius is careful not to deny Christ’s divinity, but he certainly does stress Christ’s humankind in this passage, and he stresses it not only because it makes him a suitable surrogate in paying penalties for other human beings, but because it makes him a simpler exemplary role-model — as, for the humanist scholars, so many classical pagan heroes could be — or even a grammar-teacher or magister: 32

For example, Oxford, New College, MS 288, fols 27v –28r, a passage lifted from Cicero, De Officiis, I. 130, on distinguishing ‘uirilem’ dignity befitting the ‘uiro’ (‘masculine’, ‘male’) from beauty befitting women.

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Once again, the term homo and its variant forms echo throughout the passage, both in the plural form hominum (‘of men’) referring in the plural to individual people, but also in the singular forms hominem (‘man’) and homini (‘to man’) which imply some abstract agglomeration of men into one category of humanity. And this passage implies something interesting about that category: it implies that Christ’s efficacy depends on human wisdom and free will in learning from him, and he becomes just one more ‘doctor’ or teacher — albeit a perfect one. And finally, despite the expressed favour for patristic over pagan quotations, after this citation from Lactantius Chaundler’s Allocutiones end with one last quotation from Virgil — one used and allegorized by other humanist writers in Italy and England — which identifies both divine aid and human virtue as ways to heaven (fol. 45r–v ).33 And with this balance between human striving and help from Jupiter (of course, for Virgil, not God), Chaundler ends. Ultimately, the very workings of his Collocutiones and Allocutiones depend on the ability of both the Christian classics and the classical humanities to educate, and on the ability of humankind to be educated. A similar sense of human self-determination can be found in other dialogues and interludes from fifteenth-century. For example, in Chaundler’s Liber apologeticus, a retelling of the debate of the Four Daughters of God and of the Passion, there is a striking stress on humanity’s own ability to respond to the divine.34 Yet the link between this human self-determination and the secular humanist studies is explored beyond Chaundler’s work, in other contemporary debates in a humanist idiom. One interesting exploration emerges in a translation of Book I of Petrarch’s Latin Secretum into English verse (the second dialogue on which this essay focuses).

33

Virgil, Aeneid, ed. and trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934–35), VI. 126–30, also allegorized, for example, by Doget, In examinatorium in Phedonem Platonis, in BL, MS Additional 10344, fols 65v –66r, and Collucio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis, ed. by B. L. Ullmann (Zürich: Artemis, 1951), pp. 484, 547. 34

Chaundler, Liber apologeticus, for example, pp. 60–62 on ‘self awareness’ and salvation (‘sui noticiam’).

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It survives in only one manuscript copied a decade or so later than the Collocutiones, perhaps in the 1470s or 1480s; it was copied at Winchester, probably by somebody involved in education at the priory’s school, or possibly at Winchester College, the school with which Chaundler had connections.35 There are two other Middle English dialogues which can tentatively be linked to Winchester College, and which even suggest the use of moral dialogues in education, grounded in Christian sources such as the Legenda aurea or Honorius of Autun’s Lucidarium.36 Petrarch’s Secretum is also an educational dialogue: Petrarch laments the miserable state of humankind, until St Augustine pops up to teach him — so, as in Chaundler’s Collocutiones or the other Winchester dialogues, an older, wiser man (‘cancellarius’, Lucidus, ‘Doctrine’) instructs younger men. And, like Chaundler’s work, Petrarch’s Secretum also struggles to orient humanist studies in a Christian direction and to discover whether the humanities might be an ethically serious pursuit.37 It was certainly scholarship in service of Christian belief that shaped Petrarch’s reception in England during the fifteenth century — after Chaucer’s and before Wyatt’s dabbling in his love poetry. Exemplary of this pious reception is a translation of parts of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae (‘remedies for both kinds of fortune’) into English which strips it of its classical allusions and turns it into an austere dialogue about the misery of human life.38 It was the ‘orthodox sententiae’

35

BL, MS Additional 60577, fols 8r –22r , reproduced in facsimile by Edward Wilson with Iain Fenlon in The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981), but not yet edited. On the provenance, see pp. 9–10, 13–14. 36 Non-Cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues, ed. by Norman Davis, Leeds Texts and Monographs: Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 5 (Leeds: School of English, University of English, 1979), pp. 179–208. On the date and provenance, see Richard Beadle, ‘Occupation and Idleness’, in Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross, ed. by Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King, and Peter Meredith, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 32 (Leeds: School of English, University of English, 2001), pp. 7–47 (pp. 7–8), and Ralph Hanna, ‘Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England’, in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nicholas and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 37–51 (p. 39). On the sources, see Beadle, ‘Occupation and Idleness’, pp. 8–9, 13 (n. 11) and B. S. Lee, ‘Lucidus and Dubius: A FifteenthCentury Theological Debate and its Sources’, Medium Ævum, 45 (1976), 79–96. 37

Ronald Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 231, 249–51, 254–56, 290; Brian Stock, ‘Reading, Ethics and the Literary Imagination’, New Literary History, 34 (2003), 1–17 (pp. 11–12). 38

A Dialogue between Reason and Adversity: A Late Middle English Version of Petrarch’s De Remediis, ed. by F. N. M. Diekstra (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1968), esp. pp. 32–33.

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of works such as his De remediis and his Secretum and not ‘his humanistic qualities’ which were popular in fifteenth-century England.39 But the English translation of Secretum differs a little from this strictly pious reading of Petrarch, or from the other two dialogues of Winchester provenance. Though it offers Christian teaching, and in dialogue with St Augustine, Book I of Petrarch’s Secretum also teaches us to study pagan antiquity. In it, Petrarch’s St Augustine — unlike Chaundler’s Lactantius — does not ever dismiss the pagan writers. Late in the section rendered into English, St Augustine quotes in Latin some ‘wordes poetable’ on the soul from Virgil’s Aeneid, and then adds of their message that: To thys accordethe þe Apostle noble seynt powle The body corrupte he seythe / dysesethe the sowle (fol. 20v )40

This comment is followed by St Paul’s words. To say that St Paul agrees or ‘accordethe’ with Virgil might reflect some nascent humanist historical insight here, for St Paul certainly did cite the classics — as the aforementioned English humanist John Doget noted, for example. So it might be significant that Petrarch misascribes the lines: they in fact come from Wisdom 9. 15 in the Old Testament, but Petrarch ascribes them to St Paul in the New Testament, who did live later than Virgil and therefore feasibly might have read and agreed (‘accordethe’) with him: was Petrarch here trying to suggest a Biblical precedent for studying the classical humanities, or trying to historicize the early Church in late antiquity?41 The error, preserved silently in the English translation, suggests that here is such a precedent. Yet the precedent gives priority in time and powerfulness to the humanities: St Paul now merely ‘accordethe’ passively with Virgil, whereas in the Latin original he had the power to have Virgil’s words ‘verificatum’ (verified).42 In the English Secretum the priority of secular studies is in fact confirmed a page later, when Petrarch, holier than St Augustine himself here, says that he recently read St Augustine’s De vera religione: Specyally in thye boke I lokede vppon but late De vera religione / and caste all oþer oo syde .

39

Nicholas Mann, Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles, Censimento dei Codici Petrarcheschi, 6 (Padova: Antenore, 1975), pp. 141–42. 40

Quotations come from BL, MS Additional 60577 with parenthetical folio-references.

41

The notes in Francesco Petrarca, Secretum, ed. by Ugo Dotti (Roma: Izzi, 1993), I. 15. 2 to I. 15. 4, identify sources in Virgil, Aeneid, VI. 730–34 and Wisdom 9. 15. Cf. Doget in n. 15 above. 42

Cf. Petrarca, Secretum, I. 15. 4.

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Bothe phylosophy / and poesy / and toke þat to my guyde And redde hytt for my dysporte and Solace (fols 20v–21 r)

St Augustine, however, modestly says there is no need for that, and asserts that his own works are themselves simply responses to pagan philosophy: Saufe chaunge of þe wordes ; þer ys non oþer dyfference But þat þou shalt fynde / that may the plese The phylosophye and doctrine of plato and Socrates And for to tell the shortelye in a clause Oon worde of Cicero was þe cause That y began that werke euery delle (fol. 21r)

This is extremely positive about the value of Plato, Socrates, and Cicero, and the rough English poet’s filler phrases such as ‘euery delle’ echo the gung-ho Latin here very closely.43 Moreover, the English poet develops the reference to speaking differently in the Latin (‘aliter’), in order to stress that there is little difference between different intellectual traditions: he says that only the ‘chaunge of þe wordes’ and not the ideas distinguishes pagan philosophy. As for Doget in his commentary on Phaedo, so for this translator of Petrarch’s Secretum, one can read Platonic texts and find the same lesson in them as in Christian books. However, what is the lesson? What is surprising is that it is not a lesson about the capabilities of human virtue, as for Chaundler, but about the limitations of human mortality. The dialogue starts glumly, with Petrarch ‘soore astoned’ by dread of death (fol. 8r); it includes a grim scene of the indignities of death, piling up rotting body-parts in anaphoric lines which seem devoid of logic or sense (fol. 18r–v ); and even after the praise of Virgil’s and Cicero’s lessons it ends with Petrarch reverting to ‘sorowe’ and ‘grief’, as what he is learning from these lessons is the misery and mortality of humankind (fol. 22r).44 Petrarch was already a century dead by the time this English translation was copied, and so the translation 43

Cf. Petrarca, Secretum, I. 15. 7: ‘unum maxime Ciceronis tui verbum’ (mostly one word of your Cicero). 44

It may be an accident that the text ends here: the surviving translation ends with a request to say no more ‘to nyght’ (fol. 22r ): this echoes the Latin (‘hodiernum colloquium’; Petrarca, Secretum, I.15. 14). That the English translation of Book I keeps this reference to further possible text, however, might suggest that Books II and III were also once translated. Moreover, the English translation requests to postpone book II not today (‘hodiernum’) but ‘to nyght’ and ‘with the lycens of my lorde’ (fol. 22r), phrases which suggest performance before a patron and over several nights, like other known interludes. Petrarch’s opening statement in the English that ‘I appere to youre presence a processe to proclame’ (fol. 8r; not in the Latin I. 1. 1) might also suggest performance.

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might reflect older strains of pious reflection. But gloom is not the keynote; the keynote is in fact an oscillation of mood, from wailing and penitential horror to reasoning and learning. Throughout the translation there are competing comments about human mortality and human intellectual power which it is difficult to reconcile. (Indeed, the reconciliation could, as a critical process, risk interpreting the work as complex, when it might just be inconsistent.) Moreover, the competing comments are delivered too in dialogue, with all the uncertainty that the dialogic form brings, and by characters who shift their point-of-view within the work. However, the apparent inconsistency of mood between rue for human mortality and hope for the studia humanitatis is resolved by defining humanity in bipartite terms, as coherent but combining body and soul, sensuality and reason. The soul is weighed down by the ‘contagius bodye’ but does have a ‘dyvyne lykenesse’ (fol. 20r). After Petrarch’s opening astonishment at death, Augustine tells him that people should not ponder ‘wrecchydnesse’ in their ‘ymaginacyon’ but should ‘studye’ it with ‘reson’ (fol. 10r): not wallowing in woe, but reflecting. For though humankind is miserable, people can escape misery by the exercise of reason. This is what Augustine says outright when Petrarch asks him for ‘the diffinicyon of man’: That man ys a beste and prynce of bestys alle Endued with reason and clothede with flesshe mortall [. . .] Iff thou see a man soo ferre shynynge in reson That all hys lyff hathe growndyde ther vppon And with here brydell . hathe streyned hys appetyte And put vnderfote / hys foule delyte Vnderstandynge hym selfe / by hys wytt resonable Dystincte in dyfference / fro brutes vnresonable Ne that he ys nott worthy for 1to¬ bere the name Off a man ; but reason hym entame Remembrynge and reducynge to for hys eye Euery daye and houre / that he shall dye . (fol. 17v )

So humankind is a ‘beste’ but is also ‘prynce of bestys alle’, and what distinguishes humankind from ‘brutes vnresonable’ — beasts here recast in harsher terms as ‘brutes’ — is the exercise of reason and intellectual processes: a man must let reason ‘entame’ his animal parts by ‘Remembrynge and reducynge to for hys eye’ his mortality (fol. 17v ).45 The metaphor of eyesight again, as for Chaundler, makes this

45

Closely following the shift from ‘Hominem’ to ‘animal’ to ‘brutorum animantium’ in Petrarca, Secretum, I. 10. 5–10. 6, but misreading Petrarch’s classical Latin adjective brutus (‘irrational’) modifying ‘animantium’ (‘creatures’) as the medieval Latin noun brutus (‘brute’), modified by animans (‘living’). English brute as a noun far predates OED, brute, B.1.a, but not as

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reflection sound so doable. Moreover, the gloomy fact of mortality is transformed, in some odd piece of positive thinking or cognitive analytical therapy, into an opportunity — something on which to exercise one’s reason and thereby to rise above the beastly. As Augustine said earlier: That perfyght knowynge of mannys wrecchednes Engendrethe a perfyght desyre to ryse The whiche powere folowythe in euery wyse (fol. 15r)

In a neat pair of parallel phrases, perfect knowledge leads to perfect will and the uplifting of humankind; and the last line suggests human self-determination, with human power sequent upon human cognition and will or desire.46 This argument presents the human intellect as extremely powerful — indeed, ‘perfyght’ — whereas Chaundler called it ‘imperfectum’; and that might be why this English poet says more openly positive things than Chaundler about the power of the human sciences, poetry and philosophy, to teach us. Moreover, the positive hope for the intellect’s power is not only stated but underpins the humanist style of the text itself. The use of the dialogue form invites reflection and debate, and other verbal tics in the dialogue seem to invite the reader to think. The reader as much as Petrarch is told to ‘Consydre hitt well’ (fol. 17v), ‘it’ being bipartite humanity, and ‘merke hym well’ (fol. 15r), ‘him’ being Ovid, marked in a phrase that might translate the engaged reader’s jotting of nota bene. Furthermore, the style of the translation might encourage considering and noting. It challenges readers with some learned vocabulary for logic (‘subsequent’ and ‘antecedent’, fol. 11r; ‘ambiguite of thy proposycyon’, fol. 13v), for philosophical schools (‘Stoiciens’, fol. 12v), for academic life (a humanist’s dismissal of each scholastic ‘faculte’ of ‘divyne’ or ‘legistre’, fol. 17r), and for psychology (‘a scripul in thy conscience’, fol. 15r; ‘puerylite’, fol. 17r). Few of these words are coinages,47 but cumulatively they and others require a reader comfortable with the intellectual life and its terms of thought. Similarly challenging, there are various Latin quotations from Cicero (fol. 12r), ‘vers of virgyll’ or Virgil’s ‘eneyde’ (fols 12v, 15r, 20r–v ), Ovid (fol. 15r) and Horace (fol. 16v ), and not all of them are translated. But, an adjective (OED, brute, A.1; MED, brut, (a)). Entame also far predates the first citation in this sense in OED, entame, v.2 , although OED, entame, v.1, or MED, entamen (v.), has the attested meaning ‘To make a cut into’, or, figuratively ‘To open (a discussion, conversation, etc.)’. 46 47

Closely following Petrarca, Secretum, I. 6. 5.

The few other possible coinages (cf. n. 45 above) predating all entries in OED and MED, are ‘Interpretesse’ (fol. 15v), the calqued Latin ‘certamen’ (fol. 16 r), ‘poetable’ (fol. 20 v) and ‘rethorius’ (fol. 21r).

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then, the manuscript miscellany in which the dialogue occurs comes from a school, and includes bilingual vulgaria for learning Latin, and other texts offering education or counsel.48 That context reminds us of the educational workings of this text too. Overall, the implied readers are credited with being learned or rather becoming so, and becoming so in part through reading this text — for thereby they acquire the means to ‘reson’ their way to salvation. The text does not talk down to the readers or listeners; it talks up, and thereby talks them up. Thus it is not particular ideas in pagan books which prompt these two humanist writers to think about humanity; pagan or patristic books alike can teach similarly divided ideas about human self-determination or imperfection, about reason or sensuality; there’s no obvious link between the classics and human dignity. (Indeed, John Doget argued in his commentary on Plato’s Phaedo that some classical ideas such as those of Pythagoras might debase the human being.)49 Yet both of these works emerge from educational institutions, from schools and universities which, almost by definition, encourage people to improve themselves. And it is not just any education but an education in the secular humanities or studia humanitatis which will contribute to the knowledge of self and ethical living that these works encourage. For Petrarch recognized that the secular, human processes of reading (and writing) might enable the cultivation of ethical living and the encounter with the divine.50 And Augustine too had long ago seen that ethical living and Christian living could best be comprehended and achieved through the use of narrative, imagining and reflection on temporal existence — the subjects of the humanist study of rhetoric, poetry and history.51 Within these long traditions, the Middle English translation of Book I of Petrarch’s Secretum and Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones all suggest that human reading and thinking, and about the humanities, will help to secure salvation. This interpretation fits these works into various maps of fifteenth-century English culture. It fits them into general arguments for the increased trust in

48

BL, MS Additional 60577, fols 67r–77 r (vulgaria). The Winchester Anthology, ed. by Wilson with Fenlon, pp. 18–36, identifies the various contents. 49

BL, MS Additional 10344, fols 49v –51r.

50

Among many studies of this process, see for example, Carol E. Quillen, ‘A Tradition Invented: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 179–207 (pp. 205–07); Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanities, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 170–71. 51

Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 3–4, 12, 24–25.

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secular reasoning, as traced in recent studies of rational ‘politique’, of humanist reading, or of the everyday ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ of running the church. Humanist influences might thus seem like points of origin for ‘modernities’, as Cole has noted; yet, he adds, we might beware such ‘longer historical trajectories’.52 And indeed, two elements of these dialogues by Chaundler and the translator of Petrarch make it hard to place humanism on the map of fifteenth-century English religious life — an important corner of that larger map often supposed to trace routes from ‘medieval’ to ‘Reformation’. Firstly, to study the Christian faith through the lens of the humanities makes humanism not only part of the Church but also an observer of it, and this process of observing can let us see the Church in fresh perspectives. To take just one example, in Chaundler’s work, even the fleeting adoption of procedures of the secular humanities — notably rhetoric and history — make the revered Church Fathers into elements of human history. Quoting their works at length clarifies how their ideas grow organically in textual context, as rhetorical acts; and quoting their works side-by-side with their contemporaries and sources helps to historicize their ideas within wider intellectual currents in late antiquity, one vital context. So, for example, in short comments which frame his long quotations, Chaundler historicizes St Augustine’s De moribus ecclesiae as a work engaged in a particular conflict, with the Manicheans, worth comparing with the near contemporary works of St Ambrose, because St Augustine had been an ‘auditor’ (listener) of St Ambrose, thus suggesting some human genealogy and agency for the Christian intellect (fols 36r, 36v –37r, 37v ). Chaundler’s comparisons of Lactantius’s ideas with Cicero’s — even though Cicero’s are said to be superseded — or the fleeting comments in the English Secretum on St Augustine’s dependence on classical sources or St Paul’s agreement with them (cited above) all work similarly to present the founders of the Church as human beings engaged in the flow of history and rhetoric. So humanism not only serves the Church but analyses it — and ultimately in the work of Valla and others undermines some of its authorities and authority.53 In that larger map, then, humanism marks a forking path or crossroads for the Church.

52

Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, p. 436. See Strohm, Politique, p. 4, for a similar balance between invoking novelty and eschewing oversimplification. 53

For example, see one English encounter with humanist debunking of the Church’s authorities in J. B. Trapp, ‘Erasmus on William Grocyn and Ps-Dionysius: A Re-examination’, in J. B. Trapp, Studies of Petrarch and his Influence (London: Pindar, 2003), pp. 477–94 (pp. 479, 484–88, 493).

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Secondly, though, the Church was a powerful institution and could recuperate such scrutiny of its history. For example, in his sermons to convocation William Sellyng comments on the history of the ‘primitiua ecclesia’ (early Church) as an institution on earth, and on some past time when ‘incertus fuerat status ecclesie priusquam plurimis sanctis consilijs’ (the state of the Church was uncertain before many holy Councils);54 but these historical reflections lead him to stern attacks on heresy and to a call to unity — which might seem more typical of the vigorous orthodoxy of fifteenth-century England. Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones and the English translation of Petrarch are not so edgy about free thinking; they encourage it to some extent. But not to a full extent, for they argue over the value of the humanities and ultimately incorporate them into theological thinking, and as they develop beyond their opening nods to patrons such as Wykeham, Bekynton, and Waynflete, these works remain resolutely interested in the theological category of the soul and the definition of the human. Recent secular historicist analyses of the institutions, practices and politics of humanists have still not fully encompassed these pious and often theological interests.55 Yet these interests in Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones and the English Secretum remind us that on the map of the English church’s journey from orthodoxy to Reformation, humanism leads in one of its directions to the traditional theology of Colet and Fisher.56 And that theological direction can lead to a dismissal of the secular humanities — even in works which encourage us to think through them, through meaning with them but then beyond them.

54

BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 116r, 117v .

55

For a useful note of this oversight, and others, see Maura Nolan, ‘The New Fifteenth Century: Humanism, Heresy, and Laureation’, Philological Quarterly, 87 (2008), 173–92 (p. 185). 56

For example Rex, The Theology of John Fisher, pp. 21–22; Trapp, ‘Erasmus on William Grocyn and Ps-Dionysius’, p. 493.

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I

n Passus 17 of the C-text of Piers Plowman, William Langland writes:

In sauacioun of mannes soule seynte Thomas of Canterbury Amonges vnkynde cristene in holy kirke was slawe And alle holy kirke honoured thorw that deyng. He is a forbisene to alle bisshopis and a briht myrrour [… ] Euery bisshope bi þe lawe sholde buxumliche walke And pacientliche thorw his prouynce and to his peple hym shewe, Feden hem and follen hem and fere hem fro synne.1

Liberum Arbitrium, speaking here, admonishes bishops to follow the example of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury (1162–70), who in English lore had been sanctified and idolized as perfectly pastoral, preaching against sin and

* I would like to thank the editors for their comments and the invitation to speak at the ‘After Arundel’ conference at the University of Oxford in April 2009 before a crowd who asked terrific questions, just as the audience did at the University of Virginia, where I presented a version of this essay to the Medieval Studies Program. I am also grateful to the Bodleian Library for permission to use and cite from their manuscripts, and to the librarian of New College, Naomi van Loo, for quality images of New College, M S 288. Thanks, finally, to Maura Nolan for her tremendously clarifying reading of this paper. 1

Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. by George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone, 1997), XVII. 274–77 and 283–85. As the notes to the Russell and Kane edition of the C-text make clear, the lines quoted present many editorial difficulties; see pp. 559–60. See also Lawrence Warner’s hypothetical reconstruction of these lines, as the ur-B-text, as he persuasively calls it; ‘Becket and the Hopping Bishops’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 17 (2003), 107–34 (pp. 107–09).

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conducting himself, even in his final frightening moments, in morally upstanding ways ‘[i]n sauacioun of mannes soule’.2 Becket here emerges as an exemplum or ‘forbisene’, a ‘briht myrrour’ to ‘all bishoppis’. The hagiography about Beckett is extensive — it even features obliquely in the overture of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke’ (1. 17).3 But it draws from an even larger tradition of posthumously praising bishops as perfect moral authorities, or lambasting living bishops who meddle too much in secular affairs and consequently neglect their office.4 We might think of this larger tradition as something like a ‘literature of bishops’,5 consisting of conduct books for bishops, ranging from Gregory the Great’s widely disseminated Liber regulae pastoralis to Gratian of Chiusi’s ‘Mirroir l’évêque’ contained in the Decretum — a ‘mirror’ text that commends sobriety, prudence, temperance, hospitality, and chastity.6 Often in this tradition, praise of pastorally perfect bishops and archbishops will come from papal quarters, as when Urban III recognizes Archbishop Henry of Bourges as ‘a prudent and discreet man, noble in his conduct’.7 From the mid-fourteenth-century constitutions of the archbishop of Canterbury, John of Stratford (c. 1275–1348), to the decrees at the Council of

2

See, generally, Warner, ‘Becket and the Hopping Bishops’. Becket’s example, however, was hardly realized by his successors; see John D. Cotts, ‘Monks and Mediocrities in the Shadow of Thomas Becket: Peter of Blois on Episcopal Duty’, Haskins Society Journal, 10 (2002), 143–61. 3

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson and others, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 4

On the posthumous exemplarity of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester (1469–1535), see Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). More generally, see Rex, The Theology of John Fisher and The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1469–1535): Sermons and Other Writings, 1520–1535, ed. by Cecilia A. Hatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 5

See the essays by Eric Palazzo (‘The Image of the Bishop in the Middle Ages’) and John Eldevik (‘Driving the Chariot of the Lord: Siegfried I of Mainz (1060–1084) and Episcopal Identity in an Age of Transition’) in The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. by John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 86–91 and 161–88 respectively. 6

On Gratian’s ‘Mirroir l’évêque’, see I. S. Robinson, ‘The Institutions of the Church, 1073–1216’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History: Part 1, c. 1024–c. 1198, ed. by David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 368–460. 7

On Archbishop Henry of Bourges, see Robinson, ‘The Institutions of the Church’, p. 452, n. 563.

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Trent in the mid-sixteenth,8 we have at hand a tradition in which episcopal identity is figured for bishops in ideal terms, emphasizing that their pastoral obligations be distinguished from secular and political concerns so as to guarantee that the bishop be not mired in temporalities, possessions and the saeculum — the things of the world and of time. Yet something in fifteenth-century England pushes against this body of writing and instead figures ecclesiastical identity — whether that of archdeacon, bishop, or archbishop — in terms not unlike those for secular rulers found within the Mirror for Princes and de casibus traditions, as embodied by works running from Aquinas and Ægidius Romanus (Giles of Rome) to Boccaccio, Chaucer, Hoccleve, Premierfait, Lydgate, all the way through to the Mirror for Magistrates recensions. Certain authors and readers in the fifteenth century were seeking literary authorities to imagine ecclesiastical secularity, patronage, mastery, and power, but also to offer counsel on the limits of authority and the consequences of heeding bad advice. Part of my account here joins up with critical studies of humanism in England, beginning with Roberto Weiss, and including subsequent modifications of Weiss’s work by David Rundle and Daniel Wakelin.9 My own broad contribution to the critical discussion involves the analysis of ecclesiastical and politico-theological materials as a way of thinking through questions about how and where humanism intersects with religious and reformist discourse. An example should clarify my focus. In London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 211, there is a letter dated 1441 by Thomas Bekynton, secretary and diplomat for Henry VI. Writing to an Englishman residing at the papal curia in Florence, one Richard Caunton, Bekynton sends his congratulations on a job well done in executing the king’s business — triumphing over his detractors and gaining the admiration of the pope and certain cardinals. The great interest of this letter, however, lies in Bekynton’s opening reference to John Gower’s Tripartite Chronicle (Cronica tripertita), which Bekynton says he read and enjoyed, before enthusi8

See Roy M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford: Political Revolutionary and Champion of the Liberties of the English Church, Studies and Texts, 76 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986); for the relevant material from the Council of Trent, see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press, 1990), pp. 737–38. 9

Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century. See also David Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Humanist Writings and their Reception in England, c. 1400–c. 1460’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997) and his ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss’, pp. 181–203; and Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature.

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astically sending on the copy to the Lord Chancellor and bishop of Bath and Wells, John Stafford. One might marvel at Bekynton’s remarks, in an official letter, about sharing his private reading, were it not for the fact that later in the letter, he uses Gower’s text to advise Caunton. Bekynton cautions him ‘Noli curtisanorum, maximae nationis nostræ, pravos mores æmulari, qui in invidia æstuantes, proximos rodunt et de aliena jactura lucra sua sperant’ (not to imitate the depraved manners of the courtiers, especially those of our nation, who seething with envy gnaw at their neighbours).10 Bekynton makes use of his reading by applying it. His advice about courtiers reflects Gower’s own: Gower everywhere berates the deceased Richard II who ‘took the base, immature counsel of fools to himself, and caused the principles of older men to be rejected’.11 What is fascinating about the letter, then, is Bekynton’s use of the negative types described by Gower in order to contrast the positive virtues of Caunton. In exhibiting mores (or ‘manners’) wholly different from those expressed by the false courtiers, Caunton emerges as an exemplum or exemplary figure in this praise from his superior. We will return to the issue of mores as a kind of humanist self-fashioning. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Bekynton not only absorbs counsel from Gower and passes it on to Caunton but also forwards the entire cautionary work to an ecclesiastical superior — in this case, Bishop Stafford, who later would become archbishop of Canterbury and who previously held offices as Keeper of the Privy Seal and then Treasurer of the Realm. My principal question here, as below, concerns the meaning of such exchanges. Did Bekynton intend to advise Stafford with a work that would appeal to his secular identity and occupations, which Stafford himself pursued quite vigorously — to the relative exclusion of his pastoral responsibilities — in seeking to remain a powerful head of government?12 This anecdote represents a trend in which 10

Memorials of the Reign of King Henry VI: Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. by George Williams, Rolls Series, 56, 2 vols (London: H.M.S.O., 1872), I, 230. 11

More fully from Part I of Gower’s Tripartite Chronicle: ‘He took the base, immature counsel of fools to himself, and caused the principles of older men to be rejected. He absorbed the poisonous counsels of brash youths to the effect that he was to prey upon the goods of his nobles. […] In such fashion did the wicked King cling to wicked men and become their ally, since he had lost all piety’ (The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying, and The Tripartite Chronicle, trans. by Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), p. 290); also note Gower’s words in the Preface, ‘May this tripartite chronicle which follows be heeded with experienced judgement’ (Ibid., p. 289). 12

‘Stafford made no effort to inspect the other parts of his province or promote any reforms, and remained fully occupied by his work as chancellor. […] His will does not survive, in many ways

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ecclesiasts in the fifteenth century, as well as those within their circle of patronage, derive advice not from pastoral literature (as mentioned at the outset) but from sources of a secular variety, what might be called in some instances a ‘mirror for bishops’ tradition. I am less interested in cases in which it can be shown that an ecclesiast had owned this or that book, because it is difficult to tell if particular books were read by their owners; the only evidence, if any, is occasional marginal notations or, as above, citations of certain works. Bishops always had books. And, granted, there are a host of important and earlier examples of ecclesiastical ownership, and many prominent instances in England: Philip Tripolitanus, for instance, dedicated a copy of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum to his episcopal patron, Guido Vere de Valentia, bishop of Tripoli — copies of which survive in English manuscripts, as in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 495 and MS Auctarium F. 5. 23 (fols 87–111).13 However, I am interested in discussing how ecclesiasts and those within their circles in the fifteenth century identify with and activate such literature in their own literary performances of giving and receiving advice. These performances, I suggest, demonstrate a nascent culture of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ in England. The emergence of this culture can be seen in a quick comparison between an earlier archbishop and a later bishop’s responses to the same author. Although Archbishop Thomas Arundel (1353–1414) received a dedicated copy of the vox clamantis from John Gower (in what is now Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98), he ignored the gift, at least in official proclamations and correspondence. In contrast, as we have seen, a fifteenth-century bishop such as Bekynton praises Gower’s Chronica tripertita explicitly in an official epistle meant to guide the King’s clerical representatives.14

a pity, given that he had a mediocre performance as archbishop to consider, and also the reputed complexities of his personal life. […] It is difficult to advance beyond such faint praise for him as leader of the English church’ (Richard G. Davies, ‘Stafford, John (d. 1452), administrator and archbishop of Canterbury’, in ODNB). 13

See also Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 67; MS Bodley 495 was owned by the humanist John Colet. See also M S Bodley 181, fols 98–115, compiled with Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. More generally, see Steven J. Williams, ‘Philip of Tripoli and the Complete Translation of the Secret of Secrets’, pp. 60–108 in Williams’s The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 14

See Gower’s dedicatory ‘epistola’ in Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, fol. 1v .

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After Wykeham The kind of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ that concerns me here runs through a few generations of ecclesiasts who are affiliated with Bishop William Wykeham (c. 1324–1404) who, while not penning any humanist works of which we are aware, fostered a climate in which humanistic studies and literary production would flourish. A word about Wykeham at this point would help to convey a sense of his gravity. For if ever there were a princely bishop, it was he. He was a royal councillor and courtier: collector of benefices; founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford; Keeper of the Privy Seal under Edward III; and Chancellor under Richard II.15 He was one of the most powerful churchmen of late medieval England, often embroiled in political contretemps, such as the Good and Merciless Parliaments. And he left a legacy as a patron of the arts, an innovator in education, and a maker of careers. The rest of my essay will assess a piece of writing that is on the surface a celebration of Wykeham as a bishop so suffused with secular virtues as to be comparable to rulers from antiquity. Yet a closer look at my central example will reveal that all this Wykeham worship overlays a much more complex literary and cultural practice — namely, a curious mix of officialese, autobiography, and institutional history that dramatizes a scene of advice, in which a secular work provides the salve to an author who worries about his address to a patron. Although this description evokes Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, the author is in fact a different Thomas, Thomas Chaundler, who wrote many letters to Bekynton, especially during the time Bekynton was bishop of Bath and Wells. The epistle in question is found in Oxford, New College, MS 288 — a presentation book written in the humanist hand of John Farley that Chaundler gave to Bekynton sometime between 1463 and 1465.16 The letter is actually a dedication to Bekynton of works contained in the manuscript: seven collocutiones and two allocutiones about the virtues, education, and patronage of Bishop Wykeham and his circle. These 15

On the details of Wykeham’s life, see Peter Partner, ‘Wykeham, William (c. 1324–1404), bishop of Winchester, administrator, and founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford’, in ODNB. 16

Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, comp. by Tilly de la Mare and Richard Hunt (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1970), p. 21. Leland describes this book in John Leland, De rebus Britannicis collectanea, 2nd edn, 6 vols (London: White, 1774), III, 156; see Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, I, xiii, n. 1. Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 452–57 offers a thorough description of the manuscript.

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works, which also praise Bekynton and even Chaundler, are authored by an unnamed student and revised by Chaundler.17 My particular interest, however, will be in Chaundler’s dedicatory letter as a special kind of performance that blurs the boundaries between the giving and receiving of advice, as well as the distinctions between official epistolography and literary figuration, text and context, and patron and his library of advisory books. Chaundler’s dedication of a rather illustrious book to Bekynton offers yet another example of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ in which figurations of episcopal identity, whether Wykehams’s or Bekynton’s, are concerned less with pastoral forms of self and more with modes of dealing with secular affairs.

The etc. of the res: From New College, MS 288 to the Bekynton Anthology Before proceeding, a word about the principal players: Thomas Chaundler graduated from Wykeham’s foundation, New College, Oxford in 1455 as a doctor of theology only to become shortly thereafter the chancellor of Oxford (1457–61 and 1472–79). At various times he also held offices as warden of Winchester College (1450), another of Wykeham’s foundations, and warden of New College (1454–75). While he also once served as the chaplain of Edward IV — putting him in touch with persons at the top of the political order — his most lasting, fruitful, and interesting contact was with Thomas Bekynton, admirer of Gower and an ecclesiast of considerable influence. Graduate of Winchester and New College, he was chancellor to Duke Humphrey, before rising to the position of secretary to Henry VI. He took on the keepership of the Privy Seal and served as a diplomat negotiating with the French at Calais in 1439, among other things. A few years later, in 1443, he was confirmed as bishop of Bath and Wells and remained in that office until his death in 1465. The relation between Chaundler and Bekynton was of mutual support and exchange: Bekynton made possible Chaundler’s various appointments, and Chaundler returned the favours by giving the bishop books, such as New College MS 288. The first textual item in this manuscript, beginning on fol. 5r, is the dedicatory letter from Chaundler to Bekynton. And what better way to dedicate a work to

17

See Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, I, 320. For the other texts in New College, MS 288, see Shirley F. Bridges, ‘Thomas Chaundler’, 2 vols (unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1949), II. New College, MS 288 also contains a vita of Wykeham, Wykeham’s will, a poem in praise of Wykeham, and three letters from Pope Pius II.

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someone else than by talking about oneself? Chaundler begins by speaking about the problems he experiences in administering his office as chancellor of Oxford University — a job he finds to be equivalent to the thankless role of keeper of the peace. He especially laments the ill effects of envious speech and backbiting talk — the sorts of disruptive taunts and murmuring by malidici […] viri (slanderous men) who always ‘aliorum et nomen et famam semper depeculantes’ (diminish the name and reputation of others).18 Chaundler immediately, and rather boldly, compares himself to other rulers of great places, few of whom — be they kings, popes, or governors — experience a world without danger.19 Yet there are exceptions, such as the Stoics, who (he says) are happy men, who suffer no crises while they rule, and to whom adversity is nothing.20 Chaundler quickly acknowledges that he is unequal to these persons, and then proceeds to list more examples of those who pursue governance while managing to enjoy themselves during their down time — Cato, Cicero, and Seneca (‘Sic Cato Censorius, sic Marcus Cicero, sic Annæus ille Seneca, post senatorios labores conquieverunt’).21 However, Chaundler again acknowledges his difference from such persons, and moves on to clarify his occupation and desires by confronting his enemies in a passage that reads a bit like free association: Nolo tamen in hoc nefandissimum genus hominum vindex esse. Pacem cupio; opto eorum emendam. Nolo irrationales expungere; nam ratione digna satis ad vincendum. Soleo tales plus abhorrere quam timere. Sed O utinam, quotiens obtrectatores æmulique mei me accusant, adessem præsens. An ne tunc sibi ipsis nocuerint obloquia sua? Ne perfidiam vicerit veritas? Ne innocentia malitiam condemnaret? (I wish not to be a punisher of these most nefarious kind of men. I desire peace. I wish for their improvement. I do not want to conquer these irrational men, for worthy reason would conquer them sufficiently. I am accustomed more to abhor than to fear such persons. But O, if only I might have been present as often as my critics and rivals accuse me! Would not then their abuses only injure themselves? Would not truth have conquered treachery? Would not innocence condemn malice?)22

Chaundler repeatedly uses the literary device of the rhetorical question as he seeks to distinguish himself and to find his place within an institution rife with what he

18

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 316.

19

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 315.

20

‘Aiunt tamen Stoici, quosdam ita felices esse hominess, ut cum regant nullum patiantur discrimen: adversum eis nihil’, Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 315. 21

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 315.

22

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 316.

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calls ‘horribiles dissensiones ac schismata’.23 He continues in this plaintive mode for a good while until he finally gets round to explaining why is talking about himself in a letter meant to be about other people — namely Bekynton. He wants to say that Bekynton’s friendship means — and is — everything in the world to him. While one can give great thanks to auctores such as Plutarch for their lore, even more (‘plures’) thanks go to ‘te’, to you, to Bekynton for your great friendship. It is at this point, in this turn to his patron and reader, that Chaundler speaks of ‘a thing that instructs the mind’ (‘Res animum docet’), and which — as we soon find out — moves Chaundler to view his work as chancellor with a renewed confidence. What is this thing? It is embodied in a poem that Chaundler enjoins Bekynton to read, ‘Legisti, reor, illa poetæ elegantissima metra’ (‘You have read, I believe, the most elegant of verses of that poet’). It goes as follows: Ipsam sibi odium parit; aulica rodit Serra virum mores; et laudis eclipiticat astrum Livor; et in tenebris ingloria pallet honestas; Et virtus titulos, sua mater pignora, perdit. Et alibi: Sit procul invidiæ suspecta novacula, solis Ingeniosa dolis &c (Virtue even brings hatred upon herself for the sawteeth of the courtier gnaw at the character of men; Envy eclipses the star of praise, honor languishes in shadowy ignominy, and mother virtue is deprived of those tributes which are her proper offspring. And in another place (‘Et alibi’): But let the slanderous razor of envy, keen only in treachery, remain far off — etc.)24

Before getting to the particulars of the poem as a lesson on virtue and envy, I would first like to note Chaundler’s way of quoting and organizing these two bits of text. To begin with, there is the ‘Et alibi’ that falls between his quotations. It is a bookish kind of reference, whereby reading from line to line on fol. 5r in this book requires

23 24

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 316.

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 317. The translation in the main text is from Architrenius, ed. and trans. by Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 78, 17; the formatting is my own, including the quotation marks around the two excerpts of poetry.

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thumbing from folio to folio in another book, were one interested in tracking this extract in that ‘other’ postulated place. Likewise, the ‘etc.’, seven lines from the bottom of fol. 5v and at the end of the line ‘let the slanderous razor of envy […] remain far off’, serves a codicological function. When using this kind of abbreviation for — say — scripture, the author or scribe assumes that the remaining lines are known to the learned reader by rote, as in ‘per speculum in enigmate &c’ and need not be quoted because they are memorially present. Explicits in Latin manuscripts often use ‘etc.’, as do the salutary honorifics addressing important persons in Latin epistles. Yet in a poem, especially one quoted as a metrical sample in the middle of a prosaic exposition, the ‘etc.’ can take on a different meaning. The ‘etc.’ both reminds us that a piece of text has been taken from somewhere else, and links that text back to its original source. This practice has been picked up by Langlandians, always fond of reading the ‘etc.’ of select quotations in Piers Plowman.25 Chaundler, I suggest, is using these indexical conventions to a known reader who is invited to read more of the source text, if he happens to have access to the poem in question. It would seem, indeed, that this unassuming ‘Et alibi’ and ‘etc.’ point to an object beyond the text of New College MS 288, beyond the cover boards, and perhaps on the shelf next to it in the library at Wells Cathedral, where Bekynton resided. Nowhere else in his letter does Chaundler engage in this indexical mode of situating a text within a bookish frame. Examining the nature of that text begins to clarify Chaundler’s reasons for using such indexical conventions; though he does not identify the author of these lines, he would have expected Bekynton to know them. I have identified the quotations as extracts from Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius, book three, chapter 17 and book one, chapter 7.26 This identification explains Chaundler’s referential style: it is his way of pointing to a book that Bekynton himself owned, which contained Johannes’s Architrenius — namely, that much celebrated Bekynton anthology, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional A. 44.27 This book, as A. G. Rigg puts it, is ‘[t]he anthology par excellence of this — perhaps of any — period of Anglo-Latin. […] A reading of the whole collection, in fact, would provide a student with a very solid basis in Medieval Latin literature’, because it contains all kinds of religious, secular, and satirical prose and poetry, 25

As John Alford said, ‘indeed, the whole point of some quotations [in Piers Plowman] resides in the “etc”’, ‘The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman’, Speculum, 52 (1977), 80–99 (p. 82). 26

Now correcting Bridges, ‘Thomas Chaundler’, II, 100, nn. 1–2, who was ‘unable to trace these quotations’. I thank Shirley (Bridges) Court for permission to cite from her thesis. 27

And not the fifteenth-century, much-glossed Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 64.

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upwards of one hundred and thirteen items.28 Johannes’s Architrenius featured most significantly in the volume, taking up about a third of its space — occupying fols 139v –218v — making it likely that Bekynton knew the work and would have recognized Chaundler’s quotation.29 If I am right in suggesting that Chaundler is referring to Bekynton’s anthology30 — making his reference one of the earliest in its long history of reception and celebration — then we discover a unique intercodical form of reference that maps neatly onto the relation of patronage, as imagined and lived by Chaundler: that is,

28

George Rigg writes that Bodleian Library, MS Additional A. 44 ‘was originally compiled c. 1200 in six sections by nine hands’ (A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 153). Among the works included in this extremely various manuscript are (as noted by Rigg, p. 153): ‘the Gospel of Nicodemus, Isidore’s Synonyma’, antimatrimonial prose ( Jerome, Map’s Dissuasio Valerii, and Theophrastus), Eraclius’ prose denunciations of William de Longchamps, Hugh Nonant’s letter on the same, and two biblical parodies (Adulterous Monk, Collacio on wine)’, ‘Bernard Silvester’s Mathematicus, two comediae (Matthew of Vendôme’s Miles Gloriosus, Vitalis of Blois’ Geta), and two verse debates (“Ganymede and Helen,” [and] Turaldus on Flesh and Spirit)’. There are also seventy-five shorter poems by, among others, ‘Peter of Blois, Walter of Châtillon, Berter of Orléans, Hildebert, and the pseudonymous Eraclius. […] In the fifteenth century the collection was expanded by, or for, Thomas Bekynton . […] The antimatrimonial section was supplemented (by a commentary on the Epistola Valerii and the De coniuge non ducenda) and a few other poems and items were added that were appropriate to the collection (e.g. the letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, exonerating Richard I from complicity in the death of Conrad of Mont-Ferrat); rubricated titles and a new contents list were also supplied’ (Rigg, p. 153). See also André Wilmart, ‘Le Florilège mixte de Thomas Bekynton’, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1940), 41–84 and 4 (1958), 35–90 (this second instalment edits 26 of 113 texts). 29

The ratio is Rigg’s; see A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, p. 153. My reference to the foliation corrects the serial catalogue: on fol. 139v begins the table of contents for this work, and fol. 141r contains the first line of the Architrenius proper. The work poem ends at fol. 218 v with ‘Magistri Joha[nn]is Hauvillensis Architrenius explicit’. 30

A word about the text is in order. This line in New College, M S 288, ‘Sit procul invidiæ suspecta novacula, solis ingeniosa dolis’, reads almost identically in the Bekynton anthology: ‘Sit procul invidie suspecta novacula, solis ingeniosa dolis’ (fol. 144v ), with a difference of ‘invidiæ’ and ‘invidie’. Technically, there is textual variation here, but we can bear in mind that Chaundler’s ‘æ’ for the genitive case is likely a matter of neo-Ciceronian style (of which Bekynton was fond), replacing the usual medieval ‘e’ with ‘æ’ in precisely such cases, as generally exhibited in the ubiquitous ‘ecclesie’/’ecclesiæ’ distinction. There is no definitive way to prove that Chaundler’s text is copied from Bekynton’s anthology, as there is not enough material for the comparison. Suffice it to say that the difference in ‘invidiæ’/’invidie’ proves nothing apart from Chaundler’s habits of stylization, and that my point concerns the ways in which Chaundler uses codicological conventions to refer to the bishop’s books.

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the relation between books is a relation between persons. But Chaundler’s version of this notion suggests that he sees patronage as intimately connected not only to the giving and receiving of books, but also to the giving and receiving of advice. In referencing the Bekynton anthology, Chaundler demonstrates its value by showing its utility to a seemingly inconsolable man (himself), who learns to accept his situation by reading one of the poems it contains. This poem teaches that the virtuous inevitably are attacked by the envious, and counsels patience, moderation, and relaxation. For it is only after Chaundler cites the poem that he tempers his laments, accepts his situation, and begins to speak about Bekynton’s friendship and fine personal qualities, including his ability to do what Chaundler cannot — ignore naysayers. This tonal change tells us that the poem, and by deduction, Bekynton’s book, has served its purpose. Chaundler has advised himself within the bishop’s library. Yet it is not only that Chaundler demonstrates his access to the symbolic capital represented by Bekynton’s library, in which he finds a cure. Rather, he makes the book a piece of symbolic capital when he thematizes its importance by identifying the dominant work of the anthology. His choice is spot on, too. Johannes’s Architrenius, if it is about anything, is about precisely those topics germane to Chaundler’s institutional experience of chaos and squabbling. In his long poem, Johannes comments on courts and schools, the vain machinations of hypocritical courtiers and clerics, the outrageous abuses of patronage, the learned lectures of ancient philosophers waxing lyrical about virtues and vices, and — my favourite — depicts hell not as Hell but as a chaotic household, in what is an almost existentialist point about human disorganization within the structures of organization. Indeed, this image vividly anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre’s line in Huis Clos, ‘l’enfer, c’est les Autres’ or, ‘Hell is other people’.31 Chaundler would agree.

Mores: ‘Maner maketh man’ One last word on Chaundler’s poetic extract from the Architrenius, a part of which reads (as above): ‘Virtue even brings hatred upon herself for the sawteeth of the courtier gnaw at the “mores” (character) of men’. The poem, I would argue, has a function beyond making reference to a specific book within a finely scripted and wonderfully illuminated manuscript. Rather, it also points to what motivates the entire endeavour of literary exchange and episcopal address, a collective enthusiasm

31

Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos, ed. by Keith Gore (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 95.

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or ambition that is — in its ideal form — shaped by virtue and good ‘mores’. By using lines from Johannes to claim that that his ‘mores’ are gnawed by petty, sawtoothed busybodies, Chaundler identifies both a major theme of the texts of New College MS 288 and a certain sensibility within the coterie in which the manuscript finds itself. In several places throughout the manuscript, we read about the ‘mores’ Chaundler seeks to defend against his detractors; the ‘mores’ of Cato and the withering effects of vice against ‘moribus’; the ‘gravitas morum’ of Bekynton. We can also include here Bekynton’s letter to Caunton (cited at the outset), in which a reference to Gower illustrates the value of good mores in contrast with ‘pravos mores’.32 All of these expressions fall under the aegis of that famous Wykehamite aphorism ‘maner maketh man’, which remains the slogan of Wykeham’s foundation today, Winchester College. Chaundler cites it at the very end of his epistle to Bekynton but does so in Latin, rendering it ‘mores componunt hominem’.33 He tells us that he translated this phrase from English into Latin, which points to his substitution of ‘mores’ for ‘maner’, and makes the claim that ‘mores’ themselves embody the esprit de corps of what can be called ‘Wykehamist culture’.34 Chaundler’s translation of this phrase, in other words, works as an heuristic that renders visible the institutional practices of his institutional culture. That is, the Wykehamist slogan refers not just to the lore surrounding Wykeham — the story that he was born into humble circumstances but became the right-hand man of Edward III, and, in turn, the benefactor of select poor scholars at Oxford. It also denotes the forming and reforming of the individual through education, reading, and writing — practices on display in New College MS 288 in the seven student texts that immediately follow Chaundler’s letter. In fact, Chaundler cites this slogan while introducing these works in order to forge connections among himself, the student author, and the entire institutional setting in which those texts were likely performed, read out in hall on special feast days. In the same way that Chaundler performs a scene directed at his benefactor, in which he learns from a text in Bekynton’s anthology, here, he proffers the student texts as similar examples of beneficent patronage, mentorship, instruction, and clerkly self-fashioning — this time with himself as the benefactor and teacher. These texts are also performances,

32

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 319 and II, 323.

33

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 319. Note that a glossator of MS Digby 64, which contains the Architrenius, singles out this line, ‘Serra virum mores et laudis eclipticat astrum’ and supplies an interlinear gloss to ‘virum mores’, which reads ‘detraccion bonaso[rum] viro[rum]’ (fol. 68v ) — the ‘detraction of bovine [i.e., animalistic] men’. 34

See Lytle, ‘“Wykehamist Culture” in Pre-Reformation England’, pp. 129–66.

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dialogues that demonstrate how to speak to and about a patron about his support of other patrons who beget yet more patrons. In one of the dialogues, two scholars named Ferrandus and Panescius discuss the glorious town of Wells, its buildings, and bishop (Bekynton), whom Wykeham (mentioned only after Bekynton in the dialogue) discovered at Winchester school. The discussants then turn to Chaundler as a representative of the best of both worlds (of Wells and Oxford), and compose a poem praising him. In this complex layering of patronal address, the students who would presumably perform the parts of Ferrandus and Panescius — probably before at least two of the subjects of the dialogue itself — partake of a certain dramatic courtliness while also schooling themselves in the kinds of petitionary rhetoric some would go on to write in secular, university, or ecclesiastical offices. This confluence of genres and personas, fact and fiction, patron and student shows that the texts in New College MS 288 are not simply typical examples of clerical education, lessons in the memorization and repetition of the official ‘forma’ on display in formularies. Instead, these texts enact a performative ‘making’ that composes, fashions, and makes legible the clerkly self in context. These amateur efforts, these student colloquies about the virtuous Bishop Wykeham and his circle, thus demonstrate that the ‘manner of making’ and the ‘making of manner’ is a dialectical process, a literary and dramatic activity that simultaneously shapes the identities of both the patron and the patronized. In seeking patronage through books, texts, and documents — in other words, by representing the patron in writing — a subordinate creates the very model he wishes to emulate. In the process, he inflates his own worth and advances his own status by associating himself with the idealized patron he has constructed. Not all praise is flattery, granted, and some of it is indeed criticism, but that is the subject of another paper.

Wycliffism after Wykehamism; or, Heresy and Humanism All of this material presents a picture of ecclesiastical habits that looks far more complex and compelling than the image revealed by generalities about the ‘prelacy’, ‘orthodox church’, or ‘heresy hunters’. These advisory, ecclesiastical texts raise questions about the now-ubiquitous Wycliffite paradigm.35 Does ‘ecclesiastical

35

I use the term ‘Wycliffite’ (and not ‘lollard’) to refer to writings that cite or echo the ideas of John Wyclif — a usage explained more fully in my Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chaps 2, 3, 7, and Intermezzo. Likewise, I argue

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humanism’ fall into such standard critical categories as ‘orthodox’ or ‘reformist’? The materials I have discussed certainly look orthodox in contrast to Wycliffite thought, but that contrast might not be the best paradigm for investigating the relation between heresy and humanism. For Wycliffites consider prelates like Wykeham special targets for criticism on account of — among other things — the practice of absent pluralism. In this light, constructing heresy and humanism as a binary opposition means that orthodoxy is defined according to the terms of this Wycliffite critique, which in turn distorts the contributions made by such prelates to the literary, plastic, and architectural arts in the fifteenth century. Yet Wycliffism cannot be excluded entirely from consideration, because even a cursory glance at the works of John Wyclif and his followers shows that they were concerned with these ecclesiastical advisory traditions. For instance, Wyclif clearly understands that bishops are political figures involved in the highest affairs of the kingdom. In his De officio regis (1379) — itself an advisory piece of writing36 — he singles out the king of England for wrongly succumbing to the blandishments of his episcopal advisors. Tellingly, however, Wyclif does not say (here at least) that

that ‘lollard’ is not synonymous with ‘Wycliffite’, because its sense changes drastically depending on its application. Persons hostile to Wycliffism frequently utilized the word as an epithet in order to simplify and dismiss Wycliffite assertions about the sacraments and the church. Lists of condemned conclusions, whether in ecclesiastical decrees, sermons, or poems, did the work of constructing Wycliffism as a heresy named ‘lollardy’ (pp. 47–48). Yet Wycliffites appropriated and redefined the term ‘lollard’ as an apostolic ideal for lay men and women, who are enjoined to live moderately, embrace virtuous poverty, and brook persecution and shame (pp. 47, 50, 51, 54–60, 63–66). Rarely do anti-Wycliffites attack this ‘lollard’ ideal; Wycliffites were able to construct a positive identity as ‘lollards’ in the face of orthodox efforts to anathematize them by using ‘lollard’ as a synonym for ‘heretic’. It is this double meaning of the word ‘lollard’ — defined by both Wycliffites and their adversaries — that makes it particularly unhelpful when modern scholars employ it as a blanket term. Instead, I recommend that scholars use the term ‘Wycliffite’ to describe the followers of Wyclif and ‘lollard’ to refer to the forms of lay apostolic piety advanced by Wycliffites. Further, given the divided history of usages of the word ‘lollard’ found in Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite texts alike, it stands to reason that we should call people ‘lollard’ only if they freely name themselves as such and not project the term onto them if they speak nothing of ‘lollardy’. A forthcoming essay, ‘“Lollardy”: An English and European Heresy Revisited’ will provide additional substantiation of my claims in Literature and Heresy, as well as a much needed reconsideration of continental ‘lollardy’. 36

John Wyclif, Tractatus de officio regis, ed. by R. A. Pollard and C. E. Sayle (London: Trübner, 1887). It would be interesting to consider seriously, along with Michael Wilks, that Wyclif had a real advisory ambition, if not opportunity, in writing works like De officio regis. See Wilks’s collection of essays in Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, ed. by Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow, 2000).

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bishops should never advise the king. He only says that they should put themselves to better use than being chatty ‘comensales’ or table companions. They should offer, instead, ‘consilium’ or advice.37 They must be, along with the entire clergy, schooled ‘in sciencia et virtute’ and become acquainted with the ‘law of God’.38 By these means, bishops become ‘exemplares consiliarii’, or exemplars of counsel.39 Wyclif goes on to offer apostrophic instruction to bishops themselves, citing the Secreta secretorum in order to speak of the virtues and the benefits of moderate living.40 Wyclif evidently takes a page from Philip Tripolitanus (cited above), and suggests that certain kinds of advisory secular texts can be held up as mirrors to bishops, not just princes and kings, the ostensible addressees of the Secreta. In a more strident vein, there are the followers of Wyclif, such as William Thorpe, who describes Wyclif ‘as of þe moost virtuous and goodlich wise man þat I herd of owhere eiþer knew’ — an example that stands in marked contrast to his characterization of the ‘Archebischop of Cauntirbirie and chaunceler þanne of Ynglond’, Thomas Arundel, as ‘ever the sower of vices’.41 In his Testimony, which stages his examination before Arundel, Thorpe contrasts Wycliffite virtue with the lack of virtue displayed by the ‘prelatis of þis londe and her mynystris’ in their commission of ‘tirauntrie’.42 And appropriately, he declares the terms of his obedience to any such tyrannical prelate: ‘I wole submitte me oonly to þe rule and gouernaunce of hem aftir my knowynge who, bi þe hauynge and vsynge of þe forseide virtues, I perceyue to ben þe membris of holi chirche’.43 Obviously, the criticism applies to Arundel first and foremost. And Thorpe says that to accept Arundel’s ‘counseile’ is to reject ‘vtterli al my loore’ and harm so many others ‘bi my yuel ensaumple’ as to ‘neuere deserue to haue grace of God to edifien his chirche’.44 Later in the work, his criticism is more trenchant, arguing that Arundel encourages obedience to tyrants, a point that opens out to a longer discussion

37

De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 51.

38

Wyclif offers special emphasis here: ‘precipue episcopos [especially bishops]’ (De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 52). 39

De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 52.

40

De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, pp. 53–55.

41

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, pp. 41, 29.

42

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, p. 24.

43

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, p. 33; on the virtues in question, see pp. 40, 62–63, 65. 44

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, p. 38.

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about sovereigns and virtues and how subjects are compelled to disobey any sovereign who comports himself tyrannically.45 In variously naming his Testimony ‘þis sentence’ and ‘þis conseile’, then, Thorpe is bringing us within the ambit of advisory traditions for secular rulers and appropriating its discourse, as Wyclif does when he cites the Secreta secretorum at a key moment in his discussion about episcopal advisors surrounding the king. Other, anonymous Wycliffite texts speak of tyrants and bishops in the same breath — using these advisory traditions to speak of ecclesiastical vice rather than virtue. What do we make of these examples? Some Wycliffites seem to combine the two traditions I have been viewing as relatively distinct — the pastoral tradition and the tradition of secular advice. This combination makes for an effective criticism of prelates because it moves beyond satire and the usual mockery of ecclesiastical abuses, such as we see in Speculum stultorum,46 towards philosophical resources that purport to offer a remedy to such abuses and vice — namely, virtue. This union of the pastoral and secular advisory traditions betrays the academic origin of Wycliffism; it relies on an institutional experience of the university, the church, and the court that few other heresies of such magnitude can claim. Wyclif associated with heads of state; he was a known quantity at court; and he had quarrelled with Wykeham himself in the 1370s. In another instance, Philip Repingdon became a reputable and powerful ecclesiast and royal advisor after having recanted his Wycliffite views decades earlier. Wycliffism was on the inside of the traditions from which later forms of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ emerged, and it is no surprise to find certain Wycliffite scholars wellread in Thomistic and Ægedian traditions of advice to princes. Yet however acceptable certain theological and philosophical teachings within that advisory tradition were to Wycliffites, their occasional hostility to ‘fables’ meant that they viewed the adjacent literary tradition — the de casibus, or ‘fall of princes’ genre — as nothing more than distracting stories that have no scriptural basis, ‘longe talis of fablis’ told by friars to ‘grete men’.47 The cultural categories of ‘heresy’ and ‘humanism’, which came to be antagonists, did not necessarily begin as poles of a binary opposition. Our critical eye, therefore, should be attentive to the sifting and shifting of textual resources over the course of the fifteenth century, as the Wycliffite polemic unfolds and as ‘ecclesiastical 45

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, pp. 46, 48–49.

46

Speculum stultorum, ed. by John H. Mozley and Robert R . Raymo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 47

The English Works of Wyclif, ed. by Matthew, p. 50.

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humanism’ turns inward to figure forth its own customs, practices, and power in forms of literature either created from scratch or merged with Fürstenspiegel writing.48 I have proposed elsewhere that the fact that Wycliffite controversies subsided in the middle of the fifteenth century should be viewed in relation to the changing cultural concerns of some bishops, who were very much a generation ‘After Arundel’ and even ‘After Chichele’. Wycliffism does not disappear — far from it — but the intense episcopal interest in interrogating suspects certainly does, at least for stretches of time.49 Compare episcopal behaviour during the period spanning Arundel’s provincial constitutions in 1407/09 and Archbishop Chichele’s synod of 1428, to the stretch of years in the middle of the century, and there is, indeed, no comparison at all. Of course, it would be impossible to argue that bishops and other ecclesiasts were so busy with all things humanist that they did not have any interest in persecuting heretics. But what can be shown is a difference of interests and emphasis between two groups — the Wycliffites and the humanist clerics — emerging from the same culture, each pursuing different models of reform. Whereas Wycliffites articulate a reform that seeks to change ecclesiastical institutions from the ground up, including those ‘Of the bisshop of Bathe’, with the goal of replacing them with secular establishments50 — and from a theoretical perspective there are extraordinary humanist possibilities in the wish to multiply the number of universities in England — the ecclesiastical humanists propose models of reform that have a practical aim, seeking to consolidate the gains made in the foundation of educational institutions in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Foundations such as Wykeham’s New College and Winchester grammar school were premised consciously on what were, to the humanists, new and exciting ideas. It is within these contexts that authors like Chaundler and his students would personify the institutional experience in an intense way, figuring forth the idea of the institution itself as a world in which the stakes are not only sin and sacraments. It is a world of particular demands and specific protocols, in which persons find themselves in named places, with named persons, engaged in official tasks. Some would fashion themselves as educators, others, as students — but all would construct themselves as readers. While Wycliffism reflects on episcopal advice gone wrong and indicts the ecclesiast who confuses the temporal and the spiritual as ‘hermafrodita’, ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ holds a mirror up to Wycliffism 48

See my ‘Heresy and Humanism’, pp. 421–37 (pp. 430, 436).

49

See Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, pp. 422–26.

50

See the ‘Lollard Disendowment Bill’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, pp. 135–37 (p. 136).

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to show that its generalities about ‘prelates’ or ‘palaces’ are detached and abstract, lacking the particularities and specifics of place, time, and behavior that humanism can provide — and indeed, create.51 But ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ should not be defined merely through its difference from Wycliffism. It is a literary and cultural movement that should be regarded as a major component of English literary history. It reveals striking, if not epistemic, similarities between Latin and English writing — parallel postures of dullness, poetries of petition and praise, institutional rhetorics, mirrors for princes and bishops alike, literary-cum-official epistolography, and Latin and English aureation. Research may well eventually show that ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ connects the medieval to the early modern in what is a genealogy that is very much ‘After Wykeham’: Henry Chichele, Thomas Bekynton, and Chaundler, Gilbert Kymer, Andrew Holes, Robert Stillington, John Russell, William Grocyn, and William Warham. This list is a partial one, limited to some individuals who were educated at Wykeham’s foundations, either Winchester College, New College, or both; many other humanists remain to be identified and their writing explored. The biographies of such persons are an untapped resource for literary historians — and some of them open doors to the Renaissance.

51

See the ‘Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, p. 26.

Part V Reginald Pecock

R ECONSTRUCTING THE M IXED L IFE IN R EGINALD P ECOCK ’S R EULE OF C RYSTEN R ELIGIOUN Allan F. Westphall

B

ishop Reginald Pecock’s religious treatises are motivated by a perceived need for urgent reform. Particular challenges to ecclesiastical stability, as he notes, underscore this urgency: Hussite Bohemia provides a worst-case scenario, with the unmonitored private interpretation of Scripture and a lack of trained exegetes bringing about interpretative and social anarchy.1 On the national scene, the main challenge had for decades been the Lollards, the ‘wickedli enfectid scole of heresie among the lay peple, which is not õit conquerid’ (with ‘wickedli enfectid’ perhaps being an acrostic of Wyclif?). Pecock (c. 1395–c. 1460) responds robustly to the Wycliffite heresy in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (incidentally providing us with possibly the most comprehensive and systematic overview of the tenets of Lollard belief that we have), but his concerns are usefully understood more broadly: the threat of schism is imminent in England, he claims, where a lack of synergy between, on the one hand, a new social reality of increasing literacy and expanding readership, and, on the other hand, novel forms of catechetical instruction means that the Church has rendered itself unable to channel the critical drives of what Pecock terms ‘competently wittid lay men’. In fact, outside of the Repressor, Lollardy does not appear as a monolithic, clearly demarcated challenge to be refuted, but rather as the manifestation of tendencies and demands latent in a critical, proactive, and textually competent ‘lay partie’ — a capacious category indeed, comprising the full spectrum of conformists and

1

Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. by Babington, I, 86–87.

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dissenters (and the many indifferent to or oblivious of any such divide).2 As several fifteenth-century religious writers recognized, an attitude of intellectual questioning in a particularly volatile lay environment could mean that people might easily deviate from the path of sanctioned religious practice if not provided with an adequate syllabus of pastoral and catechetical instruction. It is against such drives in private and corporate religion that Pecock presents a view of a Church stuck in the stagnating mire of its own obsolete curricula and pedagogy, proposing inadequate forms of instruction that are unable to meet the challenges of the time. As a result of the irrational orderings of traditional liturgies, doctrines, and catechetical systems, propounded by a clergy lacking requisite academic training, there can be only ineffectual exchange with a lay readership eager to participate actively and critically in theological debate, and more generally to engage in spiritual ambition.3 As is well known, Pecock’s systematic theology is a surprisingly outspoken, selfproclaiming attempt to re-invent lay theology and to de-polemicize the religious scene in England. At its centre is an overhaul of the Church’s existing catechetical schemata, proposed as a reassertion of orthodoxy against religious singularity and dissent. Furthermore, his theology propounds a declaredly exoteric teaching of general accessibility and transparency. The exotericism is apparent at various levels: firstly, Pecock’s reformulation of religious teaching proceeds on a methodological principle of generality that assumes the innate capacity of rational judgement in all individuals. Claiming the broad intelligibility and appeal of his speculative theology, he opens up the possibility of lay participation in the endeavour to determine Christian doctrine. Secondly, the tendency is against divergent opinions and private devotions in religious practice. Pecock imagines a homogenous system

2

The challenge from the ‘lay partie’ and Pecock’s response to an articulate, and still orthodox, laity receive extended treatment in Charles Brockwell, Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Lancastrian Church: Securing the Foundations of Cultural Authority (Lewiston: Mellen, 1985), especially Chapter Two, ‘A Church Worthy of Obedience’, pp. 25–56. Kantik Ghosh provides important discussion of Pecock’s complex theological positioning in relation to a Lollard heresy which ‘is perhaps to be defined less by the appurtenances of a “sect” than by an attitude of intellectual questioning and criticism, fostered and supported by books in English, including of course the Bible’: Ghosh, ‘Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Idea of “Lollardy”’, pp. 251–65 (p. 265). 3 Fifteenth-century experimentations with vernacular orthodoxy, and especially the dissemination of ‘clergie’ in religious writing, are examined, for example, in Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’. See also her essay ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’. Kantik Ghosh considers the involvement with logical method in Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite writings, and provides some discussion of Pecock’s reassessment of syllogistic reasoning in writings about the ethical life in ‘Logic and Lollardy’, Medium Ævum, 76 (2007), 251–67.

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centred on the comprehensibility of liturgy and prayer, and the channelling of subjective desire and affect into a series of formal, transparent, and rigorously rational disciplines. Thirdly, his ‘modernized’ creed de-emphasizes the supernatural. Revelation and contemplation by miracle or divine grace are accorded no special status against the rational illumination that can occur through open disputation. This essay suggests that Pecock’s extensive refutation of Lollardy (understood in narrow sectarian terms) is just one part, and possibly a minor part, of a coherent and determined attempt to re-imagine a Christian community founded on ideas of critical intellectualism and lay-clerical exchange. In fact, Pecock can be seen to transcend the merely polemical as he proposes what is perhaps the most comprehensive vision, certainly the most comprehensively articulated, of a unity of faith in fifteenth-century England. Recent scholarship, preoccupied with the confrontation between the English heresy of Lollardy and nominally orthodox responses, has tended to focus on the Repressor to the exclusion of Pecock’s other works.4 Here I will shift the focus somewhat by looking at the Reule of Crysten Religioun (hereafter Reule) to examine how Pecock seeks to participate productively in, and renew, central debates of his time concerning education, social obligation, and religious enthusiasm. More precisely, I will note that when Pecock articulates his vision of a fifteenth-century pastoral and pedagogical reform, he frames this within a topic familiar from patristic writing and much vernacular religious writing, namely that of the respective merits of action and contemplation, and the possibility of their combination in a mixed life. For Pecock, as for previous theologians producing literature of devotional guidance, the idea of a mixed life, or in Pecock’s terminology a ‘hool lijf’, becomes a particularly rich forum for imagining social involvement, as it examines the relationship between private conscience and public action in a very practical sense.5 Mixed life theology

4 Pecock’s other works in print are: Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison; The Donet, ed. by Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS, O. S. 156 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1921); The Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS, O.S. 164 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1924); and The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. by Greet. Considering that Pecock regarded his Reule of Crysten Religioun as the foundation of his œuvre and the clearest articulation of his theological system, it is ironic that this is the last of his texts to appear in print. 5

The term ‘hool lijf’ occurs in the fifth treatise of the Reule (p. 478). It should be noted that Pecock neither positions his teaching explicitly in relation to previous writing in English on the subject of the Christian modes of living, nor flags up the idea of the ‘hool lijf’ in his introduction. Rather than anticipate his instruction in the ‘hool lijf’ from the outset, he designs his Reule to persuade and instruct through its logically progressing argument and structuring of material, or what

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provides an attractive outlook, both as an optimistic and enabling theology, with its positive affirmation of lay spiritual aspiration, as well as for the opportunities it offers for the re-articulation of Christian responsibility and social obligation. Writing in the mid-fifteenth century, Pecock adds his distinctive voice at the end of a long tradition of debating the Christian modes of living in English culture and in the vernacular. In particular he invites comparison with Hilton’s idea of the mixed life, which broke new ground in showing how the life of secular clergy that combines an inward life of prayer with activity in the world can be productively extended to a newly literate and independent-minded laity. It is my aim here to show how the Reule, and the works supplementing it, constitute an extension of an Arundelian and Hiltonian reformed orthodoxy of the mixed life. But at the same time, Pecock proposes new disciplines for devotional practice, and a recodification of the moral imperatives and corporal works of mercy in the ‘hool lijf’ — the life which he presents as the full realisation of God’s moral law.6 The first part of this essay serves as a general reassessment of Pecock’s Reule, which in several ways is the key work of his œuvre, providing both the most comprehensive socio-linguistic analysis of fifteenth-century metropolitan England that we have, as well as the main articulation of his vision for pastoral and pedagogical reform. The second part examines the Reule as both a re-thinking of areas of catechetical and pastoral care, as well as a religious rule advocating the mixed, or ‘hool’, life as a legitimate devotional practice. By looking at the rationale for the ‘hool lijf’, I hope to give some idea of how Pecock develops previous pastoral models through his systematization of moral philosophy and through what is an elaborate attempt at pre-modern social theorizing. The final part considers the reform ideas pertinent to the religious orders that are part of Pecock’s manyfronted reform programme (or attempted reform programme). The clear priority of a social good, evident throughout Pecock’s works, leads him to extend the applicability of the ‘hool lijf’ to those in orders to convince them of the inherent value of parochial service and monastic outreach.

he terms ‘in a full conuenient process and ordre’ (p. 14). It thus requires advanced appreciation of the respective merits of action and contemplation before the reader is ready to be persuaded about the inherent value of the ‘hool lijf’. Pecock often emphasizes that he expects his readers, in a very concrete sense, to model their religious devotion on the basis of his teaching, and to reach increasingly sophisticated levels of religious and ethical awareness in a manner consistent with his unfolding argument. 6

A useful discussion of the context of mixed-life theology and the attempts by Arundel and his circle to circulate texts as counter to Lollardy and private devotions is Catto, ‘Shaping the Mixed Life’.

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Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun The Reule of Crysten Religioun is believed to be Pecock’s earliest work, dating to 1443, the year of the death of Archbishop Henry Chichele, and around the time of his ordination as bishop of St Asaph.7 It is itself a remarkable, self-styled compendium of catechetical instruction, lay pastoral guidance, and scholastic systematized theology. We might regard the Reule as the foundational text for what is essentially Pecock’s revised curriculum of Christian knowledge, and it is here that we find the fullest articulation of Pecock’s pastoral theology. In this elaborate system of instruction, the discipline of discretio spirituum is redefined as the ability to discern valid from invalid arguments by the method of syllogistic logic, which is proposed as by no means a formalized academic discipline, but rather the innate capacity, infallible if used correctly, of all Christians to determine truths of theology and moral philosophy. It is also in the Reule that Pecock makes recourse to the mode of spiritual revelation, in the form of an extended and divinely authorised intellectual visio; an epiphanic narrative that serves as the foundational topos for Pecock’s catechism. Thus when approached by the long-exiled ladies of philosophy ‘ful comely and faire’, in what must be characterized as an eroticized inspirational encounter, the direct result is a process of textual procreation of which the first offspring is the Reule itself.8 This is a creative appropriation of a theme familiar from much visionary and contemplative writing, here applied to an entirely rational inspiration occurring within the ‘doom of reason’. And it is a self-conscious act of textual authorization that offers an allegorized account of the genesis, not just of a specific text, but of the whole philosophical and theological system laid out in the Reule and in Pecock’s subsequent works.9 It is the privileged duty of Pecock to provide the clearest and fullest articulation of this rational illumination, and he proposes his two central arrangements of systematized religious knowledge that form the bedrock of his Christian catechesis. The first, the Seven Matters of Religious Knowledge, instructs in what Pecock defines as the ‘contemplatijf lijf’. It is an elaborate medley of systematic theology, soteriology, sacramental theology, and metaphysics, and Pecock intends daily meditation on this arrangement (together with prayer and confession) to form the key pattern for private devotion. The other, the Four Tables of Moral Virtues, subsumes the Commandments and other moral teachings into a programme of 7

Pecock notes that he is writing in the year 1443 in The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 434.

8

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 31.

9

See also Mishtooni Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock: Clerical Imitatio in the Fifteenth Century’, Notes and Queries, 47 (2000), 172–76.

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ethical activity in the active life (‘actijf lijf’). It comprises virtuous acts towards God, oneself, and one’s neighbour, arranging these according to whether they serve as ends in themselves (‘eendal’), or as instrumental in eliciting other virtues (‘meenal’).10 These revised curricular arrangements are proposed, both as the definitive summa of theology and moral philosophy, as well as the cornerstone of a pastoral and catechetical endeavour that systematizes popular religious teaching for a broadly imagined audience spanning laity and clergy. All else in Pecock follows from this pastoral theological ambition set out in the Reule. Wendy Scase has provided us with insight into innovative models of book production and dissemination devised by Pecock and some of his London associates, all of whom believed in the educational imperative, patronized learning, and supported the access of lay people to theological works.11 Pecock’s suggestions for reform of monastic orders also follow from his pastoral project with its dual orientation of active and contemplative components (as I shall discuss in some detail below), and so too do his Christian apologetics and ecclesiology. In The Book of Faith, in all probability his latest work (1456) and one that appears to be more directly targeted at the English clergy, he presents his vision of a harmonization of faith made possible by promoting a stronger intellectual and doctrinal base in the Church’s pastoral agenda. It is in this work that we see his catechetical endeavours and emphasis on disputation across the lay-clerical divide pertaining most directly to issues of social control. The dissemination of inherently persuasive and exoteric teaching (operating on a principle of generality that will bring lay rationality into accord with learned clerical reason) is urgently needed, it is insisted, if the Church is to move beyond the prevailing, but ultimately self-defeating, orthodox practice of meeting error with punitive force. What follows from the Reule’s revisionist catechesis is, in other words, a rich reform ideology, intended to be acted out on many fronts. But nowhere does this ideology and educational imperative find better expression than in the strategy of ‘dialogizacioun’, i.e. the debate form, which is where we see Pecock at his most rhetorically innovative. The comprehensive articulation of the Seven Matters and Four Tables in the Reule is enacted and given added precision dialogically in the imagined debates that structure his other satellite works, Donet, Folewer to the Donet, Poore Mennis Myrrour, and Book of Faith. In other words, it is ‘dialogizacioun’, in which student and teacher, or father and son, engage in a 10

The somewhat thankless task of describing the intricacies of these arrangements is pursued in Brockwell, Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Lancastrian Church, pp. 57–93. 11

Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’.

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dialectical encounter of scholastic disputatio that becomes the main vehicle for propagating his system of instruction: it has an implicit performative and paratextual dimension, offering a model for disputation that Pecock would like to see emulated in public and domestic spheres. And it suggests ways in which the presentation of Pecock’s syllabus can be stratified according to intellectual capacity, with the dialogue in Donet providing the basic primer, Folewer written for those who will benefit from a development of the doctrines of moral and intellectual virtues, and Poor Mennis Myrrour containing a distillate for those less advanced in such study. In all of these works, textual dialogue becomes the test ground for many of the ideas of catechesis, pastoralia, education, and lay participation in ‘clergie’ initially set out in Reule. More than that, dialogue (understood as rational, discursive exchange and persuasion) is explored as a tool for managing religious nonconformism, for developing alternatives to the punitive response to heresy, for getting logical argument back on track after Wycliffite polemic, and, ultimately, for ensuring social stability. In this endeavour, Pecock experiments prolifically with a discourse of tolerance, hospitality, and patience: ‘Sone, þat it is mych and oft as þou hast now rehercid, y graunte wel. But, certis, it is not so alwey’;12 ‘Fadir, it were good to wite what evidence, and hou grete evidence, ye have forto so clepe and holde’;13 ‘Sone, y kunne þee þank for þi scharp arguing. Neuerþeles, õeue so good diligence to vndirstonde what y schal seie for answers to þine argumentis’.14 Typically, dialogue starts from a position of scepticism or variant interpretation, always on the basis of a sustained description of a given standpoint. There then follows the determination of concepts and syllogistic ratiocination, only, invariably, to see the two disputants arrive at mutually agreed superior interpretative positions. Throughout, the lay reader is imagined as the obedient ‘sone’ of Pecock’s dialogic works. In the course of disputation, he poses increasingly demanding and occasionally critical questions, but is brought gradually to an awareness of the full Christian moral law, of the particular value of meritorious action, and of the pre-eminence of the ‘hool lijf’ that integrates action with contemplation: ‘ffadir, y þanke yow for boþe yowre preciose techyng and for yowre holsom counselyng, and y hope forto conforme me þerto’.15

12

Pecock, Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 90.

13

Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison, p. 163.

14

Pecock, Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 191.

15

Pecock, Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 170.

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The ‘Hool Lijf’ Pecock’s Reule makes its intervention into one of the central and most widely disseminated debates in late medieval English religious writing, that of the Christian modes of living, the active and contemplative lives, and the possibility of their integration in a mixed life. The impressive number of texts addressed to both lay and clergy preoccupied with this subject suggests that the rudiments of the active and contemplative lives were considered part of elementary doctrina, taught as part of the basic syllabus of religious instruction. In medieval English sources this particular theme proliferates. The enormous manual of pastoral theology, Oculus sacerdotis, by William of Pagula (c. 1320, extant in more than fifty manuscripts), takes the active and contemplative lives as part of its subject and as knowledge necessary to assist parochial clergy in their cura animarum. In vernacular texts, the lives and the possibility of their meddling are treated in myriad texts, some of which are: Rolle’s Form of Living, Dives and Pauper, Pore Caitif, The Cloud of Unknowing, and, centrally, Hilton’s Mixed Life. Moreover, the Middle English corpus of Bonaventuriana (texts adapted from the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi and the Stimulus amoris, of which the best known is Nicholas Love’s Mirror) in most instances consider the Christian lives, and do so often through interpolations and expansions to the Latin sources.16 Pecock’s engagement with the theme of the active and contemplative lives is distinct in two ways. Firstly, in his configuration of lay religious identity, he offers an extraordinary valorization of active, meritorious works. In fact, his is probably the most outspoken valorization of the active life that we find in Middle English texts of lay spiritual guidance, a feature that needs to be seen in the light of a general tendency in the Middle Ages to present the contemplative life as the more exalted religious life. Secondly, we see in the Reule a ‘modernized’ and conceptually refined rationale for the ideal Christian life that is an integration of active and contemplative components. Specifically, it offers the most sustained analysis we have of the mixed life, what Pecock terms ‘þe hool lijf’, and of the ethical commitments in the form of ‘outward werkis of vertu’ that ought to lie at the heart of it. As such, Pecock’s work invites comparison with Hilton writing half a century earlier, and indeed can be seen to develop and re-

16

F. J. Steele surveys the Middle English sources for the debate on the Christian lives, with a focus on thirty writings that treat specifically of the active life, in Towards a Spirituality for LayFolk: The Active Life in Middle English Religious Literature from the Thirteenth Century to the Fifteenth (Lewiston: Mellen, 1995). See also Denise N. Baker, ‘The Active and Contemplative Lives in Rolle, the Cloud-Author and Hilton’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition, England, Ireland, and Wales, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999), pp. 85–102.

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orientate previous teaching on the lives, but with his very own insistence on the active and practical dimensions of such teaching. It is a telling feature that, when Pecock looks to the active apostolate of Christ for an example of the ‘hool lijf’, he notes that Christ had to resort to prayer at night ‘bi cause þat in þe nyõt tymes was not oportunyte [f]or good and according leiser forto labore aboute þe peple as was in day tyme’.17 Characteristic of Pecock’s inherently practical teaching is that contemplation is accorded no special status; it is willed, accessible, not dependent on miracle or inspiration, but a rational discipline that can be learned through study of Pecock’s Seven Matters of Religious Knowledge. We are as far removed as can be from any ideal of contemplative elitism and withdrawal, as contemplation is perceived as being of little inherent virtue per se unless co-operating with the active life to issue forth in charitable, meritorious deeds. In what seems like a reversal of Hilton’s notion that contemplation is ‘a litil coole of fire in þi soule […] it is good þat þou putte þerto stikkes, þat aren good werkes of actif liyf’,18 Pecock presents contemplation as inferior but able to nourish the fire that is action: ‘þe contemplatijf lijf of þe first maner serueþ in lijk maner to his actijf lijf bi him to be brouõt forþ, as þe blowing […] seruen into þe fier kindeling’.19 This, of course, contradicts a longstanding tradition of seeing the contemplative life as a higher way to God, whether this life is actively pursued or held up as something to be admired, but not actively emulated. The Cloud of Unknowing, together with numerous other texts, offers little more than variations on a patristic theme by seeing Martha’s active life as necessary and good, while Mary, as the paradigm of holiness, has chosen the best life that partakes in contemplation and eternal life.20 Turning his attention to Luke 10. 38–42, Pecock provides his own gloss on the story of Mary and Martha. He does so in his characteristically sustained and idiosyncratic manner, and in a way that re-codifies inherited hierarchies of the modes of Christian living, particularly a longstanding commentary tradition, which used this narrative to inculcate the pre-eminence of the contemplative life over the active. The general thrust of his argument is unambiguous: the contemplative life ought to be made subservient to the active life as the discipline that ensures that meritorious

17

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 397.

18

Walter Hilton, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 92.15 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1986), p. 36. 19 20

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 478.

The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson, EETS, O. S. 218 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1944), p. 53.

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work, precisely for it to be meritorious, is performed with the appropriate intention and governance. In Pecock’s explication, Mary exercised her work of detached contemplation with the ideal ‘pure entent’, while Martha was faced with the much more challenging task of reconciling her devotion with charitable action in the world, a challenge which she never completely resolves: ‘it is riõt probable þat sche hadde not at þat tyme þis seid pure and simple entent, but þat sche dide hir werkis alle or myche for worldly freendful love to þee and to þi disciples, al or ouer myche deel’.21 God’s rebuke of Martha is thus a highly specific one, addressing a specific intentionality and ‘gouernaunce’ within the active life (which falls short of being ‘verili morali vertuose and chariteful of God’) at a particular moment in time. It was never meant to determine the inherent merit of the active life per se. Rather than remaining stable indices of merit and levels of accomplishment, Mary and Martha become re-translated and rather dynamic signifiers, at least inasmuch as Martha has yet to form the right intent through contemplation so that her action is willed and chosen, not accidental. As her intention still remains to be reformed in contemplation, the deeds of Martha, at this stage, cannot be deemed fully meritorious. There is a bit of the renegade exegete in this approach, and Pecock is only too well aware that, in his handling of patristic auctoritas, his conclusions are ‘aõens þe doom of wise men and of seintis in her writingis — as of Gregory and of oþere’.22 While it appears to be the case that Pecock recycles relatively few patristic topoi in his writings, he often does so in a manner that, in the words of Mishtooni Bose, exposes ‘the limitations of a patristically grounded orthodoxy’,23 and that at a time when the leaders of a vigilant orthodoxy advocated particular dependence on the Latin Fathers. Just as often, Pecock can be seen to reinvigorate the polemical drive of patristic tradition by rethinking inherited readings and scrutinising the semantic range of inherited terms and topoi. It is this latter strategy that enables him to formulate and give renewed precision to the alternating dynamic between action and contemplation which is so central to his pastoral pedagogy.24

21

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 489–90.

22

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 467.

23

Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 84. The scarcity of patristic quotations in Pecock gives the impression, Bose suggests, that he may have considered them to have become ‘drained of their rhetorical energies by constant use in controversy, and have thus become the devalued currency of anti-heretical argumentation’ (p. 84). 24

I survey Pecock’s varied uses of the writings of Augustine in ‘Pecock’, in the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. by Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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But Pecock’s handling of Luke 10 is not mere idiosyncrasy or irreverent exegesis. He comes, in fact, very close to a Gregorian paradigm that places a higher state of action (the prerogative of prelate or pastor) above the vita contemplativa. A similar position is found, for instance, in The Book of Vices and Virtues and Nicholas Love’s Mirror, where ‘þe seconde part of actif life’ that proceeds from contemplation is defined as the preserve of ‘prelates & prechours & oþer þat hauen cure of soule’.25 This rather conservative and circumscribed view of the higher active, or mixed life, stands in some contrast to Hilton’s idea of the mixed life, in which Hilton does more than anyone before him to engage a rising urban middle class with a model that offers a broad continuation and reinforcement of patristic teaching on the lives, but within a more inclusive vision of who can be called to the spiritual life. His achievement is to propose a model in which a reform of will and affect is given outward expression in deeds performed for the spiritual and physical welfare of one’s neighbour — deeds which are themselves viewed as a mode of prayer to the mystical body of Christ. This pastoral outlook emphasises pastoral care and ethical concerns within spheres of religious piety and worldly practice, and in doing so offers a practical and inclusive theory for ‘how aman in al þat he doth mai shape him to be contemplatif’.26 Making a similar point and being characteristically unequivocal, Pecock insists that ‘werkis of vertu’ are ‘a real preier […] and þerwiþ al þyn honour and worship and preising and service is more brouõt forþ þan if he schulde lie in mental or in vocal preier and begging only’.27 Contemplation provides the right intent and ethical foundation for deeds and, with this in mind, Pecock can make the further forceful point that if one is unsure of one’s spiritual power — if one is unaccomplished in moral theology and contemplation — one had better avoid the life of service to men.28 The apex of the Christian life is the ‘hool lijf’, manifesting the productive complementarity between ‘moral outward deedis, namelich anentis neiõboris’ and the religious contemplation that is the pre-requisite thereof: Þe hool lijf maad of þe contemplatijf lijf and of his to him answering actijf lijf […] is moche better þan þe contemplatijf lijf is in it silf and bi hym silf wiþout þe setting to of his actijf lijf. And so forto occupie a while parfijt contemplatijf lijf and þanne bi strengþ of it forto

25

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 118.

26

The quotation is from The Prickynge of Love, an adaptation of Stimulus amoris in all probability by Hilton, and showing a concern with mixed life spirituality. The Prickynge of Love, ed. by Harold Kane, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 92.10, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983), p. 2. 27

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 410.

28

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 384–89.

278

Allan F. Westphall occupie parfitely actijf lijf anentis neiõboris, and from þens come aõen in an oþer while to contemplatijf lijf, and aftirward eftsoone come aõen into such actijf lijf, is better þan forto stabili and perpetually abide in contemplatijf lijf oonli, namely if abilte and oportunyte be had forto make such alternaciouns or chaungis.29

Pecock adds his voice at the end of a vernacular debate about the Christian modes of living. He writes some fifty years after Hilton, and, like him, defends the active/mixed life, providing a theory for balancing contemplative aspiration with an awareness of the moral imperative of active, social obligation. In his rich attempt at reform, he saw it as crucial to propagate and re-articulate a positive mixed-life theology in a manner that sharpened its lexicon and determined its constituent parts. Occasionally structured like a scholastic pro et contra (and there are plenty of dialogic qualities in the Reule), this work details the advancement through stages of contemplative and active lives towards perfect ‘hool lijf’, constantly classifying, subdividing, and assessing these. Pecock thus wished to assert himself as the ideologue of the ‘hool lijf’ in the era of Chichele and after, where, previously, in the time of Arundel, Hilton articulated a coherent rationale for the ‘medled lyf’. For Hilton, practising the mixed life takes place in a continuum of devotional exercises, such as participation in standard liturgy and sacraments, and a programme of basic reading and orison (‘I holde it most siker vnto þee for to seie þi mateyns, or ellis for to rede vpon þi sautir’).30 Pecock, by contrast, offers his work as a manual for ‘cristen mennes sufficient scolyng’ that posits very little outside his extensively interlocked and cross-referenced corpus of texts; his writing is driven forward by what Rita Copeland has termed a process of autoexegesis; methodically expanding the sum of truths discovered, endlessly expounding method, and reflecting on its own ruptured relation to past auctoritas.31 But the main difference between Pecock and an earlier pastoral literature of mixed life theology needs to be addressed. For Hilton, the mixed life remained the special preserve of a social minority and elite — that of a secular lord within a particular matrix of material and social power, who is involved in the active pastoral care of his dependents. Although his treatise on Mixed Life was one of several to find varied devotional utilities also among vowed religious, who evidently found its guidance relevant to monastic spirituality, the text is designed to resolve

29

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 478–79.

30

Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by Ogilvie-Thomson, p. 62.

31

Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, pp. 109–14.

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a conflict and a crisis of vocation in the life of a wealthy gentleman in his desire to realize his devotional aspiration.32 We notice in the development of mixed-life theology in England before Pecock a line of broadening application of the life that integrates contemplative and active elements. The mixed life as theorized in the Reule is not the prerogative of a specific professional state; rather, it generalizes to all Christians an ethical imperative towards action. Through the idea of the ‘hool lijf’, Pecock proposes an overarching rationale for the Christian life and for religious discipline. It is a modus vivendi viewed as the best and most comprehensive manifestation of his catechetical syllabus and, by implication, of God’s moral law. Furthermore, it is intended as the cornerstone of a reformed and strengthened Church, and for a revised Christian catechism that, if only nominally, guarantees transparency and social homogeneity. We may thus say that with Pecock, more so than with Hilton, we are closer to a novel concept and an alteration of the status of the topic itself. Mixed life theology itself contains a vision of a Christian community traversing boundaries of lay/clergy, monastic/secular, constituted around the study of moral theology, and educated in the gradual progress from illumination and argumentative practice, through prayer, good will, compunction, and moral reform, to the highest good of a ‘hool lijf’, at the heart of which is the performance of virtuous deeds ‘wiþ pure entent’. The idea of an ethical goal that directly affects relations with one’s neighbour thus lies at the heart of the exercise of the ‘doom of resoun’ and training in syllogistic method.

A Blueprint for Monastic Reform? Whereas Hilton’s Mixed Life returns to the cloister by accident and through the contingencies of late medieval manuscript circulation, where it was read by monks and nuns, Pecock envisages the utility of his catechetical discipline for an audience of vowed religious in very explicit terms. There can be little doubt that Pecock was full of reservations about late medieval monasticism and the monastic way of life, and he begins to outline in the Reule the parameters of a thoroughgoing reform of the religious orders, centred specifically on his notion of the ‘hool lijf’ with its impetus towards social obligation and corporal works of mercy. I suggest that we should think of Pecock’s defence of monasticism in the Repressor as separate from his preoccupation with the same in the Reule and in the context of his mixed-life theology. The defence in the Repressor of cloistered 32

Nicole Rice offers illuminating discussion of several texts offering pastoral guidance for the laity that also became instruments for contemplation in monastic communities in Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, pp. 136–48.

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religion forms part of an exercise of systematic refutation of Lollard doctrine, and is arguably, in the words of V. H. H. Green, ‘the least satisfactory of his answers’, arguing for instance that sinful monks would have committed even greater sin were they not in a religious house, and that they commit less evil than any soldier presently engaged in the war against France!33 The view voiced in the Reule that the religious orders are ripe for reform exemplifies the broader intended reach of Pecock’s writing, and underscores his priority of social utility in its suggestion that the rationale of the active ‘hool lijf’ is pertinent in the effort to integrate religious houses more directly in a vibrant parochial scene as providers of active ministry. If it is true that the monasteries to a particular degree in the late Middle Ages ‘were caught in a double bind between the reforming imperative of withdrawal, and the social imperative of integration’,34 then Pecock’s priorities for a solution are clear: intellectual education, and crucially the exposition of God’s moral law in the Reule with its social orientation, ought to serve as the much needed instrument in a programme of monastic reform, and as the corrective to an over-emphasis on prayer and meditation seen amongst ‘conuentual religiosis persoonys’. Here Pecock extends a reservation also found in Hilton’s Mixed Life, namely that his reader may pursue devotion too vehemently through ‘indiscrecion’, to the exclusion of ‘medeful werkes’. Hilton perceives potential conflict in the lay reader’s mixed life as arising from disharmonious relations between social obligation and spiritual meditation; what his treatise cautions against is pursuing the inclination to ‘kisse [Christ’s] mouþ bi deuocion and goosteli praier’ while stepping ‘upon his feet […] in as moche as þou wolt not tende to hem, for negligence of þi silf, whiche þou hast take þe cure of’.35 Similarly in Pecock, the multiplication of prayer in a manner that leads to withdrawal or neglect of one’s social obligation means to sin and to ‘failen bi indiscrecioun’.36 The use of ‘indiscrecioun’ here demonstrates shared concerns with Hilton, and a shared vocabulary, particularly in the effort to define an appropriate balance between active and contemplative disciplines. With particular appeal to the religious orders, Pecock stresses the importance of avoiding longer

33 V. H. H. Green, Bishop Reginald Pecock: A Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), p. 162. See also Pecock, Repressor, ed. by Babbington, pp. 516–17. 34

Benjamin Thompson, ‘Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 165–212 (p. 190). 35

Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by Ogilvie-Thomson, p. 37.

36

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 395.

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prayer routines, instead recommending what he terms, in a memorable phrase, ‘schort smert fiery deuoute preiers whiche wolen be seid in iii or iiii or in fewe wordis accordaunt to oure entent for þe tyme’.37 It is for these reasons that we notice a particular admiration for those who go from a cloistered life of prayer to the ‘parfijt actijf lijf’ — a view fully consonant with his insistence that a Christian ought to progress from ‘illuminacioun’ (understood as predominantly rational, but with an affective component) towards moral reform; from logical contemplation towards the social integration of the ‘hool lijf’. As Pecock notes, the fact that many ‘monks and chanouns’ leave the cloister in order to serve the laity as ‘parsouns and vicaries and bisschopis’ should be taken as evidence that, having had a long time to reflect on Christian moral law in the ‘pryuy sure saaf world’ of the religious house, they arrive at the conclusion that ‘the actijf lijf with the contemplatijf lijf’ is the superior of all Christian modes of living. Although it is never stated directly, one suspects that Pecock’s criticism is directed chiefly at the devoted asceticism of observant, Carthusian, and Birgittine orders — surely a very minor proportion of the monastic population in England, but an influential and strongly profiled one. The Cistercian order, on the other hand, is held up as an example of vowed religious who live in accordance with the full spectrum of God’s moral law, being equally sensitive to active and contemplative disciplines.38 Although the three folio pages in the Reule that address the subject of religious orders can be said to constitute, at best, a very sketchy proposal for monastic reform, Pecock is unequivocal about the initiatives required for a necessary re-orientation in monastic practice. Firstly, his own syllabus sets out the trajectory from contemplation to action and the ‘hool lijf’ ‘in a ful conuenient process and ordre’, and ought thus to constitute a rule for vowed religious. With characteristically unswerving confidence, and in a manner that conveys an indirect critique of the reading material habitually used for daily observance in houses, Pecock recommends that ‘the redyng, leernyng, remembering and vsyng of tho bookis which God vouchith saaf me to write in the comoun peplis langage and in latyn should be unlakable and

37

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 397. The advice here recalls advice given in The Cloud of Unknowing to prefer short prayers ‘in ful fewe wordes; õe, & euer þe fewer þe betir. Õe, & õif it ben bot a lityl worde of o silable, me þink it betir þen of to, & more acordyng to þe werk of þe spiryte’ (The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Hodgson, p. 74). The application, however, could not be more different, with Pecock insisting that prayer ought to pose a minimum of hindrance to active works, while the Cloud-author views an increasing shortness of prayer as part of a gradual dismantling of linguistic and discursive awareness in the demanding discipline of solitary contemplation. 38

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 418–20.

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unleuable daily obseruance’.39 Secondly, Pecock advocates a return to an original monastic ideal of achieving a balance between active and contemplative disciplines. It seems here that active deeds, monastic outreach, and utility to society become the norm for evaluating the forms vowed religious life should take and the justification of its existence. It is clear that, in the practical pastoral teaching of the Reule, monasteries have a particular obligation to society at large as places of learning, literacy, and as providers of education. What is less clear is the type of secular extensions and parochial functions intended by Pecock, especially when we consider that, as Benjamin Thompson notes, in many ways in late medieval England ‘the barrier between the cloister and society had become almost entirely permeable’.40 But it seems safe to conclude that, in its attempted appeal to enclosed religious, the Reule strives to inculcate an ideal of proceeding from monastic contemplation to carrying out duties in the practical operation of the Church, as well as a deepened understanding of how one can be personally ascetic but still actively attend to the needs of others. Thus, the monastery, in its function as ‘a pety world as a scole to the grettir world’, ought to serve as a training ground for those who can later take up ‘þe state of a prelate and of a gouernour, which is moost hard and moost perilose of alle oþere’.41 The striking analogy used to convey this idea of the religious house is that of the astronomer’s ‘speer’ [sphere] that ‘makiþ al þing in þis litil counterfeet world be like and answer to þe þingis conteyned in þe greet world’:42 the purpose of the monastery should be to have the whole world — and, we may add, the ‘hool lijf’ — present in microcosm. In this way, the house is to provide a locus for contemplating God’s moral law towards self, neighbour, and God (as manifested in Pecock’s Four Tables), for rehearsing charitable action, and for training the will to perform this with the right intent, before attending to the cura animarum beyond the walls.

Conclusion It is Pecock’s holistic pastoral outlook and vision for the ‘hool lijf’ that forms the backbone of his critique of the monastic life and of programmes of monastic lectio. Its comprehensive teaching stands as a remarkable alternative to the devotional and

39

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 422.

40

Thompson, ‘Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England’, p. 186.

41

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 419.

42

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 419.

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meditative reading programmes disseminated through monastic channels, primarily Carthusian and Birgittine, with one key text, Love’s Mirror, travelling with the mandate of the archbishop of Canterbury. Evidently, this revised catechism is far removed from the voguish vernacular lexicon of Christocentric, affect-based meditative writing, and from a predominant late medieval ‘normative centring’ towards the salvific function of Christ’s Passion, imitatio Christi, true repentance, the realization of the compassion of Mary, and so on.43 As Jeremy Catto has observed, Pecock’s alternative remedy for orthodoxy ‘was probably less perceptive in the long run than the Carthusian’s reliance on spiritual literature’, but he notes, crucially, that ‘the difference should not be exaggerated’.44 Indeed, we need to see Pecock, not as unique in his pedagogy or as dismissing devotional affectivity, but as a late voice in a tradition of English pastoral theology that explores how the dominant vogue of devotional enthusiasm, inward prayer and desire may issue forth into necessary meritorious works. We may even say that Pecock, in his propagation of mixed-life theology, goes further than any before him by exploring and systematizing in detail how we may put affectivity to work. In his own distinct way, Pecock translates an emotive idiom, a language of ‘inward passiouns and affectis’, into the intended effects of his teaching and of the disputational literary culture he envisages: ‘þe practik or arguing which is tauõt here’ works for the ‘gendering of wel willing and of compunccioun and for gendering of passiounal loue and of desijr’.45 Other emotional configurations to be elicited through the experience of rational illumination include ‘sorewe’, ‘ioie’, ‘repentaunce’, ‘schame’, ‘fier of deuocioun’, ‘feruour’, ‘gladnesse’, ‘angir’, ‘drede’, and suggest that Pecock’s ‘modernized’ theology of the ‘hool lijf’, in its conception, was intended to match the spectrum of interiority and emotional response delineated, for instance, in Christocentric meditative material. We might thus say that Pecock reconfigures an emotive idiom by suggesting ways in which a method of syllogocentrism itself can engender his distinctive notion of a ‘contemplaciounis effect’. The important

43 The term ‘normative centring’ is Berndt Hamm’s from The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm, ed. and trans. by Robert J. Bast (Leiden: Brill, 2004). See especially chapter one: ‘Normative Centering in the 15th and 16th Centuries: Observations on Religiosity, Theology, and Iconology’, pp. 1–49. 44 45

Catto, ‘The King’s Government and the Fall of Pecock’, pp. 201–22 (p. 206).

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 372. The Donet is particularly interesting for its reconfiguration of affective rhetoric. The prologue describes the syllogocentric method as able to ‘knytte hem [his readers] and couple hem to God and to his wel willingis, as forto be a bilowe to blowe and puffe vp the fier of deuocioun in her soule, into banysching aweie the cool of vndeuocioun and of vncharite’ (p. 6).

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thing is that affectivity, and the experience of a ‘contemplaciounis effect’, are disciplined within the exercise of the ‘doom of resoun’. The danger is always abandoning the universal and the rationally verifiable in favour of subjective religious singularity and a non-visibility of meaning. Thus, turning to the subject of ‘dyuersitees in felingis and feiþis’, the reader is cautioned that ‘alle suche singuler feelingis in þe vndirstonding and movingis in þe affeccioun whiche ben not vniuersal in summe men of alle maner complexioun ben to be hold suspect and not liõtli to be folewid’.46 Considerations such as these conceivably drive Pecock to dispense largely with affective modes of empathy and projection centred on Christ in his humanity and the narrative of his Passion. For Hilton, these were indeed the focal points for his rationale of the mixed life: Christ’s body is glossed as ripe with social significance — imitatio Christi is to be pursued through charitable action and worldly governance, which themselves become a mode, or extension, of affective Christocentric meditation. Like Hilton, Pecock is concerned with shaping the appropriate intentionality and religious sensibility that underlie activity. But he proposes a more robustly rational system of co-operation between religious ‘affecciouns’ and the will to do well. It is important here that a substantial portion of the last (and incomplete) Fifth Treatise of the Reule proposes what we may term a phenomenology of meritorious action — ‘meritorie moral holynes or goodnes’ — for the ‘hool lijf’. It is beyond the scope of this exercise to engage with this topic in detail, but its gist is clear: contemplation, as an exercise of reason, both stirs and disciplines ‘affecciouns’; affectivity, as trained in contemplation and inherently reasonable, then moulds the will into a state of ‘inward welwilling’ in which it desires ‘deuoutly, ferseli, feruently or strongly and abidingli’ to perform charitable active deeds.47 The intricacies of this philosophical dimension of the ‘hool lijf’ extend the initiatives of English pastoral theology in the previous decades that similarly worked to articulate the relationship between religious desire and action. Even for an ardent rationalist such as Pecock, the instrumentality of religious enthusiasm is pivotal, as he aims to channel its energies within his very own bid for a fifteenthcentury religious reform.48

46

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 460.

47

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 498. The reciprocity of outward action and ‘þe movingis of þe wil which ben called hise affecciouns or passiouns’ is analysed in the Reule, pp. 481–86, 498–501. 48

I thank Ian Johnson who read an early draft of this paper and made many helpful suggestions.

V ERNACULAR A UTHORITY AND THE R HETORIC OF S CIENCES IN P ECOCK ’S T HE F OLEWER TO THE D ONET AND IN T HE C OURT OF S APIENCE* Tamás Karáth

T

homas Arundel’s Constitutions have been interpreted until recently as a watershed in fifteenth-century cultural politics. This view, however, had already been challenged before the Oxford conference ‘After Arundel’ of April 2009.1 One of the purposes of this conference was to reconsider cultural continuities before and after Arundel as well as the meaning of censorship imposed on vernacular composition. In this paper, I will juxtapose two approximately contemporary texts of the fifteenth century, the anonymous Court of Sapience and Reginald Pecock’s Folewer to the Donet, to show that the concept of ‘continuity’, the continuation of generic or rhetorical conventions, is complex and elusive. After 1409, vernacular compositions, rooted in inherited discursive traditions, could both affirm and destabilize their own authority by alluding to restraints on writing in English.

* I owe my thanks to Kantik Ghosh for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Eva Schaten, who helped me to access some important sources. 1 Nicholas Watson initiated a rich debate on cultural paradigms in late medieval England in his study of censorship and cultural change in the fifteenth century: see Watson, ‘Censorship’. Fiona Somerset has responded to Watson’s seminal argument thus: ‘[The] reassessment of the relationship between censorship and use or advocacy of the vernacular in late medieval England suggests that the relationship, while close, is not as simple as it may appear. The choice between using or advocating the vernacular and keeping silent is not necessarily a choice whether to exclude oneself from discussion or to submit to a prior self-censorship. If we assume that it is, we limit our analysis’ (Somerset, ‘Professionalizing Translation’, pp. 145–57 (p. 153)).

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The discourse of the classification of sciences is fundamental to the organizing principles of Reginald Pecock’s Folewer to the Donet and of The Court of Sapience.2 After Arundel, this discourse seems to have become especially sensitive to issues of censorship, vernacular creation, and externally imposed limits on authority. I will argue that Pecock’s theorization of knowledge in the Folewer positions itself in the same rhetorical tradition which manifests itself in the allegorical poem. Moreover, both authors address problems underlying writing in the vernacular by means of the discourse of the classification of sciences: these include the suspect status of English, restraints on vernacular textual composition, and the authority to discuss and transmit theological subjects beyond the university. In spite of these similarities, the implications of this discourse are very different in the two works under consideration. Reading the Folewer in light of The Court of Sapience can elucidate Pecock’s much debated attitudes to vernacular religious instruction. At the same time, it also reveals that the Arundelian measures of the early fifteenth century could affect segments of religious writing in diverse and contradictory ways even within the framework of the same discursive tradition. Pecock’s Folewer is a sequel to his Donet. These texts provide the reader with an introduction to the Reule of Crysten Religioun. The order of composition of these three works, however, is uncertain. Numerous cross-references reveal that Pecock was simultaneously working on these writings. The Donet may have been finished between 1443 and 1449, while the Folewer was not concluded before 1453–54.3 The ‘follower’ to each Christian’s ‘Donatus’ imitates its antecedent in form and structure: both texts are dialogues between father and son, and are divided into two parts. But their approaches to their subject-matters are very different. Pecock conceives the Folewer as an elaboration on the Donet for more developed intellects. He establishes a hierarchy of audiences and contents in the preface to the Folewer, where he states that the Donet, though sufficient for simpler minds, does not satisfy the needs of readers with bigger intellectual capacities.4

2 For important discussions of the discourse of the classification of sciences, see Joseph Mariétan, Le Problème de la classification des sciences d’Aristote à St.-Thomas (Paris: Alcan, 1901); Jerome Taylor, ‘Introduction’ in The ‘Didascalicon’ of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. from the Latin with an introduction and notes by Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 3–39 (pp. 3–7); James Weisheipl, ‘Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought’, Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), 54–90; and Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1984). 3

For difficulties in dating Pecock’s earlier works, see Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. xvi–xviii. 4

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 2.

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The Folewer is an enlarged version of the Donet, which itself is a heavily reduced and simplified exposition of the seven matters of faith as propounded in the Reule of Crysten Religioun. The exposition of Pecock’s moral and religious instruction to the laity is presented in such a way that the three books complement one another. They not only offer clergie for the transmission of catechetical teaching, but also create a new frame for lay education. As Kirsty Campbell points out, Pecock’s role in fifteenth-century lay education is unique as the bishop not only wrote (or rather rephrased) books of religious instruction, but also ‘devis[ed] innovative plans for lay education’: he ‘envisioned the religious education of the lay members of the Christian community in ways that had never been imagined before’.5 Inspired by the need for an all-encompassing, but simple and transparent, scheme of the moral laws, Pecock recasts the elements of the traditional canon of lay religious instruction — as outlined in Archbishop Pecham’s Constitutions — into a new mould. Nevertheless, he breaks with the tradition of expounding separate lists of memoranda (the seven articles of faith, the Ten Commandments, the seven deeds of mercy, or the seven deadly sins), and rearranges all moral and religious instruction into four tables. The four tables are designed primarily to structure Pecock’s religious instruction and provide a new educational aid for lay people. The raison d’être of the fourfold division of moral imperatives is nowhere justified in Pecock’s books, the methodology of the transmission of religious instruction being taken to be as selfevident as Pecock’s ‘doom of reason’. (‘[A]lle moral dedis according to resoun and to feiþ, and þerfore alle moral vertues commaundid or counseilid bi resoun or feiþ, and alle comaundementis or counseilis of god ben conteyned in […] xxiij poyntis’.)6 The overall idea of the four tables is that all of God’s commandments can be classified into three categories: one’s duty towards God, towards oneself, and towards one’s neighbours. These categories list several duties, which — altogether twenty-three — constitute the ‘eendal’ virtues, i.e. the absolute aims of morality. The moral virtues have their corresponding ‘meenal’ virtues; these are the executive powers of the will through which the moral ends can be reached. As all intermediary virtues are inherently present in their respective ‘eendal’ virtues, further tables of virtues would be redundant. But Pecock argues that an appendix of the eight ‘meenal’ virtues, preceding the three tables of moral law, would further clarify his system.7 5

Kirsty Campbell, ‘Reginald Pecock and the Religious Education of the Laity in FifteenthCentury England’, Studies in Philology, 107 (2009), 48–73 (p. 50). 6 7

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 22.

In Pecock’s system the eight ‘meenal’ virtues are: learning, praising, dispraising, praying, thanking, worshipping, ‘disworshipping’, and living ‘sacramentally’. The ‘eendal’ moral virtues

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What the Folewer adds to the Donet in its elaboration of Pecock’s scheme of moral instruction is the integration of intellectual ‘virtues’ into the moral code. Chapters 10–14 of the first part of the Folewer demonstrate the role of reason in consenting to the four tables and to a faith based on the moral imperatives of Pecock’s system.8 The context of Pecock’s theorizations of knowledge is, thus, not a separate treatise on epistemology or on the relationship between reason and faith, but an educational aid in which the author revises the canon of moral and religious instruction as well as his methods. The transformation of the discourse of the classification of sciences in Pecock’s argument is comparable to his reworking of the catechetical instructions into the four tables of moral laws. For the purposes of this essay, primarily this section of Pecock’s ample argument will be juxtaposed with the methods of classifying sciences in The Court of Sapience. The Court is an allegorical discovery of a ‘castle of mind’.9 The anonymous and undated poem survives in four manuscripts,10 and two early prints by Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde. Robert Spindler refutes the consensus of early scholarship that ascribed the poem to Lydgate.11 Several suggestions have been made about its date of composition, of which none is compelling. Ruth Harvey argues that a date

provide a behavioural and ethical code for Christians as regards their relationship with God, with themselves and with their fellow Christians. For the most concise summary of Pecock’s moral teaching of the four tables, see Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 27–67. 8

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 45–75.

9

I borrow this expression from Christiania Whitehead’s study of architectural allegories of the mind in late medieval religious writing, which also discusses The Court of Sapience: Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). I also owe my thanks to her for her reflections on this paper at the conference. 10

Three manuscripts (London, British Library, MS Harley 2251; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 21, and New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 256) date from the second half of the fifteenth century, while the fourth is a copy of Caxton’s print, made by John Stowe in 1558 (London, British Library, MS Additional 29729). The copy-text of the first modern edition of the Court was the version in the Trinity manuscript: The Court of Sapience, ed. by Robert Spindler, Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, Heft 6 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1927), p. 7. Spindler did not know about the Plimpton manuscript, first described by Karl Brunner, ‘Bisher unbekannte Schluszstrophen des Court of Sapience’, Anglia, 62 (1938), 258–62. The modern critical edition of the poem by E. Ruth Harvey is based on Caxton’s print (c. 1480–83), which is related to the Plimpton version, but contains fewer omissions. The Court of Sapience, ed. by E. Ruth Harvey, Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations, 2 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984); all citations are from this edition. 11

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Spindler, p. 7.

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of 1471 or shortly after, as proposed by Spindler, is as reasonable as a date before 1456.12 Besides the uncertainties surrounding the circumstances of the Court’s composition, the most intriguing aspect of the poem is the impossibility of recovering one established version of the text. ‘No one of the sources [the Harley, Trinity, Plimpton manuscripts, and Caxton’s print] contains all of the poem we know, and even in its fullest surviving form the work is still plainly incomplete. On the other hand, each witness adds something different to the narrative text’.13 The account of the castle of Sapience reaches very different stages in the four major versions. The Harley text stops well before the end of Book I, in the middle of the story of God’s four daughters. The Trinity version finishes in the third court of the castle, that of Sapience and the seven liberal arts, with an incomplete tract on music, but before the concluding tract on astronomy. This version also lacks the visit to Lady Faith’s tower. Caxton and the Plimpton version extend the allegorical plot with the visit to the seven towers, where presumably the figures of the seven virtues have established their residence. However, after the visit to the first tower, Caxton appends an exposition of a Christian’s ABC with the basic items of catechetical learning, while Plimpton proceeds to the visit of the second tower in the nine ensuing stanzas, and concludes the allegorical journey with a stanza listing the most important matters of the poem. In none of the versions does the dreamer wake up. Indeed, the architecturally structured plot suggests a much more extended allegorical design than achieved by any of the surviving texts.14 The survival of the poem in four different versions gives rise to problems. If we insist on the uniqueness of each manuscript version, there is hardly any observation which would be adequate to all of them. This ultimately questions the idea that one poem may be identified as The Court of Sapience. On the other hand, if we create a patchwork version of the poem from all the early witnesses, none of our conclusions may be true of any of the surviving versions. Nevertheless, in spite of

12

For attempts at establishing the date of the Court’s composition, see: The Court of Sapience, ed. by Spindler, pp. 14–15; Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Court of Sapience and the Gude and Godlie Ballatis’, Neophilologus, 74 (1990), 608–11 (p. 609); James J. Murphy, ‘Caxton’s Two Choices: “Modern” and “Medieval” Rhetoric in Traversagni’s Nova Rhetorica and the Anonymous Court of Sapience’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 3 (1972), 241–55 (p. 250); and The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xxii–xxiv. 13 14

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xiv.

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xxv–xxvi; also Brunner, ‘Bisher unbekannte Schluszstrophen’, pp. 258–59.

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the obvious discrepancies between the textual and authorial traditions underlying the different versions, there are patterns common to all of them. Central to all early witnesses of the poem (with the exception of the Harley fragment, which is interrupted too early to predict anything about its design) is the elaboration of the interior of the castle, i.e. the three courts of Science, Intellect, and Sapience. Even if the logic of the architectural allegory predicts the continuation of the vision of the court of Sapience in a much broader tableau of the seven virtues, none of the versions opens up the allegory to a more extended description of moral virtues. However, all versions are preoccupied with initiating the reader into an understanding of the nature of Sapience. The core of the allegory, in terms of plot, presents a quest which follows a common pattern of dream visions: fatigued by fruitless worldly meditations, the persona falls asleep, and sees in a dream a tableau of all sciences, arranged in a landscape with a Gothic castle in the centre. The way to the castle and the dreamer’s experiences in the court of Sapience cause him to reflect upon epistemology, starting with the examination of the physical world and reaching to an understanding of theology. In the most fully surviving version of the poem, a significantly longer section belongs to the allegorical realm of Sapience, which is left behind by the dreamer’s ascent to the realm of faith only in the last few stanzas.15 A second common feature of all versions is that a central element of the allegorical design is constituted by the versification of lists describing the subject matter and the representatives of all sciences. The poet avowedly considers his work as a compilation of sources that present ‘good mater’ for an encyclopaedic work of this sort.16 Scholars have reached contradictory conclusions about the indebtedness of the Court to earlier authorities.17 James Murphy and Alasdair MacDonald describe the work as a mosaic, and confirm that it seems to have stood 15

In Harvey’s edition, based on Caxton’s print, 315 stanzas out of 330 (not counting the ten additional stanzas to be found only in Plimpton) elaborate on the core narrative: the circumstances of the dream, the dreamer’s journey to the castle, and his discovery of the interior of the court. Lady Faith’s dwelling and the conclusion of the poem are described in the remaining 15 stanzas. 16

Book I, stanza 129, ll. 898–900: ‘And graunt me grace, or I of makyng cees, / To thy plesaunce somme mater that is good / For to compyle, to help me from the flode / Of fruteles worldly medytacyon, / And fynd a wey to my salvacyon’. 17

C. F. Bühler, The Sources of the ‘Court of Sapience’, Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, Heft 23 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1932); Mary Immaculate, ‘The Four Daughters of God in the Gesta Romanorum and The Court of Sapience’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 57 (1942), 951–65 (pp. 961–62 and 964); and The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xxvi–xxxviii.

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in the line of a long and unbroken tradition of conceptualizing human sciences.18 But the poem rearranges old material to serve unusual purposes: the long lists of the subject-matters and of the authoritative figures of each science structure the dreamer’s advancement from futile meditations to illumination. The discourse of the theorization of knowledge fused with the literary convention of allegorical dream poetry establishes a new context for an experiment sensitive to concerns regarding unfettered vernacular composition. Though Murphy claims that ‘The Court of Sapience could just as well have been written a hundred years earlier’,19 its concerns inherently bind it to post-Arundelian dilemmas.

Theorizations of Knowledge in Pecock’s Folewer and The Court of Sapience The theorizations of knowledge in Pecock’s Folewer and in the Court are similar both in the presentation of an eclectic subject matter and in structure. Both texts use the discursive tradition of the classification of sciences, but not with the primary aim of expounding the nature of knowledge. A second point of similarity is that the classifications play the same role in the larger argument, as they claim that instruction in faith must be preceded by learning about the intellectual virtues, which engender the moral ones. In his Folewer, Pecock proceeds from an exposition of ‘kunnyngal’ (intellectual) virtues to a classification of sciences. He proposes two models. In the first, he distinguishes five intellectual virtues: ‘[A]ftir oon maner of holding, which is allowable y-nouõ, vndir þe nombir of v, as me seemeþ, mowe be comprehended conuenyentli alle kunnyngal vertues. […] vndir Intellect, Speculatijf science, prudence, craft, and opynyoun’.20 ‘Intellect’ is a set of truths, self-evident to reason, which do not require further demonstration. If a truth is indirectly proved by another truth more open to reason, it is called ‘kunnyng’. ‘Kunnyng’ is further divided into ‘science’ and ‘opinion’ according to the degree of certainty, while each of these two bifurcates into practical and speculative categories. Pecock’s first system thus differs considerably from early medieval classifications of sciences that had established an authoritative tradition for later thought. He creates an open system which does not seek to label all the academically received 18

MacDonald, ‘The Court of Sapience’, p. 608, and Murphy, ‘Caxton’s Two Choices’, p. 248.

19

Murphy, ‘Caxton’s Two Choices’, p. 250.

20

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 48.

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fields of science. The classification derives from a distinction between knowledge evident to reason (axiomatic truths) and knowledge not self-evident, and therefore to be proved by reason. The non-axiomatic, therefore demonstrable, pieces of truth (‘kunnyng’) raise an epistemological problem: ‘How certain can we be with regard to a piece of knowledge? To what extent can we establish the certainty of a truth?’ Accordingly, the division of ‘kunnyng’ into science and opinion is determined by the criterion of certainty. Lastly, Pecock affirms that the scrutiny of knowable things, both certain and uncertain, can follow a theoretical or a practical path. This question of method therefore leads to the third major division in the classification: that of the ‘kunnyng’ branches into speculative and practical categories. Pecock’s system of intellectual virtues allows a great deal of flexibility in transferring items between categories. His classification is necessarily ‘dynamic’, as an ‘opinion’ can always become ‘science’, and a ‘kunnyng’ can emerge in time as a part of ‘intellect’. At the same time, the system is anxious to fulfil the scholastic criterion of the symmetry of divisions, as it advances from the higher categories to lower divisions through binary oppositions. In the end, Pecock is drawn into an automatic generation of categories, difficult to sustain, let alone to define precisely. Whether there is any sense in distinguishing ‘prudential’ and ‘craftial’ knowledge from ‘prudential’ and ‘craftial’ opinion must have preoccupied him as well, since he detaches the treatment of opinion from all other manifestations of knowledge (speculative science, prudence and craft) in the rest of his exposition.21 Pecock also elaborates on a second theoretical model, which draws on the tripartite classifications of philosophy into ‘physica’, ‘ethica / theologica’, and ‘logica’.22 In this system, ‘knowing and opinion’ are divided into three categories. The first comprises crafts whose truths and opinions are drawn from physical creation (‘þings makable’). The second category involves all truths and opinions which derive from the Aristotelian triad of practical sciences, i.e. ethics, economics, and politics (‘þings doable’). Finally, the third category is labelled speculative science, 21

Although, in Pecock’s treatment, the categories of ‘prudence’ and ‘craft’ are varieties of both knowledge and opinion, Pecock does not develop the second implication. He associates prudence and craft primarily with manifestations of science. This is confirmed by the fact that he creates a separate category for opinion in the list of ‘kunnyngal vertues’. See Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 48–49. 22

The classical tripartite division of speculative philosophy can be traced back to Boethius’s De Trinitate, which fuses Aristotelian and Platonic elements of the discourse of theorizing knowledge. Weisheipl identifies this line of discourse as the Stoic tradition, and considers Isidore of Seville, Alcuin of York, Rabanus Maurus, Scotus Eriugena, and Hugh of St Victor its major continuators; Weisheipl, ‘Classification of the Sciences’, pp. 60 and 63–66.

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and contains truths proved by the intellect. These three major categories of knowledge are subdivided into several fields of theoretical or practical activities. Crafts involve the professions, such as carpentry, tailoring, or masonry. Prudence is an elaboration of the Aristotelian triad of the practical sciences; it branches into five subdivisions: (1) the study of the laws of God (further divided into God’s law and positive law); (2) the study of the laws of clergy (canon law); (3) the study of the laws of princes (civil law); (4) merchandizing; and (5) economy / husbandry. Speculative science involves metaphysics, natural philosophy, medicine, and the quadrivium.23 This second classification is eclectic. We can detect a probable influence of Hugh of St Victor’s model as set out in his Didascalicon — with two major deviations from it. Hugh divides philosophy into four branches: theoretical, practical, mechanical, and logical.24 All of these, except for logic, can be equated to Pecock’s divisions. Pecock, however, entirely omits the trivium from his system. Furthermore, he transfers theology from its privileged status (the highest theoretical science) to prudence, which is labelled ‘practical sciences’ by Hugh.25 Both of these alterations reflect Pecock’s endeavour to reshape the academic canon, and to claim an authoritative role for himself in the field of the classification of sciences. Pecock’s modifications of the classification of sciences discourse may be profitably compared with The Court of Sapience. The Court incorporates the academic tradition of the classification of sciences into a non-academic genre. The poem elaborates on different concepts of the division of sciences in a way similar to Pecock’s, without prioritizing any of the models. The first vision of a systematic classification appears in stanzas 220–21 of Book II, with an ancient topos: Dame Theology is escorted by seven ladies, the allegorical figures of the liberal arts. All of them salute Dame Sapience, the queen of the court of all knowledge. This initial vision of a hierarchy of sciences is then enlarged to admit Dame Philosophy, who introduces new concepts of knowledge. Philosophy appears as a substitute for Sapience, since she comprises all knowledge (earthly and heavenly) — both certain and uncertain: Philosophye is, who lust to dyffyne, Knowlege of erthely and eke hevenly thyng,

23

See the full exposition of the classification in Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 49.

24

Hugh of St Victor, Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon de studio legendi: A Critical Text, ed. by Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington, DC : Catholic University Press of America, 1939), I. viii. 747B–C and I. xi. 749A–750D. 25

Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, ed. by Buttimer, I. viii. 747C. Cf. also Weisheipl, ‘Classification of the Sciences’, pp. 65–66.

294

Tamás Karáth Y-ioyned with the sad study and fyne Of governaunce honest, and good lyvyng; It is also the probable connyng Of worldly thyng and goodely thyng, ywys, As in as moche to man possyble is. (II, 223, 1555–61)

This model is an alternative scheme of the division of sciences. As in Pecock, this model establishes the basic division of knowledge according to the criterion of the degree of certainty. This concept also derives (certain) knowledge from (uncertain) suppositions. After the division of philosophy into ‘science’ and ‘opinion’, the Court-poet provides two further definitions and classifications of philosophy. In the first (II, 227, 1583–89), philosophy undergoes a tripartite division into ‘phisyca’ (natural philosophy), ‘ethyca’ (moral philosophy), and ‘logyca’ (rational philosophy). It comes only as a late addition to the scheme that philosophy is subordinated to divinity, since the three main branches of knowledge are subservient to scriptural studies. In what follows, the poet presents a third model for the division of philosophy, where the two main branches are labelled ‘inspectyve’ and ‘actual’ (II, 233, 1625–31). In this scheme, ‘dyvynal’ philosophy, which discerns invisible things, is integrated into the model as a subdivision of the speculative sciences. As opposed to Pecock’s classifications, the Court-poet’s different models of the theorization of knowledge are not compatible with each other, since each new tableau of sciences requires the reader to revise the poem’s earlier definitions. The plot advances by discarding one theoretical model of the classification of philosophy for the sake of another. The relationship of the last and most elaborate model to the earlier ones remains questionable. Finally, the Court-poet constructs his divisions from bottom to top, which is why the three main branches of science come to be classified under theology only as the last step in the classification. Pecock, in contrast, devises two complementary and reconcilable models, in which respect for tradition is subordinated to the author’s argumentative purposes. He thereby justifies not only his deliberate intervention in the inherited schemes of the classification of sciences, but also his pedagogic endeavours in the vernacular.

The Language Question Concerns relating to language underlie both authors’ endeavour. They are explicitly present in the allegorical poem. Less obvious in Pecock, the preoccupation with vernacular composition is voiced only vaguely in the first two chapters of the Folewer. At the end of Chapter 1, Pecock is concerned with the correct under-

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standing of the technical terms he uses to express valid logical inferences.26 In Chapter 2, he cautions that writing in the vernacular does not guarantee the understanding of difficult matter.27 The other side of the same argument appears in the preface to the Donet, where Pecock justifies the need for a three-tier scheme of instruction. Besides writing in Latin, he also intends to compose English works for two distinct audiences: one that overcomes difficulties of language and subject matter, and another one that cannot cope with more demanding subjects and the language appropriate to them.28 Consequently, the Donet and its sequel are different from each other in the brevity and simplicity of their explanations and in their style. Pecock’s overall attitude to vernacular textual creation has already received much attention from scholars discussing the charges of heresy brought against the bishop in the light of his decision to write in English.29 Much attention has also been devoted to the study of Pecock’s authorial self-empowerment through the vernacular and through creating his own modes of vernacular argumentation.30 A passage from the Folewer suggests another, less frequently studied, aspect of Pecock’s engagement with language. Chapter 6 of the first part concludes with the author’s personal admission of his inner need to write in the vernacular. In a confessional tone, he claims that if he did not write down his ideas, occurring to him on the spur of the moment, he would not be able to do it later. He associates inspiration with his own vernacular creativity, and suggests that English empowers him with creative energies and inspiration that would not be on hand when composing in Latin: [I]f y schulde abstene me here now fro writing herof in lay tunge, y schuld neuer write it, neiþir in lay tunge neiþir in latyn tunge […]; And if y schulde seie in my conscience before god: ‘þis now towchid is oon cause whi y delyuerid bi writyng in lay tunge many maters and treuþis as þei camen to mynde ouer what y entendid before forto delyuere in lay tunge, lest if y schulde haue ouer passed hem forto not haue written hem in þilk while, þei schulden

26

‘Also y proteste þat y take and schal take ech argument or mocioun maad, or to be maad, bi me in eny of my writyngis, englisch or latyn, as for argument or mocioun oonli, and not as for a proof vttirli’ (Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 6). 27

‘summe of þo bookis whiche ben to be maad in lay tunge, and to be delyuerid to lay men, be so hard þat þei be not liõtli and esili vndirstonde of þe wittiest lay men whiche schulen rede and studie and leerne þerinne; fforwhi þerbi summe and many lay men mowe be tamyd and repressed and chastised fro pride and fro presumpcioun’ (Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 6–8). 28

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 2.

29

For a review of scholarship on the issue, see Hudson, PR, pp. 189–91 and 440–43.

30

Bose, ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’; Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’; and Theresa Kemp, ‘The Lingua materna and the Conflict Over Religious Discourse’, Philological Quarterly, 78 (1999), 233–57.

296

Tamás Karáth neuyr haue be write of me; And leefir y hadde forto write suche maters and treuþis in lay tunge, vndir hope þat afterward þei schulen come into latyn tunge, þan forto putte hem into perel forto neuer be of me written’.31

Admittedly, Pecock hopes that his vernacular texts will be translated into Latin one day, but the order of composition cannot be reversed: were it not for his vernacular works, he would not be able to provide materials for translation. Thus, for Pecock, writing in English is not only a practical decision which serves his pedagogic aims and the needs of his audiences, but also a fundamental aspect of his creativity, without which these works could not have been written. The exposition of the four tables as well as of the intellectual virtues are the fruits of inspiration as well as of an analytical mind. Pecock’s attempt to exculpate himself from his seeming disrespect of Latin also explains his silence on the place of the trivium in his classification of sciences. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic are omitted from Pecock’s categories. They are, however, implicitly present in his theorization of knowledge. As we see in Chapter 6 of the Folewer, the discourse of the classification of sciences can only be presented in the vernacular, and Pecock’s vernacularity is bound to an experiment with several aspects of the trivium: for example, with the perceived rules of language, the careful choice of vocabulary and images, and the logical exposition of arguments. The fundamental concept of Pecock’s pedagogy is aligned with a pupil’s introduction to the basic arts. The title — Donet — suggests its equivalence, in the field of moral education, to an elementary school introduction to grammar. The second art of the trivium, rhetoric, is constantly invoked by the imitation of diverse rhetorical conventions. Third, grammar and rhetoric are subordinated to the demonstration of Pecock’s syllogistic methods as, ultimately, he writes to prove the universal validity of the doom of reason. The Court-poet’s use of the vernacular is also an inherent part of his textual creativity. The dream-framework enables the poet to conceive a language that can describe the realm of uncensored thoughts. By versifying different classifications of sciences, the poet also demonstrates the possibility of transposing an academic treatise not only into a non-academic medium, but also into the vernacular. But by disavowing the adequacy of English, the poet reveals a contradictory attitude to his own vernacular creation. He attributes only a secondary role to English. Two passages of the core narrative, one in the prohemium and another one concluding the description of stones in Book II, attest to the limited capacities of the vernacular. The prohemium survives only in Caxton’s print (and the versions 31

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 29–30.

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dependent on it), but Harvey argues that it was part of the original composition.32 The humility topos in stanzas 5 and 6 contains specific references to the poet’s awareness of the low prestige of his native English. The rhetoric of this passage is based on the conventional dichotomy of vulgar language and refined composition. But this polarization is developed into a contrast between rude composition in the vernacular, which the poet must use ‘of force’, and the ‘gay’ and ‘eloquent’ terms of aristocratic discourse, from which he distances himself.33 The stanza at the end of the description of stones (II, 158) is present in all early witnesses, except for the Harley fragment, which is interrupted before the end of Book I. In this passage the poet articulates the limitations of his ‘natyf langage’ that prevent him from naming the stones of the visionary landscape. This time, the use of the vernacular is problematic not because of its low status or its incompatibility with high eloquence, but because of its lack of terms to discuss the branches of natural sciences. In this cul-de-sac of composition, the poet enumerates the stones based on their Latin names. Although he indicates that it would not be impossible to invent (or find) the English equivalents of these words, he asks the reader not to blame him for his inappropriate vocabulary, as he disclaims invention for the sake of a ‘larger community’, the suggestion being that the Latin names of stones had become so common for English-speakers that the introduction of new terms would only disrupt the commonality of this language community. At the same time, the argument seems to evoke the paradox of Trevisa’s cantankerous clericus, who doubts if a greater number of people would understand the English translations of the Latin chronicles.34 But while Trevisa’s clericus ignores the capacities of an English

32

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xii.

33

‘I knowe my self moost naked in al artes, / My comune vulgar eke moost interupte, / And I conversaunte and borne in the partes / Where my natyf langage is moost corrupt, / And with most sondry tonges myxt and rupte, […] For to al makers here I me excuse / That I ne can delycately endyte; / Rude is the speche, of force which I must use: / Suche infortune my natyf byrth may wyte. / But, O ye lordes whiche have your delyte / In termes gay, and ben moost eloquent, / This book to yow no plesaunce may present’ (I. 5. 29–33 and I. 6. 36–42). 34

‘Þeus bokes of cronyks buþ ywryte yn Latyn, and Latyn ys yused and understonde a þys half Grees yn al þe nacions and londes of Europa; and comynlych Englysch ys noõt so wyde understonde, yused and yknowe, and þe Englysch translacion scholde no man understonde bote Englyschmen alone. Þanne how scholde þe mo men understonde þe cronyks þey a were translated out of Latyn, þat ys so wyde yused and yknowe, into Englysch, þat ys noõt yused and yknowe bote of Englyschmen alone?’ John Trevisa, ‘Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk’, in The Book of Middle English, ed. by John Anthony Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 215–22 (p. 217).

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readership not trained in Latin, the Court-poet leaves the path of linguistic invention open exactly to this layer of his audience.35 The tension between vernacularity and its intrinsic limits is resolved with a return to Latin following two different authorial strategies as attested by the manuscripts and early prints. The change of expression is necessitated not so much by the inadequate vocabulary of English in certain fields, but rather by the acknowledged constraints on the poet’s creative power and freedom. The dreamer confesses that poetic and linguistic invention could counter the shortcomings of his diction and language; nevertheless, he avoids this strategy with a reference to the safety of Latin. The idea of safety is raised in stanza 158, where the poet associates it with the idea of a more secure understanding of the text. The argument is that Latin is based on the common linguistic practices of a larger community, as opposed to the alternative strategies of linguistic innovation whose solutions risk being idiosyncratic. The implications of this argument manifest themselves differently in the two groups of the early witnesses, representing two different textual traditions of the poem. Plimpton and Caxton conclude the dream vision and anticipate the tract on faith with a stanza which invokes certain external (and orthodox) constraints on vernacular composition that are not directly bound to questions of the adequacy of the vernacular. In these versions, the author abruptly ends his literary experiment with vernacular allegory under the pressure of the prohibition of extramural and vernacular discussion of theological matters: These articles, with other poyntes al, That longeth to the holy Trynyte, Dame Feyth herself gan telle in specyal, With al the secretes of the deyte Whiche in Englysshe ought not reherced be; Suche thyng as shold be private and occult I rede we leve, and take Quicumque vult. (II, 321, 2241–47)

At this point, the dreamer leaves his transitory refuge in Sapience’s court, and turns from the discussion of the sciences into a tract on faith. Simultaneously, he abandons the interior of the castle, and proceeds to visit the first tower. The image of the tower, appearing at structurally significant points of the work, marks a

35

‘And yf the seme that here be stones straunge / And thou in Englysshe can them better name, / Doo as the lyst theyr names for to chaunge, / So my langage and my book thou not blame, / For I suppose ther be fewe wordes lame, / For by the Latyn for the more suerte / I name theym al, and for more comunte’ (II. 158. 1100–06).

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change in the allegorical context. At this point, it initiates the reader into the sphere of faith. The residence of Dame Faith is a solemn and glorious tower. The elevation to new heights emphasizes the dynamic progress of the poem from the world towards heaven. However, the ascent to the region of faith means the end of the poetic endeavour to assign a meaningful purpose to the literary rehearsal of the classification of sciences. The poet admits to having reached the limits of expression, which the self-imposed boundaries of his own authority do not permit to transgress. He invokes the prohibition on discussing theological issues in the vernacular. The Latin conclusion of the macaronic stanza cited above underlines the gesture of reinstating Latin when the authority of English has proved to be inadequate. The Harley and Trinity texts do not reach this stage of the allegorical journey. However, in these two versions, Latin remains such an integral part of the authorial endeavour that the manuscript context never really allows the absolute priority of the vernacular over Latin. The Latin notes and the interlinear glosses, both Latin and English, which are extant only in these versions of the Court, constitute a new layer of the text of the poem that is missing from the two other main witnesses. Harvey suggests that, while the interlinear glosses of Trinity and Harley, ‘written over or beside certain words in the poem’, might be ‘the work of a studious reader of the poem rather than the author’, there is no reason to doubt that the notes are authorial.36 As a consequence of the extended Latin notes in Harley and Trinity, the two languages are interwoven in a very intricate way. The occasionally Latin (mostly English) summary notes — speech prefixes, implicits, and explicits — structure the plot and the dialogues. They also figure in Plimpton and Caxton. The second layer of notes in Harley and Trinity is represented by Latin and English interlinear glosses which elucidate, but occasionally also obscure, certain meanings in the poem. According to Harvey, they might witness an early reader’s work in the original copy-text of these two manuscripts.37 Finally, interspersed in the poem, especially in Book I, long Latin glosses interrupt the English stanzas and set out definitions and authorities. ‘[Trinity] includes the same Latin notes as in Harley, often writing them right across the page above the stanza they refer to’.38 The notes copy out longer passages from the sources on which the verses draw, and provide

36

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xvi and xv.

37

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xvi.

38

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xi.

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a larger and more explicit context for the issues engaged with in the poem. The Latin notes offer the reader alternative ways of understanding, as they also propose materials, not present in the stanzas, to be considered by the reader. The Latin glosses partly echo and nuance the contents of the English stanzas, but more often they add new textual elements, which creates a subtle contrast between the vernacular and the Latin layers of the composition. The notes indirectly reflect on the poem’s vernacular experiment and the dilemmas relating to poetic authority, embodied by the insertion of old authorities into the poet’s invention. The Latin note following Book I, stanzas 20–21 bears witness to the poet’s endeavour to connect the vernacular text to a Latin discourse of the theorization of knowledge: Differunt tamen sapiencia, intellectus et prudencia, quia sapiencia valet ad solius eterne veritatis contemplacionem et delectacionem, intellectus vel intelligencia ad creature vel creaturarum invisibilium speculacionem, sciencia ad rectam administracionem rerum temporalium et ad bonam inter malos conversacionem. Et qualiter intellectus, sciencia, et sapiencia, que sunt dona Spiritus Sancti, differunt ab intellectu, sciencia, et sapiencia que sunt naturaliter in anima, vide per doctores et per Januensem, in suo Catholicon in verbo sapiencia. (But wisdom, intellect, and prudence differ in that wisdom serves the contemplation of, and delight in, Eternal Truth alone; intellect or intelligence serves the contemplation of creation and invisible created beings; and science [or ‘prudence’] serves the right administering of temporal things and the proper mode of living amongst the evil. And for the way in which the intellect, science, and wisdom which are the gifts of the Holy Spirit differ from the intellect, science, and wisdom which are in the soul by nature, see in the doctors and in Balbus, Catholicon sv sapientia.)39

The long invocation of a passage from Balbus’s Catholicon disclaims the selfcontained nature of the English stanzas, and suggests to the reader that a full understanding of the poem must extend to material outside its English stanzas. Like the other Latin notes of the Trinity and Harley manuscripts, this note too outlines further possibilities of textual interpretation and invites the implied (scholarly) reader to continue a dialogue outside the poem. The parallel English passage of stanzas 22–23 experiments with the rhetorical possibilities of the same scientific discourse rendered as a monologue of Dame Sapience. This speech, however, does not treat the same questions as the Latin gloss: Unto all vertues we ben ladyes thre, Bothe in offyce and degree dyfferent. It is my parte to knowe dyvynyte;

39

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. 85–86.

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My suster here hath knowlege dylygent Of creatures in heven and erthe content; And Dame Scyence of thynges temporal Hath knoulege pure; thus mayst thou know us al. Of us al thre I am the moost soverayne; And yf the lyst me descryve and dyffyne I am the trewe propre knowlege certayne Of erthely thyng, and eke of thyng dyvyne. (I, 22–23, 148–58)40

The Court-poet’s withdrawal from vernacular creation contrasts him with Pecock, who, until his public recantation in 1457, never gave up his basic conviction of the benefits of writing about serious matters in English to a lay audience. Pecock affirms the necessity of writing in English for the sake of his own audience as well as of his own creative needs. The Court-poet also acknowledges the value of English in poetic inspiration, but he is not as determined to insist on the vernacular when he encounters prohibitions or limits. Both authors voice the perceived or implied dangers of discussing their subject matters, especially when related to divinity or moral instruction, in the vernacular. But, even if the reflections on the questionable status of the vernacular only indirectly invoke the long-term effects of Arundel’s language policies, they suggest that a collective awareness of the possible dangers of vernacular composition lingered on into the middle of the fifteenth century and beyond. This awareness affected more than the authors’ attitudes to language; it also coerced them into reconsidering their own authority vis-à-vis various (licit and illicit) discursive traditions. In the process of situating themselves in relation to the discourse of the classification of sciences, both Pecock and the Court-poet not only shape their subject matter in markedly individual ways, but also reflect on their own discursive authority.

Authority Pecock and the Court-poet align themselves with the tradition of the classification of sciences in new literary contexts, and thereby ascribe new purposes and new meanings to the old discourse. As they rearrange their textual material, their works

40

There are two accompanying Latin marginal glosses in the Harley and Trinity manuscripts that summarize the concerns of these two stanzas: ‘Nota differenciam inter sapienciam, intellectum, et scienciam’ (Note the difference between wisdom, intellect, and science) beside line 147, preceding stanza 22, and ‘Nota quid est sapiencia’ (Note what wisdom is) beside lines 157–58 of stanza 23.

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ultimately raise questions about the limits of authority and of uncensored creativity. But while the Court-poet is less ambitious in justifying his own authorial position, Pecock uses the classifications as part of an argument to consolidate his own authority. For the Court-poet, the allegorical frame, in which he embeds his vision of sciences, is the structural foundation of his poem. For Pecock, the classification of sciences is an important pillar of his pedagogic methodology, by means of which he sets up premises for his ambitious theoretical attempt to encompass all intellectual activity and to define the work of the ‘doom of reason’. In the logic of the Folewer, therefore, the role of the classification of sciences discourse is not only to establish the premises for the ensuing arguments, but also to consolidate Pecock’s authority. This he does in two ways. First, he relies on a discursive tradition which is subordinated to his own self-authorization in much the same way as his imitation of Christine de Pizan is in the second prologue to the Reule of Crysten Religioun. As Mishtooni Bose has shown, Pecock consolidates his authority through imitating Christine de Pizan’s ‘transformation of the conventional metaphors for textual creation’.41 Bose points out that this rhetorical imitation becomes controversial due to the contradiction between the inherently authoritative status of the narrator as a ‘rising clerk’ and his reliance on a topos ‘of obvious value for the empowering of a female writer, but less obviously necessary for a clerk supposedly secure in the authority of his gender, his profession, and his avowed orthodoxy’.42 Bose’s illuminating discussion of the relationship between Pecock’s rhetorical imitation of de Pizan and the empowerment of the vernacular for his own purposes enables us to see a similar strategy in the Folewer: In the entre to Pecock’s Reule, therefore, it is possible to detect a reciprocal process: the troping of the quest for authority by a clerk about to embark on a similarly unprecedented project: the discussion of theology (as opposed to mystical experience) in the vernacular. This was an undertaking for which Pecock had few precedents among the orthodox, and rather more among heretical or otherwise controversial writers. […] Although it would be unwise to attribute a single purpose to this complex entre, it may also have provided a means for Pecock to articulate an acknowledgement of the fact that by using the vernacular to extend clerical authority into controversial literary territory, he was also courting certain kinds of vulnerability.43

Pecock’s second way of consolidating his own authority is apparent in both the entre to the Reule and in the classification of sciences in the Folewer: he relies on

41

Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock’, p. 175.

42

Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock’, p. 175.

43

Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock’, p. 175.

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and transforms discursive conventions. In Pecock’s system, the process of sciences — to use the allegorical phrase of the Court — serves a purpose very different from that in the poem. Instead of disavowing the authority of the English language and of the English poet to reflect on sciences and faith, Pecock empowers himself and his own vernacular to engage in an alternative academic discourse whose ultimate aim is to create a new framework for the transmission of religious instruction, uncensored by academic or ecclesiastical authority. Moreover, Pecock carefully designs his classification of sciences and his overall discourse of the theorization of knowledge in a way that it internally establishes his authority. Only the power of syllogisms and formal logical operations can grant authority, and enable Pecock to attribute truth to his arguments. At the end of Chapter 1 of the Folewer, Pecock insists that first person statements, like ‘y proue’, ‘y schal proue’, ‘y schewe’, or ‘y schal shewe’, are not to be understood as authoritative declarations, but as handy synonyms for truths generated by syllogistic methods, i.e. conclusions proved from their premises.44

Conclusion Reginald Pecock’s Folewer to the Donet and the fifteenth-century Court of Sapience are two revealing instances of the continuation of a discursive tradition which reaches back long ‘before Arundel’. The discourse of the classification of sciences was subject to significant transformations in the fifteenth century, even though this discourse was only indirectly related to religious writing. Pecock and the Court-poet, as continuators of a pre-Arundelian textual convention, also recontextualized the traditional implications of the discourse. Their contribution to medieval theorizations of knowledge lies not so much in revising the content or the structure of the classification of sciences or in establishing radically different categories, but in applying the discursive tradition to comment on the nature of vernacular creation, on the authors’ perceptions of the limits of their own authority, and, indirectly, on the interrelationship between the cultural politics of the age and its literary output.

44

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 6.

Part VI Literary Self-Consciousness and Literary History

‘T HIS HOLY TYME’: P RESENT S ENSE IN THE D IGBY L YRICS Helen Barr

T

he twenty-four short lyric poems in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102 are written in a timeless poetic temper. There are very few proper nouns, no dates, and no unambiguous references to events.1 And yet, as I shall argue, it is precisely this sparseness of specific temporality that defines their literary historical moment. The manuscript itself dates from the first two decades of the fifteenth century, and the dialect of the poems points to an early fifteenth century London provenance.2 Extrinsic evidence suggests a Benedictine author. There are extensive parallels between the Digby Lyrics and the macaronic sermons preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649.3 The author of these sermons was clearly a Benedictine monk. As their editor, Patrick Horner, argues, ‘while the name of this preacher remains uncertain, allusions within the sermons make clear his Benedictine affiliation and his university training at Oxford. References to historical events also suggest that most of the sermons were composed around the time of Henry V’s reign, many of them after the Lollard

1

There are twenty-five proper nouns; all are biblical with the exception of ‘Edward’ (Poem 13/113); ‘Engeland’ (13/27); ‘Englische’ (12/121), and ‘Flandres’ (12/85, 16/1/47/57/79). All references are to The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr. All further citations of the poems are from this edition. 2

See The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 1–2 for a description of the manuscript. Throughout the sequence, the poet uses a variety of dialect forms, and there is clear marking of south-west Midland features. This dialect diversity is characteristic of English used in London in the early fifteenth century. The linguistic provenance is discussed in more detail on pp. 67–73. 3

A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England, ed. by Horner.

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uprising of 1414 led by Sir John Oldcastle’.4 The sermon collection as a whole shows an orthodox preacher passionate to explain and defend Church doctrine on the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and penance. The preacher is also at pains to emphasize the divinely ordained role of the clergy in theological investigation and liturgical activities, and he devotes considerable attention to practical pastoral theology in his discussions of how confessors should treat penitents. Sinful priests are urged to reform, and there are vivid exhortations, including brief devotional lyrics, to show compassion with Christ’s suffering on the cross. Furthermore, the sermons call for a harmoniously functioning political body. There is sustained criticism of flattery, robbing the poor, oppressing the commons, and internal dissent. And there is overt support for the ‘heavenly soldier’ Henry V both against France, and against the Lollards. Every note that is sounded in the sermons (apart from overt denunciation of Lollardy), is sounded in the Digby Lyrics. There is also extensive, and distinctive, common use of figurative expression and proverbs.5 Some of the Bodley sermons are also found in another Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 706. An ‘ex libris’ on fol. 181v states that the manuscript belonged to John Paunteley, monk of St Peter’s in Gloucester, ‘sacre pagine professor’ at Oxford in 1410 and author of the funeral sermon in 1412 of Abbot Walter Froucester at St Peter’s.6 While the attribution of the macaronic Bodley sermons to Paunteley is suggestive rather than proven, all the evidence points to a Benedictine author who was familiar with national events, London based, but with roots in the south-west Midlands. Such a profile matches exactly the dialect patterning of the Digby Lyrics, and a Benedictine provenance is made more persuasive, not only because of the far-reaching overlap in the shared subjects of the sermons and lyrics, but also because there is one poem in the sequence, Poem 18, which concentrates on the proper conduct of monastic life. While Henry V is never named in the Digby Lyrics, the unequivocal support for a recently crowned king who is a vigorous defender of Holy Church; a military leader against France rather than a treaty broker, and the head of a flourishing body politic invested with hope, must surely point to a writing context of the early years of Henry’s reign. No other monarch matches the timescale, or the profile.7 If my arguments for date and provenance are correct, then the Digby Lyrics can be added 4

Patrick J. Horner, ‘“The King Taught us the Lesson”: Benedictine Support for Henry V’s Suppression of the Lollards’, Mediaeval Studies, 52 (1990), 190–220 (p. 191). 5

The parallels are listed in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 76–78.

6

See A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England, ed. by Horner, p. 5.

7

The date of the lyrics is discussed in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 6–18.

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to those works of Benedictine origin which formed part of an axis of literary allegiance to Henry V. Even before he became king, Henry had turned to Benedictine writers such as Lydgate for support, both religious and political. Lydgate tells in the Prologue to his Troy Book that Henry, ‘the worthy prynce of Walys’ ‘me comaunded the drery pitus fate/Of hem of Troye in englysche to translate’ (102–06).8 The envoy to the book, written with Henry now king, places Henry amongst the Nine Worthies and compares him with scriptural and classical heroes and rulers.9 Benedictine support for Henry’s kingship took a variety of forms: in occasional poems, Lydgate praised Henry V as ‘Goddis knyght’ and ‘Goddes chaumpyon’.10 Lydgate appears to have written translations of the ‘Eight Verses of St Bernard’ for the king’s use at Mass, and of ‘Benedic anima mea domino’ in the chapel at Windsor at the request of the dean while the king was at evensong.11 Thomas Elmham, a monk of St Augustine’s Canterbury, thought to be responsible for the Gesta Henrici Quinti, written in 1418, likens the new king Henry to the newly born Christ-child, not only anointed at his coronation, but an epiphanic defender of the church and the saviour of the kingdom.12 All of these Benedictine works show unequivocal support for Henry both as secular monarch and champion of the church against the seditious threat of the Lollards.13 Henry V is ‘Goddis champioun’ — defender of Holy Church.14 The political and religious positioning of the Digby Lyrics is no less staunchly Henrician, but with a crucial difference; namely, of literary texture. There are no mighty classical framings and parallels; the poems are insistently vernacular both in language and allusiveness. The grandiose literariness, characteristic of these other Benedictine works, is markedly absent from Digby. Not because the poet lacks 8

Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Bergen.

9

Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Bergen, p. 877, lines 36–49.

10

‘A Defence of Holy Church’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by MacCracken, pp. 30–35 (item no. 10, lines 26 and 69) 11

Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, ELS Monograph Series, 71 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1997), p. 17. The information derives from a comment made by the bibliographer John Shirley. 12

Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. by Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1–4. 13 14

See Horner, ‘“The King Taught us the Lesson”’.

These explicit statements of Henry’s duty and resolve in combating named enemies of Holy Church are also found in Thomas Hoccleve’s verse ‘O verray sustenour/And piler of our feith, and werreyour/Ageyn the heresies bittir galle’: Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, rev. edn by Mitchell and Doyle, V. 12–14; cf. Poem 4.

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literary invention and finesse, but because the poetic temper of the series does different literary and political work. The linguistic choices made by the Digby-poet project a vision of a kingdom which reproduces key elements of the desires, hopes, and fears widely written about in the early years of Henry V. But these linguistic choices are not self-consciously ‘poetic’. The literary texture of the Digby Lyrics is not one of gorgeous poetic apparel or singularly dizzying locutions: the familiar made strange.15 Rather, ‘familiarity’ is the key to the historical significance of their literariness. To historicize the Digby Lyrics through the long-standing critical practice of seeking out parallels and echoes in materials written alongside the work under scrutiny, that is, researching a text and its contexts,16 overlooks vital evidence. Analysis of the linguistic texture of early texts can also do important criticalhistorical work.17 The language of the Digby Lyrics is its context even if we need to access other late medieval materials to help infer the meaning of poetic lexis and grammar.18 The accumulation of lexical and grammatical elements of the lyrics which make up their ‘text-world’ encode historical and social context.19 The Digbypoet fashions a normative poetics based on what is ‘ordinary’ and well known through pertinent choices of ‘form’ words: aspects of lexis, grammar, and syntax.20 The key poetic elements here are not classical parallels or ornate figurativeness, but the ‘nuts and bolts’ of familiar expression: verb tense; the illocutionary force of sentences; deixis, and the interpersonality of address. 15

The concept of ‘ostranenie’ — ‘making strange’ underpins the essay by Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, first published 1917, reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. by David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 15–32. 16

This approach to the Digby Lyrics is best exemplified by R . H. Robbins, ‘On Dating a Middle English Moral Poem’, Modern Language Notes, 70 (1955), 473–76 (p. 474). Robbins edited three of the poems (nos 3, 12, and 16) in his Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. by R. H. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 39–53. In his introduction, he notes how the turn to documentary record can ‘help towards precise dating even of general moralising pieces’ (p. xxiv). 17

A seminal article in this argument is David Lawton’s analysis of the poetic texture, especially voice, of early fifteenth-century poetry, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, pp. 761–99. 18

My approach here is influenced by Keith Green, ‘Deixis and the Poetic Persona’, Language and Literature, 1 (1992), 121–34, esp. p. 124. 19

The term ‘text-world’ is taken from Paul Werth, ‘“World enough and time”: Deictic Space and the Interpretation of Prose’, in Twentieth-century Fiction: From Text to Context, ed. by P. Verdonk and J.-J. Weber (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 181–205 (p. 187). 20

The distinction between ‘full’ words such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and ‘form’ words —‘grammatical’ words — is discussed in Frank Palmer, Grammar, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 59–60.

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The text-world of the Digby Lyrics is predominantly created in present time.21 In some ways this is not perhaps surprising; the present tense is, after all, the dominant tense of the form: the lyric present.22 Even so, the overwhelming use of present time does have timely social edge. Here is a representative example from Poem 12: Eche a kyng haþ Goddis powere Of lyf and leme to saue and spille. He muste make God his partenere And do not his owen wille. For God resceyueþ eche pore mannys bille, And of here playnt God hereþ þe sowne, Sette õoure [domes] in euene skille: Counseile þe kyng to kepe þe crowne. (Poem 12/105–12)

This is a characteristic mixture of present indicatives and imperatives. The remarks are generic: seen by the prefactory ‘Eche a kyng’ (line 105). ‘Each’ (cf. line 109), is a keyword in these lyrics, suggestive not of the particular but of generality. The present tense of the opening two lines sets out a template for kingly duty which is followed by timeless imperatives addressed both to kings and to counsellors. As is characteristic of the verbal texture of these lyrics, injunctions are bolstered by biblical authority (lines 109–10 paraphrase Job 34. 28 ‘So that they caused the cry of the needy to come to him, and he heard the voice of the poor’) — again delivered in the present tense. Throughout the sequence, the poet works with a comparatively closed and limited lexicon which recycles key statements in the present tense. The last line of the stanza quoted forms a refrain for the whole poem: individual statements in the stanza can be paralleled elsewhere: Þe pore mannys erande God doþ spede. (Poem 4/175) Lawe õeueþ kyng lyf and leme, To hasty slauõt, and sodeyn fed. (Poem 13/17–18) Sette õoure domes in euene skille. (Poem 13/71)

21

I have counted manually the tense and mood of all the verbs in the sequence: over 50 per cent of the verbs in the lyrics are present indicative. Nearly 20 per cent are imperatives. Past and future tenses are present in much smaller proportions: less than 10 per cent for the future and nearly 12 per cent for the past. Subjunctive verbs, though used sparingly, have an important political and religious function, as I shall go on to argue. 22

As argued by George T. Wright, ‘The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 89 (1974), 563–79.

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The textual situation of this stanza is replicated throughout the sequence: there is a reiteration of present tense declarative statements; a present insistence on key terms and propositions: Eche man wot that hath wyt, These worldes goods beth not his; Alle is Godes: he oweth hit. (Poem 1/25–27) Man of his owen hath no thyng; Man is Goddis, and al God sent. God wole haue rekenyng Of ryht and wrong; how it is went. Man, not nys thyn; alle God lent. (Poem 1/33–37) Man of his own nouõten haue; Al is Goddis, and he it lent. (Poem 7/83–84) Þe puple, ne ryches, nys not õoures: Al is Goddis, and so be õe. (Poem 3/131–32) Eche dedly synne is a dedly knyf. (Poem 7/105) Eche dedly synne is a dedly knyf. (Poem 21/127) Man, synne not in ouerhope; Thou wynnest not Goddis mercie with fight. (Poem 1/129–30) Man synne not in ouerhope. Þu wynnest not Goddis mercie wiþ fiõt. (Poem 7/97–98) In ouerhope be not to bold, In synne for to haue mercy; Let not wanhope in þe be old. (Poem 20/201–03) For worldly wys is gostly nys. (Poem1/45) Þis worldly wysdom is gostly nys. (Poem 8/77) Folowe mesure in euene syse. (Poem 1/61) Set mesure in euene assise (Poem 3/13) Fle fro fooles and folwe wise. (Poem 1/167) Folowe fooles, and fle fro wyse. (Poem 6/28) Fle all folly and folwe þe wise. (Poem 22/72)

These are merely representative examples. Numerous individual lines within the poems are re-used, sometimes within the same poem, sometimes in much later poems in the sequence. Many of these repetitions are verbatim, or with small changes such as in the use of pronouns, grammatical form, or the ordering of the

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line. Overwhelmingly this reiteration takes the form of the present indicative or imperative. As such, it is unsurprising that one of the poet’s favourite kinds of utterance is proverbial or axiomatic:23 Defaute of wit makeþ long counsayle; For witteles wordes in ydel spoken. Þe more cost, þe lesse auayle. (Poem 3/89–91) The world is like a fals leman, Fayre semblaunt, and moche gyle. Wiþouten heire dyeþ no man. (Poem 3/121–23) Man, þynke þy lyf is but a wynde, When þat is blowen, þu art forõete. (Poem 9/29–30) All tymes nys not soþ to say. When al þe world is þurgh souõt, In his best tyme is worst to trest. Þis world is a fayre nouõt, A fals leman þat chaunge lest. (Poem 4/224–28) The herrere degre, þe more wys; Þe gretter worschip, þe noblere fame: Þe herrere degre, þe more nys; Þe gretter foly, þe more blame. After foly folweþ þe shame. (Poem 14/1–5) On a mowntayne a sete may not be hyd, Ne lordis werkis in no degre; A lordis werkis wiþ comouns is kyd: Þat he doþ most in preuete, Gouernour of kyngdom or cyte, After þey lyue, men deme so. For eche a werk God õeueþ a fe; Eche man be war er hym be wo. (Poem 14/17–24) Ouer cite or town hast gouernaunce, Loue al crafty folk yliche, Mayntene no party in distaunce, Sette mendis for trespas in euene balaunce, For a penyworth of harm tak not two, Rule wel mesure and sustenaunce. (Poem 14/34–39) To fliõe to hyõe treste not þy wyng. (Poem 14/47)

23

Analogues to these proverbial sayings are recorded in the annotation to my edition.

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The combination of present tense, declarative aphorism, and injunction creates a verbal texture of moral homeostasis. The poet’s lexical and grammatical choices build a present world that is also a timeless world of common sense and ethical behaviour, both political and spiritual. The text-world is one of portentous repeated action. The verse acquires a monumental character, articulating general conditions of life; the constitution of all things. There is a sense of permanence, of general validity. As George T. Wright observes, ‘the simple present is the present of truth’.24 This textual sense of permanent moral validity, general rather than singular, projects a poetic world onto present circumstances. The early years of Henry V’s reign offered the promise of stability: a political realm made whole after the divisions, factions, and unrest following the deposition of Richard II and the threats to the institutional church posed by the challenges of the Lollards. While the Digby-poet is not the only Benedictine writer to fashion a textual Henrician new dawn to herald the arrival of a king intent to heal the maimed and wayward limbs of the body politic, he is distinctive in marrying poetic style to political and spiritual matter with an ease that seems so common and unforced that it might be mistaken for what is natural. And this is, of course, the point. By writing so predominantly in the present tense, forging his poetic materials from the known, the tried and the tested, avoiding the singular and the distinctive, telling his audience what is already familiar, the poet delivers a version of the political world that has the appearance of having lasted for ever. There is no before and after: not Henry, not Arundel. The moral timelessness is habitual and proven, recognizable. And this recognition is vital; this ethical political body is not distant and strange; it is happening now, and the audience is all part of it. This is where the interpersonal address of the poems is so important. By giving the audience what they already know and by addressing them directly with the second pronoun through use of the imperative voice, the poet incorporates his audience into the ethical realm which his verse creates. The poet and the audience, levelled into present moral time, become political subjects of an ethical, spiritually guided, kingdom. There is no division; no individuality, rather a corporate voice acting now. The solidity, permanence, and stability of the present tense models exactly the political and spiritual values which the poet wishes on the early years of Henry V’s reign; not just for the king, but for each man; hence the repetition of ‘each’ throughout the sequence. The linguistic choices of the Digby-poet create a political and spiritual body made whole, with each and every member subsuming

24

Wright, ‘The Lyric Present’, p. 567.

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their individual part, their voice (and this includes the poet, of course), into timeless political stability. That may seem a large claim given that the present tense is the dominant tense of lyric poetry. And there is, after all, a very strong tradition of lyric wisdom poetry. Why should there be a particular, timely political edge to these lyrics?25 The answer is in the word ‘these’; a word which conveys ‘proximal deixis’. That is, it locates the speaker and reader in a spatio-temporal context that is here and now. It puts them at the centre of the text-world that is created between them. Deictic terms such as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘this’ and ‘now’, place the speaker alongside, and in company with, those to whom the narrator speaks.26 Proximal deixis is a dominant strand of the poetic texture of the Digby Lyrics. This holy tyme make õow clene; Burnysche bryõt õoure soules blake! Fro õow to God, let þe prest be mene. (Poem 9/1–3) Glade in God þis solempne fest, Now Alleluya is vnloken! Þenkeþ how God, lest and mest, On oure enemys haþ vs wroken. (Poem 11/1–4) A day is mad of solempnyte: Of þis table first ordynaunce is worschipful tolde; In þis newe kynges table now knowe we Newe estren endeþ þe olde. (Poem 23/25–28) Glade in God, call hom õoure herte! In ioye and blisse, õoure merþe encres, And kepe Goddis lawe in querte. Þes holy tyme, lete sorwe ases. (Poem 12/1–4) A specyall tyme of heryeng here: Lyueliche quyk bred is put forþ þis day. (Poem 23/17–18)

25

Vincent Gillespie has argued that one of the key challenges for approaches that seek to explore the socio-literary practice of medieval poets is to ask how generic lyrics can be said to be ‘affiliated’ to a particular moment in history, ‘Moral and Penitential Lyrics’, pp. 68–95 (p. 90). Also crucial is the statement, ‘if moral poetry is not susceptible to contemporary events, it has effectively lost its purpose’ (pp. 91–92). One might contrast this remark to George Kane’s dismissal of the socalled politicality of complaint literature, preferring instead to see it as literature of moral instruction, ‘Some Fourteenth Century “Political” Poems’, in Medieval Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986), pp. 82–91. 26

See Green, ‘Deixis and the Poetic Persona’, pp. 129–30.

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Helen Barr To salue õoure sores now begynne, Þe holigost õoure grace gyõe. (Poem 7/109–10) To knowe õoure seluen now bygynne; To stryue wiþ God we may not wynne. (Poem 9/12–13) Now sumwhat Y haue õow sayd What is salue to õoure [sore]. (Poem 9/177–78) Let God now lengere wiþ õow rest; Now God and man is wel at on. (Poem 11/71–72) Siþ õe be syker, kepe õow so, Now God and õe are wel at on. (Poem 11/95–96) God õeue õow grace þis reme to õeme, To cherische þe goode and chastyse þe nys. And also serue God to queme, Þat õoure werkis preue õow wys. And in õow þe helpe it lys, Þe puple in Goddis lawe to hede. Do so now, õe wynne õow prys, And heuene blisse for õoure dede. Amen. (Poem 13/161–68) Now I lykne mannys brest [To] presthod in good degre. (Poem 15/25–26) Mannys rybbes Y likne now, Flesch and skyn in body hydes. (Poem 15/41–42) In þy lyue, besye þe now In goode werkis wysely wake, In loue [and] drede to me bow, And fle to me fro synnes blake. (Poem 19/85–88) In old lawe õe wyten how At estren þey eten a lamb al ded; Is ouer put in newe lawe now, At estre we eten quyk bred . (Poem 23/100–03)

The use of words such as ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘here’, and ‘we’ situate the poet and his audience in a present world in which they are all co-participants. In some of these examples, this present world is a world in which human action will be judged in future time by God, and this is a point to which I shall return. But in some key examples, especially in the conjunction of the use of the words ‘now’ and ‘holy time’, the world is clearly that of the start of Henry V’s reign. There is a minisequence of poems from 9–13, significantly at the heart of the series, which focuses on Lenten preparation before the time of Easter, Easter being a time of present

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incorporation in the receipt of the Eucharist and the celebration of the rising of Christ from the dead. As these examples show, the poet enjoins his audience to be part of this liturgical and spiritual present. This holy time, they must burnish bright their black souls and perform acts of penance, before, in Poem 11, being glad in God at this holy time of Easter, now that alleluia is ‘vnloken’ (2). This is a liturgical reference. During Lent, the alleluia was not sung at the Mass. Its return on Easter day signalled Christ’s resurrection. This liturgical and spiritual present is mapped onto a very timely present political moment: the hopes of resurrection and incorporation invested in ‘this new king’s table’ in Poem 23. While this poem is a paraphrase of a hymn by Aquinas, the ‘Lauda Sion’, which was part of the liturgy of the Eucharist, its presence in the sequence serves to establish parallels between the Easter joy of the resurrection of Christ and the new dawn of the reign of Henry V. This new king in Poem 23/27 could reference only Henry V whose coronation fell on 19 April, two weeks before Easter Day.27 This holy time in Poem 12 is again, clearly Easter; the refrain of this lyric is to defend the realm and to save the crown. The conjunction of Easter and concerns that the crown be kept whole clearly mark it out as a poem which celebrates the incorporation of a new political body under the head of Henry V. The poet’s injunctions to celebrate, to let sorrow cease, and to keep the law in this holy time, interpellates his readers as political and spiritual subjects in this new king’s reign, Exactly the same work is performed in Poem 23 with the reference to the special time of praise being here (line 17). Living bread is put forth this day. It is no accident that the poem finishes with the words: We resceyue oure housell, God o blisse. (Poem 23/128).

Quite literally, the poem comes to rest on a statement of present day incorporation into Christ’s body, the church on earth, over which, of course, Henry V presides as king. Neither the poet, nor the audience, are onlookers at this event; the poet’s linguistic choices make them participants.

27

The evidence is discussed more fully in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 15–18. I discuss the political significance of liturgical reference in the Digby Lyrics more fully in my ‘The Deafening Silence of Lollardy in The Digby Lyrics’, in Wycliffite Controversies, ed. by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). As recent commentators have remarked, ‘to do justice to the historically complex realities of medieval liturgy, we need to begin viewing it as the cultural site for the most inclusive social and political as well as religious performance’ (C. Clifford Flannigan, Kathleen Ashley, and Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Liturgy as Social Performance: Expanding the Definitions’, in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005), pp. 695–714 (p. 714)).

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So far, I have painted rather a rosy picture of the political and religious work that is performed by the lexical and grammatical texture of this sequence of poems; especially in the way that it models a wise and ethical kingdom, grounded in stability and permanence with Henry V at its head and all its participants speaking with one voice in present time. But while the sequence of poems is written predominantly in the present sense, it is not written wholly in the here and now. The projected stability and permanence of the poems is hedged in by fears from the past, and anxieties about what the future may, or may not, hold. Poem 16 is a catalogue of the follies of Flanders. It is titled ‘A remembraunce of Lij folyes’, and the poet holds up the example of the internal discord and social turmoil of this kingdom as a warning to the English: Flaundres was þe richest land and meriest to mynne, Now is it wrappid in wo and moche welþe raft. (Poem 16/57–58) Here enemys lawhen hem to skorne and seyn, for synne, Of here banere of grace God broken haþ þe shaft. (Poem 16/63–64) By þese poyntes Flaundres was lest, Now is it out of rule and of rest, Drede is here chef gayte, So eche man on hem bayte. (Poem 16/79–82)

Flanders was the richest land, but now it is wrapped in woe and has been deprived of much wealth. The conjunction of present deixis ‘now’ with the past tense ‘was’ creates a vignette of a realm gone wrong, a spectre of dissolution which the poet does not want visited on these present shores. Flanders is a kingdom that has been laughed to scorn.28 In keeping with the recycling of diction in these poems, however, these have been words which the poet has penned earlier: not about Flanders, but about this holy time of England, and what might happen in the future. These are the closing stanzas of Poem 12; the poem that begins in the holy time of Easter and the king’s new crown: A comons myõt sone be shent Wiþouten kyng or gouernour. And a kyng wiþoute rent Myõt liõtly trussen his tresour.

28

The poet’s treatment of John the Fearless, the duke of Burgundy, and inter-guild factionalism in Flanders is discussed in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 10–14. The poem is not the portrait of one bad ruler; it is part of a poetic political discourse, one which, as David Wallace has demonstrated, spoke ‘most eloquently of the anxieties and desires of its English authors’ (David Wallace, ‘In Flaundres’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 19 (1997), 63–91 (p. 64)).

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For comons mayntene lordis honour, Holy chirche, and religyoun: For comouns is þe fayrest flour Þat euere God sette on erþely crowne. God lete þis kyngdom neuere be lorn Among oure self in no distance; Oþer kyngdomes lauõhe vs not to skorn, And sey, for synne God send vengeance. God õeue vs space of repe[n]tance, Good lyf, and deuocioun. And God kepe in þy gouernance Oure comely kyng, and saue þe crowne. (Poem 12/137–52)

Lines 143–44 are characteristic of the poet’s axiomatic statements; here an optimistic timeless assertion of the value of the commons to the realm as a whole. But the statement has been prefaced by a series of conditionals: ‘myõt’. A commons might soon be destroyed without a king or a governour, and a king without income might easily pack up his treasure. The proverbial pithiness of line 140 here articulates the spectre of discordant bankruptcy; indeed a realm without a king. The final stanza moves into the subjunctive. May God not allow this kingdom to be lost ‘among oure self’. This deictic phrase in line 146 has been used earlier in the poem: Among oure self, God sende vs pes. Þerto, eche man be boun To letten fooles of here res; Stonde wiþ þe kyng, mayntene þe croun. (Poem 12/5–8) Õif we among oure self debate, Þan endeþ floure of chyualrie: Alle oþere londis þat doþ vs hate, Oure feblenes wole aspye. On euery syde, þey wole in hye; Þe stalworþe cast þe feble adoun, Õif þey wiþ myõt haue maystrye, Fro þe riõt heire wolde take þe crowne. (Poem 12/33–40) Among oure self, õif fiõt be raysed, Þan stroye we oure awen nest. Þat haþ victor wole be euel payed, So many good men ben lest. (Poem 12/129–32)

Even as the poet forges a present realm united in Easter joy, the recycling of diction associated with peace and harmony in the present tense becomes freighted with what might happen if disharmony and dissolution return. If there is internal dispute, then the flour of chivalry will end. Enemies will invade, and if they have

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the upper hand they will take the crown from the rightful heir. If fighting happen among ourselves then we destroy our own nest and whoever has the victory will be greatly displeased that so many good men have been lost. The crown hovers between the subjunctive of internal debate and the past tense of dead men who can never return. England’s recent past of deadly infighting haunts this present time with the fear that it may happen again. It is no accident that the holy time of Poem 12 ends with the uneasy rhymes of devotion and crown with ‘skorn’ and ‘lorn’ (146, 148). The scornful laughter directed at Flanders’s past follies may yet cackle at the newly crowned realm of England. The permeation of the present sense of the poems by what may yet await occurs not just in a political dimension but also in the spiritual. Line 149 of Poem 12 records the hope that God may give the realm space for repentance. Repentance is a key motif of these poems. The life of the political body is dependent upon the spiritual health of the soul. The space for repentance may be a present space but the consequences for the fate of the soul are played out in past, present and future time. The sequence does not offer comfortable reading: there are frequent reminders of the fragility of the world and of human existence. Here is a summary of some of the repeated warnings. The world is but a cherry fair, transitory, and a place where everyone, kings and poor, must face up to their mortality and give reckoning to God (Poem 3/146–52). One day man is alive, the next day dead (Poem 4/198). Your life is but as a wind, says the narrator in Poem 9; when it has blown its full, you will be forgotten. Therefore make your peace with God (25–32). Do not be too proud in your prosperity; you do not know how soon you will have less. Do not be too sure of your health; you do not know how soon you will fall into sickness. Death claims each man for his (Poem 5/49–54). Think you will die, and you do not know when. Your plight is precarious, therefore fear and tremble. God will come on Doomsday and judge everyone according to their works. The good run to the bliss of heaven; the wicked shall burn in Hell in endless torment. Death shall feed them (Poem 22/57–64). The terror of judgment is thumped home (Poem 7/18; 8/102, 10/189, 24/97–104). The future fate of the soul depends on what you have done since you were born (Poem 22/41). And there is no escape from God’s purview of all behaviour from that moment. Nothing can be hidden from God (Poem 1/95; 4/153–54); everything is numbered in God’s sight, even the least step (Poem 1/134). The audience is enjoined to make amends or else to suffer the consequences (Poem 9/5/115/135; 17/84/178; 19/28; 24/329/342). Repentance is urged in the most fervent tones (Poem 17/75/95; 19/52/74). The audience is admonished to give account to God for their misdeeds by reckoning up their sins before God does his own accounting on Doomsday (Poem 1/29/35; 3/152; 7/83; 9/92; 10/196/210;

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11/29/35/110; 21/148 and 24/231). The interpersonality of address; the imperatives in the here and now address an audience whose present world is but a transitory stage in the drama of salvation which knits up the past and the future into a potentially terrifying scenario of endless torment. For all the poet’s creation of a present political realm founded on stability and truth in which all are included, at the last Day, though many are called, few shall be chosen.29 The true eternal present of the sequence of the poems belongs not to humankind but to God: Ihesus herte was cleued so To lete out trewe loue to his frende. In that blisse God graunte vs go Þere trewe loue woneþ wiþouten ende. (Poem 17/197–200)

The endless present of the last line of Poem 17; eternal bliss where true love dwells forever is not the work of humankind; nor is there any human entitlement to the place where true love lives without end. Entrance to eternal bliss is made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and conditional on God’s permission.30 This spiritual text-world is inseparable from the political text-world. The poet does not fashion a political community knit up in heady coronation triumphalism but forges a political realm and a contemporary Church grounded on principles of penance and repentance. The political subjects interpellated by the poet’s modes of address are human beings made conscious of the need for reform and spiritual cleansing. As such they are subjects created in alignment with the new king’s zeal in reforming the Church from within. The text world of the Digby Lyrics creates an early fifteenth century body-politic which is mindful of past sins and the need for their remedy. Only then can the body-politic stand on its own two feet, but then only with God’s grace.31 While the liturgy of Easter forms the centre of this 29

This verse from Matthew 22. 14 is explicitly quoted in the lyrics, ‘Fewe ben chosen, þouõ mony ben calt’, Poem 21/151. 30

The image of the herb ‘trewe-loue’ is also found in ‘Christ’s Testament’, in The Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. by Carl Horstmann (vol. 1) and F. J. Furnivall (vol. 2), EETS, O. S. 98 and 117, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1892–1901), I, 645, lines 114–26, ‘And my loue-dedes haue in Mynde;/ffre to haue, and fre to holde,/wiþ al þe purtynaunce to wolde,/Myn heritage þat is so fre./ffor homage ne for feute/No more wol I aske of þe,/But a foure-leued gras õeld þou me:/O lef is soþfast schrifte,/Þe toþur is for synne herte-smerte,/Þe þridde is “I wol no more do so,”/Þe feorþe is “drede god euermo”; whon þeose four leues to-geder ben set,/A “trewe loue” men clepen hit’. 31

The inseparability of the political and the spiritual can be seen from the way that in Poem 15, the poet fuses a poem based on an enumeration of the parts of the body-politic with a body and soul debate.

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sequence of poems, at its end the poet turns to the Office of the Dead in his paraphrase of its readings, responses, and versicles. Lyric 24 closes with the need for each and every subject of the realm to reflect on their sins, to repent and to be mindful that on the Day of Judgement they will be called to account. These are the final two stanzas of the sequence, and they are the poet’s addition to the liturgy: At domesday no man shal be excusyd: Lord, ne lady, mayde ne knaue, For wykked counsel scholde be refusyd, And after good counsayle craue. After warke þat þay vsed, I shal hem deme or saue: Þe sauyd excusyd, þe dampnyd accusyd, As thay deseruyd echon haue. Ech touche and mouynge with hys honde, þe leste twynkelynge wyþ his eyõe, His wronge worke, sitte or stonde, Ryde or go, sitte or lyõe, Þouõ he spede noõt þere he dede fonde, Hys conscience wole hym bewrye; Benefice, auauncement, hous or londe, The leste bargayn þat he dede bye. (Poem 24/403–18)

The penultimate stanza of the sequence is scored by sound patterning: especially by the repeated sound ‘yd’ endings of past participles and participle adjectives, reinforced through rhyme position. The repetition is not mere ornamentation. As the list of actions (lines 411–18), states, each person will be judged on the basis of every action, however small, that they have performed in the past tense. The future destiny of the soul is dependent on the least bargain that a person did buy. In a finale which presses home the message that each person shall be judged according to what they have done, the ultimate future worth of accumulated deeds is emphasized by the insistent sounding of the past tense. The speaker here is God. The audience of the poem who will face his wrath are ‘thay’, or ‘he’, terrifyingly distant from God — potentially always so — by the worth of their past deeds. The text-world of these Digby Lyrics is politically and spiritually congruent. A present realm founded on permanence, truth, and ethical behaviour is created as part of a transitory world where God is the ultimate judge of deeds in time. It is a present realm created in the here and now in which all members of the audience are its incorporated subjects. But the celebration of a political realm incorporated in Easter joy at Christ’s resurrected body is inseparable

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from the soul-searching of the community united in the liturgy of the Office of the Dead. There is no hope of endless joy without the communal work of penance.32 The text-world of the Digby Lyrics is self-consciously literary by avoiding the stylistic features traditionally seen as the signs of literariness: the terms deployed, but sheepishly disclaimed, by Chaucer’s loquacious Eagle in The House of Fame: subtilite Of speche, or gret prolixite Of termes of philosophie, Of figures of poetrie, Or colours of rethorike.33

It is the eschewal of ‘peculiar language’,34 the absence of making strange, or defamiliarization, that marks out for the Digby poems an important place in literary history. But, as the history of the use of literary language shows so clearly, the turn to ‘common speech’: the ordinary and the known, is just as much a poetic choice and a literary style as the searching out of what is novel and strange. The selfconsciously familiar poetics of the Digby Lyrics are perhaps best encapsulated in the ringing injunction of the opening line of Poem 12: ‘call hom õoure herte!’

32

If John Paunteley were the author of the lyrics, then the concern for penance and correction may have had a personal significance; in 1411 there was a pardon issued ‘to John Paunteley, monk of the abbey of Gloucestre, for all felonies, trespasses and misprisions committed by him, except murder, common larceny and treason’, Cal. Pat. Rolls 1441–1446, 13 Henry IV, Part 1, p. 364 (29 December 1411, Westminster). 33 34

Chaucer, House of Fame, lines 854–59 in The Riverside Chaucer.

Derek Attridge writes a compelling account of the history of norm/deviation theories of literary language in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 2004).

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I

n tracking personalized devotions in manuscript margins, Colin Richmond found a rubric beneath a prayer-book miniature of the Mass of St Gregory: ‘To all them that before this image of pyte devoutly say five pater nosters and five aves and a credo pytously beholdyng these armes of christs passion are graunted 32755 years of pardon’. Pondering these specifications, Richmond articulates the challenge posed to investigators of late medieval piety: Precisely how, I asked myself, was this particular image used, if it was used at all? Did [the book’s owner] devoutly perform before it? If he did, how often did he? Did his confessor show it to him during confession? If he did, at what point? Did either, or both, of them add up the years?1

In the Oxford manuscript that preserves the poems and carols of John the Blind Audelay, a reference to this iconography occurs in the poet’s Saint Gregory’s Indulgence, but without an actual illustration of it: Apon a day Saynt Gregoré Song his mas at Rome, truly; Crist to him he con apere In the fegure of his autere; […]

1

Colin Richmond, ‘Margins and Marginality: English Devotion in the Later Middle Ages’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: Watkins, 1994), pp. 242–52 (pp. 243–44). The rubric appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Liturgical 7 (fol. 59v ), a prayer-book owned by George, Earl of Shrewsbury, around 1500.

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Audelay’s item agrees with Richmond’s discovery in its call for a worshipper to say five Paternosters and five Aves. Gregory’s indulgence is totalled at 14,000 years, with other bishops reportedly adding more, to a (garbled) total of ‘Twenty thousand and six days and thirty-six yere’. A note is scribbled in the left margin: ‘here within [p]or[tr]eyd a fygur’.3 To obtain the pardon, the reader evidently needed to say the given prayers before the well-known image of Gregory at the altar envisioning Christ’s body in the host. As Caroline Walker Bynum observes, ‘the indulgenced object is an image in which Gregory frames the devotional centre and mediates its power to us’. It is ‘an image of an image of a vision’, ‘a stimulus evoking absence as well as presence’, a prod to ‘see beyond’.4 As with so much else in Audelay’s book, a yearning to apprehend the unseen divine presence focuses the blind poet’s spirituality. Saint Gregory’s Indulgence is but one element of a unified set of texts at the heart of Audelay’s book, a sequence offered for the benefit of a devotional reader. To echo Richmond, for whom was this sequence intended? How was it to be used? Why did Audelay set it in his anthology? In what ways is it his own creation, in what ways borrowed? And does its Englishness matter? Discussions of vernacular theology have largely bypassed John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience (c. 1426; henceforth CC), a book that blends didacticism and devotion. Its contents establish it as an English religious compendium of mixed genre, including, for example, items of pastoral instruction, lyric verse, vision, prophecy, and truth-telling regarding ecclesiastical abuses. Some texts have received isolated attention, but Audelay’s broader purpose and plan have remained elusive.5 2

Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 91.

3

On fol. 12va (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 259). The scribal note may point to the drawing of the Vernicle (fol. 27va), the only image in the manuscript; an image of the Mass of St Gregory seems more likely, however. 4

Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 208–40 (pp. 216, 218). 5

John Audelay’s book is not listed among the works of ‘vernacular theology’ in Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 859–64. Studies of Audelay’s CC are scarce; they include Eric Stanley, ‘The True Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven: In Defense of John Audelay’s Unlyrical Lyrics’, in Expedition nach der Wahrheit: Poems, Essays, and Papers in Honour of Theo Stemmler, ed. by Stefan Horlacher and Marion Islinger (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), pp. 131–59; and Oliver Pickering, ‘The Make-Up of John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on

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To the whole book Audelay assigns a spiritual goal of soulehele, as if in imitation of a much more ambitious codex, the Vernon manuscript, created some forty years earlier, also in the West Midlands.6 Many individual items in CC are, in fact, intricately sequenced acts of worship. They consist of indulgenced prayers designed to be practised in quasi-liturgical serial clusters according to Audelay’s guideposts. A string of ten items at the core of CC appears to be a comprehensive programme of vernacular worship by which a lay audience (mostly individual, but at times addressed as a congregation) is led to meditate on the Passion, prepare for the sacrament of the altar, and revere Christ’s ‘seen’ presence. This sequence at the centre of CC has not been previously recognized as an interconnected cluster of texts.7 It is devoted to venerating Christ’s body — specifically, to meditating on the Passion and avowing one’s faith in the miracle of the host. The Long Passion (as I call it here) appears on folios 8rb–16ra of the Audelay manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302), extending across nine of the twenty-two folios that hold CC.8 Unfortunately, what survives of CC represents Audelay’s purpose in only an incomplete form. The book has lost a large portion of its opening leaves (thirteen to nineteen) with four more gone between folios 7 and 8. In what remains, three items precede the Long Passion, all in a didactic mode: True Living, Marcolf and Solomon, and The Nine Remedies of

John the Blind Audelay, ed. by Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009), pp. 112–37. Audelay’s title The Counsel of Conscience may be borrowed from Piers Plowman A.10.91 (William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Longman, 1995), p. 382; I am grateful to Prof. Schmidt for this suggestion). Vincent Gillespie finds an echo of the ‘Council of Constance’ in Audelay’s title (‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–20 (pp. 417–18)). On how Audelay denotes a spiritual process by giving successive titles to CC, see my ‘The Epistemology of Titles in Editing Whole-Manuscript Anthologies: The Lyric Sequence, in Particular’, Poetica, 71 (2009), 49–74 (p. 61). 6

Susanna Fein, ‘Example to the Soulehele: John Audelay, the Vernon Manuscript, and the Defense of Orthodoxy’, Chaucer Review, 46 (2011), 182–202. 7

Pickering, ‘The Make-Up of John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience’, pp. 120–28, notes the devotional texts but views Visiting the Sick as an interruption. Susan Powell, ‘John Audelay and John Mirk: Comparisons and Contrasts’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 86–111, characterizes these texts as ‘lay devotional reading, a focus easily explained by [Audelay’s] career in a noble household’ (p. 91). Helpful overviews of late medieval Passion piety are given by Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 8

Because of gaps in the manuscript, one cannot know for certain where CC begins. What remains names an endpoint on fol. 22vb . Scholars presently apply the title to all the leaves that come before this colophon.

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Virtue.9 The third of these, a Rolle-related work with a Latin original, has Christ himself utter dicta to Christians, which (via Audelay) he declares in English. The rest of CC continues without lacunae. After the Long Passion, four works conclude the book: Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday, The Vision of Saint Paul, God’s Address to Sinful Man, and Audelay’s Epilogue. These are again didactic works, two of them channelling God’s voice (in English), as he issues laws and promises mercy to penitents. Our Lord’s Epistle has a Latin source, while God’s Address, a refrain poem, seems to be entirely Audelay’s creation. Epilogue, the last item in CC, delivers Audelay’s own urgent words of prophecy and warning. Audelay assigns to the final pair, God’s Address and Epilogue, a joint heading: ‘De misericordia Domini’ (The Lord’s Mercy). Thus, after The Vision of Saint Paul, which paints the tortures of hell, the poet closes his book of soulehele on notes of merciful healing and salvation. Audelay first addresses general humanity with words voiced as God’s own; then in Epilogue he removes the mask and addresses a reader directly, offering a self-portrait of considerable complexity. Audelay presents himself as author, guiding chaplain, blind prophet, penitent mirror, and sinner afflicted (and chosen) by God’s visitation.10

The Long Passion I chart below the works that Audelay clusters to create the Long Passion. Some items are sets of prayers. Most are designated a ‘remission’ (indulgence); asterisks indicate the items marked in this way. (1) *Seven Bleedings of Christ (English) (2) *Prayer on Christ’s Passion (English; a translation of O Deus qui voluisti) (3) *Psalter of the Passion (Latin with English instructions) Anima Christi O pendens dudum (to be recited with a rosary) O Deus qui voluisti (4) *Seven Words of Christ on the Cross (English)

9

The scribal numbering system indicates that nine items are lost before True Living, and three more between Marcolf and Nine Remedies. 10

See Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘The Vatic Penitent: John Audelay’s Self-Representation’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 54–85. Pickering, ‘The Make-Up of John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience’, p. 125, examines the unified pattern of Audelay’s signings in these final texts.

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(5) The Levation of Christ’s Body (English/Latin with English instructions) Salutation to Christ’s Body (to be said in sight of the sacrament) *Prayer for Pardon Adoramus Te Christe, Ecce Agnus Dei, Laudes Deo (hymnal prayers) (6) *Virtues of the Mass (English) (7) For Remission of Sins (English with instructions) *Saint Gregory’s Indulgence (to be said in sight of the image) Prayer of General Confession Prayer for Forgiveness (8) Visiting the Sick and Consoling the Needy (English) (9) Blind Audelay’s English Passion (English/Latin with English instructions) The World’s Folly *Pope John’s Passion of Our Lord (10) *Seven Hours of the Cross (English with Latin hymnal tags)

In what follows I will explore the logic underlying Audelay’s creation of this set of texts: its probable audience, the programme it represents, and its intensity of focus upon faithfully seeing beyond.

Audelay’s Audience Identifying the original audience of CC is critical to reconstructing the book’s contemporary purpose, and this is especially true for the Long Passion, which was evidently created both for private devotion and for use during mass. What I wish to propose and explore here is an understanding of CC as an author-anthology made up of spiritual texts created in large part during Audelay’s tenure as chaplain in a noble household. When Audelay set about making the physical book that is now designated the Audelay manuscript, he was by his own account a man advanced in years, declining in health, failing in eyesight and hearing, and living a cloistered life in an Augustinian monastery. He had come to this situation after an active career as chaplain to Lord Richard Lestrange of Knockin. His later residence was Haughmond Abbey, a wellendowed religious house located barely fifteen miles (24 km) from Knockin, on the other, eastern, side of Shrewsbury — a house to which Lestrange had longstanding ancestral ties of patronage. When Audelay relocated there, he became the first

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priest commissioned to pray for the souls of the Lestranges in a newly endowed family chantry. As chantry priest, Audelay probably did not take monastic orders but remained in the ranks of secular clergy. There are arguably two sets of contemporary audience for Audelay’s book, one secular, the other cloistered, but those for whom the texts themselves were first created would seem to have been members of the lay nobility, the ‘lords’ and ‘sirs’ so often addressed in Audelay’s verse. A monastic audience is alluded to in the wellknown colophon that marks the end of CC: ‘Iste liber fuit compositus per Johannem Awdelay, capellanum, […] ad exemplum aliorum in monasterio de Haghmon’ (This book was composed by John Audelay, chaplain, […] to serve as a model for others in the monastery of Haughmond). The Augustinian canons of Haughmond were likely to be familiar with Audelay’s compositions. Certainly, the two scribes who carried out his plan of anthology knew the nature of the texts they were copying. They executed the poet’s programme with precise attention to detail — down to the underlining of instructional passages in red, the insertion of pointers for key passages, the drawing of a well-placed devotional image, and so on. Both were probably monks who served the blind Audelay to make the book he wanted, working under the chaplain’s direct supervision.11 The primary audience for whom Audelay first created the items found in the manuscript is most likely to have been, however, his long-term employer, Lord Richard Lestrange, 7th Baron Strange of Knockin. Additional recipients of his pastoral care may well have been Richard’s wife Joan and other family members, high-ranking associates, and familiars in the household. Perhaps among them were, more loosely defined, the body of retainers charged with the maintenance of Knockin, its appurtenances, and other household settings for Lestrange activity, such as London, where records show Lord and Lady Lestrange attending Easter services at St-Dunstan’s-in-the-East in 1417. Even though their behaviour was less than pious on that occasion, the legal documents tell us that a large cohort of servants came to church with them, which may have been the normal procedure.12 When Lestrange and his chaplain were in residence at Knockin, it is also possible that Audelay took opportunities to preach and officiate at the chapel adjoined to the castle.13 At any rate, we can assume that Audelay had in mind an aristocratic 11

Fein, ‘Introduction’, in Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 4–5.

12

Michael J. Bennett, ‘John Audelay: Life Records and Heaven’s Ladder’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 30–53 (pp. 33–37, 50 n. 29). The records name fifteen men in attendance with Lord and Lady Lestrange, among them three squires, two chaplains, and a clerk. 13

Knockin Church, now St Mary’s, was built between 1182 and 1195 by Ralph le Strange, at which time Knockin was removed from Kinnerly parish, and ‘the right of patronage’ (i.e., its tithes)

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lay audience for his works of pastoral care. Beyond that, some items suggest delivery in church, or performance in other corporate settings (such as carol singing in hall), indicating a chaplain who served, at times, a diverse audience of nobles, retainers, and general parishioners tied economically and culturally to the Baron’s manorial, parochial presence at the centre of their community.

Audelay as Versifier, Spiritual Guide, and Translator The Long Passion brings into focus many of the features that characterize Audelay as a Middle English religious poet. Most importantly, it allows scholars to observe a clerical writer at work in his study, and sometimes at his pulpit, composing lyrics, constructing devotions, preparing texts of pastoral care, and translating items deemed useful to a lay reader. If the Long Passion represents a programme created for a noble household by a personal chaplain, then it (along with other parts of the Audelay manuscript) allows us an insight into the conditions that lie behind the making of many medieval religious lyrics, the bulk of which are scattered across manuscripts without attribution. In Audelay’s Long Passion one may detect the chaplain’s earnest effort as a translator and transmitter of scriptural, hymnal, and prayer matter — often from Latin to English, occasionally from English to reworked English. If many Middle English poets served daily as priests to private patrons or parish congregations, then real-world responsibilities would have fired their creativity. Practical soul-saving impels Audelay’s verse. At the same time, many quirks are substantially Audelay’s own. One is a habitual attention to form: endings often match openings with marked symmetries of content, centre-points, decisive closures, and patternings by number. The poet experiments incessantly with metre, inventing a wide range of stanza types, signature metres, and metres reserved for particular genres. Most of all, he personalizes his verse in distinctive ways. Not only does he sign it frequently; it also conveys an idiom unmistakably Audelay’s own. Audelay inhabits his verse with a pressing authorial presence, often as a priest, but also, just as often, as a penitent who conflates his subject with himself. Self-referentiality is a habit. When Audelay uses metaphors of seeing — as he often does — they point two ways: they speak, as from a preacher,

given to Haughmond Abbey ‘for the souls of his [Ralph’s] Father and ancestors, and the health of himself and his successors’ (R. W. Eynton, Antiquities of Shropshire (London: John Russell Smith, 1860), p. 366). This arrangement was in effect during Audelay’s tenure as chaplain. In 1392 the living of Knockin Church was given to a Henry de Alderley, whose surname is a local variant of ‘Audelay’. The name of the rector in Audelay’s time is not recorded.

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of spiritual sight and true knowledge, while they allude as readily to the poet’s handicap and his proclaimed vatic gift. References to Paul may turn imperceptibly to Audelay’s identifying of himself with an apostle struck blind at his conversion.14 In the Long Passion one finds this reflex in operation in multiple references to the blind Longinus, and even in the poet’s interest in the gospel recorded by John the Evangelist, the ‘archetypal visionary and seer’.15 Audelay’s stylistic idiosyncrasies saturate his book. When one examines CC metrically, much emerges about what Audelay calls ‘my wyl and my wrytyng’.16 The chaplain frequently speaks to the reader in verse asides, typically couplets, that become paratexts of instruction.17 They guide a worshipper by explaining how to pray a prayer, or they explain the order of a quasi-liturgical prayer service, emphasizing its sequential nature. Instructional couplets may serve double-duty as incipit or explicit, naming the work or specifying the genre, as does the one introducing Audelay’s carols: ‘I pray yow, syrus, boothe moore and las, / Syng these caroles in Cristemas’. When signpost couplets identify a text as offering an indulgence, they may detail the item’s measurable spiritual reward. In the Long Passion the poet often brackets prayers with recipes for how they are to be uttered reverently, the instructions couched in imperatives: ‘Loke ye say this oresoun / Dewoutlé with devocion’. In addition to these priestly counsels, Audelay’s voice resides in another metre common to CC, his standard mode for didactic preaching: the thirteen-line stanza. In CC, seven works are composed this way, and Audelay almost always signs them, emphatically staking his claim. Their style is malleable and fluent, suggestive of oral delivery, with frequent phrasal repetitions and insistent reiterations of doctrine. A signature-stanza concludes most of them, each time tailored to a specific setting: Mervel ye noght of this makyng — Fore I me excuse, hit is not I.

14

See Bennett, ‘John Audelay’, p. 39; and Robert Easting, ‘“Choose yourselves whither to go”: John Audelay’s Vision of Saint Paul’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 170–90 (p. 185). 15

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, St John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 98. As Hamburger’s important book details, St John ‘insists on the centrality of sight to salvation’, and ‘the visibility of the invisible God’ (p. 18). These sight-based assertions would have drawn Audelay to the Evangelist, patron saint of Haughmond Abbey. 16 17

Audelay’s Conclusion, line 33 (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 224).

While most instructions in the Long Passion are in couplets, a few appear in six-line stanzas, the metre Audelay favours throughout this section, as illustrated in the way he converted his source for Virtues of the Mass from twelve-line stanzas to six-liners (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 256).

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Fore this of Godis oun wrytyng That he send doun fro heven on hye, Fore I couth never bot he foly. He hath me chastist for my levyng; I thonke my God, my Grace, treuly, Of his gracious vesetyng. Beware, serys, I you pray, Fore I mad this with good entent, Fore hit is Cristis comawndment; Prays for me that beth present — My name hit is the Blynd Awdlay. (Our Lord’s Epistle, ll. 196–208)

As this specimen shows, the signature-stanza starts off by deferring authorship to a higher authority (here, God) while claiming only ‘high folly’ for Audelay. The poet then extends a prayer of thanksgiving that he has been ‘visited’ with chastizing infirmities. In the final five lines (the wheel), Audelay shifts to a strong statement of authorship, ‘I mad this with good entent’, and asks the reader to pray for him by name, ‘Blynd Awdlay’. Most of CC (though only a small portion of the Long Passion) consists of poems in the discursive thirteen-line stanza. In these works Audelay demands that clergy preach the truth of Scripture to the laity, and he bluntly defends his exposure of ecclesiastical corruption. In Marcolf, for example, Audelay critiques greedy friars, proclaiming that those who know they are guilty will renounce him. Then he adds, ‘Fore to stond at a stake, bren ther Y wolde / Yif I say falslé at my wyttyng — / Blynd as Y am’ (lines 501–03). This startling statement reflects the political climate during which Audelay lived, but he probably did not write it in actual fear of indictment. It belongs with the fervent public stance Audelay takes as a blind prophet called to speak truth to sinners — churchmen and laymen alike.18 In another thirteen-line poem, Epilogue, Audelay explains how he was called via a dream: a man beckoned him, requiring him to preach truth, while flames consumed the world. The urgency of sacred mission permeates Audelay’s works, especially his thirteen-liners, as he stakes the courage of an outspoken orthodoxy against both erroneous Lollards (‘heretics and renegades’) and over-zealous Lollard-hunters: Fore thay cal trew Cristyn men Lollard, That kepyn Cristis comawndmentis nyght and day,

18

While most of Marcolf addresses an audience of monks, friars, and secular clergy, the poem’s conclusion (after line 780) is directed to the laity. Marcolf’s outspokenness against both churchmen and Lollards is examined by Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 340, 378–80. See also his ‘Saving Satire after Arundel’s Constitutions’.

334

Susanna Fein And don Godis wil in dede and worde. Agayns ham, I take Crist to wytnes; Here is non error ne Lollardré, Bot pistill and gospel, the Sauter, treuly; I take witnes of the treue clargy That han Godis lauys fore to redres. (ll. 253–60)19

Audelay speaks on behalf of ‘treue clargy’, urging them to follow their duty to save souls. According to Audelay, each ‘man’s soul’ needs to be taught its own personal responsibility for salvation. The right path lies only through Holy Church and its sacraments. God hears and absolves a person even if his confession is given to a corrupt priest or friar. Moreover, a Mass is efficacious to all believers even if a priest fails to say it attentively and sincerely. Audelay pointedly asks clergy to remember that their own souls hang in the balance. Any souls lost through negligence will be accounted against a priest’s salvation on Doomsday. Consequently, curates must preach courageously what they know to be true: The treuth to preche, men may be bold, Ore ellis, ye curatis, ye schul sore rew, […] Fore to curatis, sayth Saynt Gregory, Thai schul onswere treuly Fore mons soule specialy, At Domusday tofore Crystis face. (ll. 266–67, 270–73)

In asserting that no error exists in preaching Christ’s commandments — contained in ‘pistill and gospel, the Sauter, treuly’ — Audelay claims an orthodox space, sanctioned by Gregory, where churchmen are obliged to transmit biblical teachings to the laity. This claim allows insight into Audelay as a cleric who conveys religious doctrine. Audelay’s emphatic use of English and selective use of Latin suggest his stance on disseminating Scripture via the vernacular. In Marcolf, a poem in which nearly every stanza has a Latin heading, these tags construct a clerical commentary that laymen might not be expected to understand. Most such lines are biblical. Audelay seems not to feel a strong urge to translate them, though his exposition in the stanza often offers a paraphrase. Biblical Latin is thus treated with deference, its deployment set in motion by a professional chaplain who speaks broadly to others 19

My use of the term Lollard in this essay adheres to Audelay’s own usages, as reflected in passages such as this one. The poet applies the word to those whose beliefs depart from orthodoxy, but he also shows concern over the slippery nature of fallible humans using this term to label others. See Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 235, 242, 277; and Fein, ‘Example to the Soulehele’, pp. 193–202.

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in ecclesiastical orders. Scriptural authority proves that God’s dicta and natural laws (kynde) underwrite everything uttered by the rustic Marcolf in his spontaneous, impassioned bursts of truth-talking. But the fool speaks in English, delivering Audelay’s imperative (for layfolk to hear) that churchmen are duty-bound to do the work of Holy Church and save souls. The poem’s premise is that a preaching rustic speaks difficult truths to the power base — ‘Solomon’ — who should listen, send them forth, enact reforms. Eventually ‘Marcolf’ preaches directly to laymen — just about when Audelay drops the mask — delivering the critical message that salvation is each soul’s responsibility. Audelay’s English is thus deployed in ways that both reflect and deflect contemporary concerns about disseminating Scripture in the vernacular. God’s mission transcends human wrangling.

The Long Passion’s Frame: Guided Prayer In the Long Passion itself, similar signs of linguistic consciousness arise. A particularly intriguing title — Blind Audelay’s English Passion — emerges from an explicit: Amen, Jhesu, now I thee pray, Have mynd and mercé on Blynd Audlay, That mad in Englesche this Passion, Fore synful men to have mynd theron.

Audelay announces himself here as blind author, as translator, as conveyor of the vernacular, and as purveyor of a Passion (a biblical genre). This English Passion is, in the main, a précis of the Gospel of John, a Latin item found in horae and central to the Good Friday liturgy.20 Set near the end of the Long Passion, this Passion in English balances a Latin Passion set near the beginning: The Psalter of the Passion, which, despite its essentially Latinate nature, comes with a set of English instructions and a prefacing translation of its longest element. Likewise, the English Passion proclaims itself a translation from Latin. Both devotions are therefore openly bilingual while vernacularly user-friendly. Audelay provides a noble patron with straightforward recipes for reaping spiritual benefit. Symmetries and formal repetitions mark the Long Passion as a crafted programme. Along with the two Passions there are also three poems based on the holy sevens that structured medieval veneration of Christ’s suffering on the cross. One opens the sequence, another closes it, and the third comes right after the Latin 20

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 237.

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Passion. Prayers based on these septenaries are frequent in books of hours, and their explication is common in English treatises.21 Here Audelay weaves them around the Passion meditations, making them keys for obtaining remission as privately performed devotions transport one to a vivid biblical tableau. Christ’s Seven Bleedings become remedies for the seven sins, matched to seven instruments of the Passion (the arma Christi).22 The user is to pray this prayer every day in worship of the Passion and Christ’s wounds, and he should also teach it to others. The content of Seven Words, which follows the Latin Passion, is also ordered strictly by mnemonic number. The seven words are matched to seven petitions, and they too offer remedies for the seven deadly sins. The user is told to follow this poem with recitation of seven Paternosters and seven Aves in order to activate the remission. In between these first two seven-poems is an exercise in two parts: first, an English verse prayer on Christ’s torture, again evoking the arma Christi, while foreshadowing O Deus voluisti, which it translates; second, Audelay’s Psalter of the Passion, a set of three Latin prayers to be said in order. They begin with the cleansing, fortifying Anima Christi, which holds a long history as an indulgence and was used during the Mass.23 The second prayer is brief: ‘O pendens dudum / In hara crucis nudum / Pro nostro scelere, / Jhesu, nostri miserere’ (O long hanging / On the altar of the cross naked / For our sin, / Jesus, have mercy on us). Audelay explains that his patron is to recite it as a ‘psalter’ with the aid of a rosary, substituting this miniature evocation of the Passion for prayers one might more commonly use: the Paternoster or the Ave.24 It seems meant for recitation before a crucifix, which may

21

William A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Medieval Academy of America, 1980), pp. 189–262, esp. pp. 227–30; and C. A. Martin, ‘Middle English Manuals of Religious Instruction’, in C. A. Martin, ‘Middle English Manuals of Religious Instruction’, in So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediæval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. by Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Benskin and Samuels, 1981), pp. 283–98. 22

In addition, Christ is addressed in fifteen Oes, and the reader of the poem is told to pray fifteen Paternosters and fifteen Aves to receive the indulgence. 23

The fifth line of this prayer hymn, ‘Passio Christi conforta me’, resurfaces later in the Long Passion in Pope John’s Passion; Audelay also uses it as a carol burden. See Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 251. An elevation prayer, its history is tied to Pope John XXII (Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 157). 24

I have located this prayer also in an early fifteenth-century English book of hours: Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 72, fol. 51v. See M. R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Emmanuel College: A Descriptive Catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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be the necessary setting for the whole regimen. Upon completing the rosary prayer, the devotee should ‘say thi Crede’ and then recite the third, longest prayer, a frequent item in books of hours: ‘O Deus qui voluisti / Pro redemcionem mundi / A Judeis reprobare’ (O God, you who were willing / For the sake of the salvation of the world / To be condemned by the Jews), and so on.25 After rehearsing Christ’s painful tortures, this prayer concludes with a petition to be taken to heaven as was the thief crucified with Jesus. In providing this Passion to his patron, Audelay draws from the well of Latin prayer-books to compose what seems to be an original sequence. As an aid, he introduces it with an English verse translation of its longest element. A reader who has dutifully followed Audelay’s regimen will have already been taught the Gospelbased meaning of O Deus voluisti in the preceding Prayer on Christ’s Passion: ‘O God, the wyche thou woldust, Lorde, / Fore the redempcion of the worlde / Of Jewis to be reprevyd’, and so on. Audelay arms his patron with the necessary compassion, reverence, and linguistic comprehension to pray aright. The second Passion, Blind Audelay’s English Passion, comes late in the Long Passion sequence. It combines two items, World’s Folly and Pope John’s Passion, which are succeeded by a seven-poem. Verbal echoes often bind the parts together. The worshipper is to read Audelay’s Passion to learn ‘what Cryst sofyrd fore synful mon’, its meditative focus resting on ‘passive suffering by a loving victim’ — the understanding of the Passion typical of primers.26 The reforming rationale for reading a Passion is to evoke peté, the feeling that leads to contrition. All three works in this textual strand propound this idea. The theme of World’s Folly is ‘hou fayth and charyté away is gon’, how in this fickle world ‘Godis laus beth turnyd up-so-doun’. This interesting little poem, which names ‘Mede, that swet maydyn’ (a possible echo of Piers Plowman), and for which there is no known source, starts off as an advertised act of translation. The first stanza, in Latin, is followed by eleven others in the same metre but in English. The second stanza translates the first:

1904), pp. 66–67. Audelay elsewhere appeals to Jesus ‘hongyng on cros’, as if this prayer dwells as a totem in his mind; see the first lines of Seven Words and Prayer for Forgiveness (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 74, 93). 25

In horae and psalters, this prayer is commonly grouped with prayers to Christ. In MS Douce 302 its final lines are copied as prose, which gives the appearance of two separate prayers (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 73–74). The item is also recorded by Robert Thornton: see Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and his Followers, ed. by Carl Horstmann, 2 vols (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895–96), I, 408. 26

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 241.

338

Susanna Fein Multis diebus iam peractis, Nulla fides est in pactis. Videte. Mel in ore verbis lactis, Fel in corde, fraus in factis. Cavete. Moné days now agone Fayth ne covenant is ther non — Behold and se! In mouth is honé swet wordis uchon; In hert is galle, in dede, tresoun. Ware now be!

Audelay makes the clerical language legible — lifts the veil, so to speak — when he turns it to English. Vision is shown to be a powerful operation, leading to awareness, as the short lines stress: ‘Videte […] Cavete’, ‘Behold and se! […] Ware now be!’ In World’s Folly we learn, too, that priests often lack peté: ‘Fore al that clerkis now prechon, / Of holé Cristis Passion, / Is no peté’. According to Audelay’s instructions, World’s Folly serves as a ‘treu lessoun’ by which to meditatively prepare for Pope John’s Passion. The user is to read it before he proceeds to the versified Gospel of John attributed to Pope John XXII, who is said to have attached to it an indulgence for all who ‘sayd or herd hit with dewocion, / And on Cristis Passion had peté’. Pope John’s Passion alternates two lyrical refrains meant to nurse devotional sorrow: ‘Al hit was fore love of thee’ and ‘Apon his Passion to have peté’. It closes with veneration of the five wounds, prescribing five Paternosters, five Aves, and a Creed to gain the remission.27 Continuing to emphasize peté, the poem that follows, Seven Hours, calls for a reforming contrition to develop in readers: ‘Lord, […] / send sorou into our hert, […] / And let thi mercy be medysyn, our mendis for to make’. Composed in finely wrought metres, Pope John’s Passion and Seven Hours finalize Audelay’s Long Passion. The chaplain solidifies his stance as ‘treue clargy’ and vernacular poet, distinguishing himself from clerks who preach without peté. Seven Hours also advertises Audelay as a translator. Each stanza is headed by a line of the anonymous Latin hymn ‘Patris sapiencia’, a work known to pious readers because horae incorporated it into the Office of the Virgin, and from there it was adapted to vernacular primers. Under each hymnal verse, Audelay’s translation appears in the stanza’s first four lines, while narrative expansion or 27

The Seven Hours analogue in the Vernon manuscript is also labelled an indulgence from Pope John.

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pastoral exhortation fills out the remaining five lines.28 The presence in the Long Passion of several works englished from books of hours — Seven Hours, O Deus qui voluisti, and Pope John’s Passion — shows Audelay’s professional versifying to be aligned with goals expressed in such works as the Lay Folks’ Mass Book and the English Prymer.29 The purpose is vernacular instruction and pastoral care. Audelay’s particular aim is to deepen a patron’s private devotional frame of mind, spurring compassion and reverence for Christ’s body, its loving sacrifice made intensely present in images wrought in the worshipper’s own language.

The Long Passion’s Core: Sacrament Between the seven-poems and the two Passions, Audelay constructs a manual to be used ancillary to the Mass. It is a handbook of devotion and instruction, containing guides to worship (two sets of prayers) and sermons on the sacraments. The first sermon is Virtues of the Mass, a work borrowed and adapted by Audelay from an English source, in which he details the benefits of the sacrament of the altar. The second is Visiting the Sick, the only thirteen-line poem in the Long Passion. This sermon defends the orthodox tenet that salvation may occur only by means of Holy Church’s seven sacraments administered by a priest. They are the cleansing salves ‘fore everé sore’ (line 259), provided by God through the Passion: Thus in thi God thou cumford thee, And thenk apon his Passion — […] For in him is al consolacion, And may thee hele of thi sekenes. (ll. 248–49, 252–53).

As the doorway to redemption, the sacraments require respectful churchgoing and true faith: Then aske thi sacrements, pur charyté, And when thou ressayvst that sacrement, Beleve in hert, truly,

28

Alexandra Barratt, ‘The Prymer and its Influence on Fifteenth-Century English Passion Lyrics’, Medium Ævum, 44 (1975), 264–79 (pp. 272–76). See also Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 266–67. 29

The Lay Folks Mass Book or the Manner of Hearing Mass, ed. by Thomas Frederick Simmons, EETS, O. S. 71 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1879); Henry Littlehales, The Prymer or Prayer-Book of the Lay People in the Middle Ages (London: Longmans, Green, 1892); and The Prymer or Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, ed. by Henry Littlehales, EETS, O. S. 105, 109 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1895–97).

340

Susanna Fein That he is that Lord Omnipotent, And Crist is God Son, verament, […] Have this in mynde — foreget hit noght! And beware, uche Cristin mon, Fore heretekis and renegatis that uncriston be, That beleve not in that sacrement, treuly — […] Of hom is no redemcion! (ll. 286–91, 294–97, 299)

True faith separates saved souls from lost ‘heretics and renegades’. Audelay’s emphasis upon receiving the sacraments is what connects this item to its companions in the Long Passion. It follows his Prayer of General Confession and Prayer for Forgiveness with an opening formula for confession. Complementing Virtues of the Mass, it is a ‘Virtues of the Sacraments’. The Passions and seven-poems that create the flanks of the Long Passion express a devotional mode that seems designed for private worship. The devotee follows exercises led by a spiritual director present by means of the book; Audelay’s voice guides the user, but the chaplain need not have been physically nearby. The one who prays these regimens mentally recreates and witnesses the events of Christ’s Passion, transported to sacred time. In contrast, the texts at the core of the Long Passion suggest a public milieu: prayers prayed during a service of the mass in church or chapel, and didactic sermons delivered to a congregation, recorded here for private study. Both prayer series found in the centre of the Long Passion — Devotions at the Levation and For Remission of Sins — require visual foci that are integral to the sacrament of the altar: the Levation of the host and the Mass of St Gregory, respectively. A medieval reader, possibly someone who knew Audelay, has left a mark of use in Audelay’s book: a sleeved hand drawn in the margin, pointing to the Salutation’s climax, the moment of the host’s elevation.30 In Audelay’s Long Passion we may observe the professional employment of a poet ordained to preach sermons and officiate at mass. The chaplain opens with a series of prayers and remission-bearing meditations on seven that lead his patron to contemplate the Passion and prepare privately for the host’s elevation. Then that liturgical event is shown to occur on a visual plane, while the layman reads an English salutation to Christ’s body, a prayer summons of the divine presence meant for private use while a Latin mass is performed at the altar. After a prayer for pardon and three Latin hymns, which evoke the communal service in progress, Audelay provides his devout reader with the Virtues of the Mass, a verse sermon with an exemplum on how to comport oneself in church. The next item is to be uttered before an image of the Mass of St Gregory: a prayer of confession followed

30

Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 254, 337.

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by another that entreats God’s forgiveness. The penitent devotee appears to be still in church (or imagining himself there), enacting the liturgical elements that come after the holy Levation. Now appears another sermon, the lengthy, Audelay-signed poem that launches a defence of Holy Church and the seven sacraments. At this point Audelay is ready to close his multi-part sequence of orthodox devotion and sacrament, centred on venerating and spiritually ‘seeing’ Christ’s body. Two last items, his English Passion and Seven Hours, round-off the intense focus on Redeemer hanging on cross. An emerging theme of preparing for death threads through the final items, from the Anselmian Visiting the Sick to the consolation offered in the last lines of Seven Hours: Then joyful may ye be Agens the day that ye schul dye, To have grace and mercé, In heven foreever a place!31

John the Seer, Witness, Maker ‘John the Blind Audelay’ is how the poet typically signs himself. The blind chaplain invests his Long Passion with numerous instances of seeing and witnessing. Phrasal repetitions on the subject of believing in God’s presence — of seeing beyond — mark the texts of this sequence. Important instances are enacted by three men drawn from the gospel accounts. First is the centurion who declares ‘This is verey Godis Son’, a miraculous witnessing, which Audelay recounts in Pope John’s Passion and Seven Hours, and had earlier asserted in proclaiming, in Salutation and Virtues of the Mass, that the host is ‘God veray’. Second is Longinus, the blind man whose striking of the crucified Jesus with a spear caused him to see. Whenever Audelay speaks of this miracle, he does so with personal poignancy. The miracle literalizes the spiritual power of the Passion narrative by showing a blind one given new sight.32 Third, and most critically, is John the Evangelist, gospel author of Pope John’s Passion and primary witness to holy events: He that al this sorous se, He bers treu witnes hereon, That was keper to mayd Mary, The holé evangelyst, swete Saynt Jon.

31 32

On the movement in Passion piety toward dying well, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 242.

Longinus is named five times in the Long Passion (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 249–50).

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St John deserves special regard as the patron saint of Haughmond Abbey. But there is something more than veneration here: references to the saint are coloured by Audelay’s complicated tendency to represent himself in everything he writes. In Blind Audelay’s English Passion the poet adroitly varies his habitual signing trope. He claims authorship in an explicit, at a point near the end of the Long Passion — a normal spot for an Audelay signature. His claim invokes not just epithet and surname ‘the Blind Audelay’; it also draws upon his Christian name ‘John’. The maker of Pope John’s Passion assumes a blurred identity, but in name he is steadfastly John. Initially, the work is said to have been made by the pope: Pope Jon the XXII at Avyon was. Ther, in the worchip of Cristis Passion, He made this gospel, be Godis grace, And gaf thereto a gret pardoun.

Pope John ‘made this gospel’ and did so for a pastoral cause, to grant the indulgence. The original author, however, is John the Evangelist, who stood beside Mary at the foot of the cross: ‘This is the Gospel of Jon truly — / To this passion take good entent!’ Likewise, St John made it for the good of souls: ‘He bers treu witnes hereon’ and ‘bedis you beleve this everechon’. Ultimately, though, the maker of Blind Audelay’s English Passion, is its translator in present time, who ‘mad in Englesche this Passion / Fore synful men to have mynd theron’. Three Johns across time have crafted this inspirational work, designing it to save souls. As vernacular author, Audelay merges himself with apostle and pope. John the Blind blends himself into the scene of Crucifixion, witnessing it through the seeing eyes of his namesake saint, conveying it as a good curate to a contemporary audience.33 For Audelay, it is as the apostle wrote: ‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men might believe through him’ ( John 1. 6–8).

33

The writing of a wealthy patron into a space of devotion is not uncommon in the fifteenth century; the practice occurs in many manuscript illuminations made for nobility. A contemporary parallel to Audelay’s self-mergence with the Evangelist occurs in an initial A at the opening of St John’s Apocalypse in the Bedford Breviary; in it is drawn a portrait of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford (Victor Leroquais, Les Bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, 5 vols (Paris: Macon, Protat, 1934), III, 303–04). Contemporary writers might also appropriate holy space, as when Margery Kempe imagines herself into the Virgin’s relationships to Christ, in effect displacing Mary; see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 278–82.

L YDGATE’S R ETRACTION AND ‘HIS RESORTE TO HIS RELIGYOUN ’ W. H. E. Sweet

L

ydgate had recently been ordained priest at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds when Archbishop Arundel made an overnight stop there on return from his visitation of the Norwich and Ely dioceses in 1400. The record of his stay, preserved in London, British Library, MS Harley 1005 (fols 40–41), shows that the political sensitivities surrounding any implied recognition of the Archbishop as Visitor precluded an ostentatious reception.1 There was no procession; he was not received through the main gates; the bells were not rung. Nevertheless, the abbot arranged lavish entertainment and the monks were likely included in the festivities. This is the only known occasion when Lydgate was almost certainly in the company of Arundel, but Lydgate’s poetry is steeped in the religious milieu to which Arundel centrally contributed in early fifteenth-century England. Whether directly or indirectly, as a Benedictine monk and a Lancastrian poet, Lydgate felt the influence of Arundel’s Constitutions. This paper argues for a renewed recognition of Lydgate’s piety, identifying a certain poetic reluctance in the monk’s fulfilment of many of his secular and laureate commissions. Because Lydgate was at his most comfortable writing about religion, expressions of regret concerning his earlier pagan-classical output became increasingly explicit as his career progressed and come to constitute a retraction that is far more anxious and prolonged than Chaucer’s.

1

See the description by William Page, ‘Houses of Benedictine Monks: Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, in Victoria County History: Suffolk, II, ed. by William Page (London: Constable, 1907; repr. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1975), pp. 56–72.

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Lydgate was known to his contemporaries as much by his ‘monk of Bury’ sobriquet as he was by his name. In fact, in Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk. 5. 30 of the Troy Book, Lydgate is simply known as ‘the monk’. Yet despite ubiquitous evidence that fifteenth-century readers regarded his religious status as a central facet of his authorial persona, and despite Fiona Somerset’s solitary voice claiming Lydgate as ‘a poet whose “religious” and “secular” œuvres cry out for crosscomparison’, the critical view that there is a contradiction between Lydgate’s status as Lancastrian court poet and Benedictine monk at Bury St Edmunds has dominated.2 Walter Schirmer writes of Lydgate that ‘by inclination he was better suited to a secular than to an ecclesiastical career’; Christopher Cannon calls him ‘worldly in both habit of mind and writing practice’.3 Richard Firth Green and Derek Pearsall both speculate that Lydgate was appointed prior of Hatfield Broad Oak specifically to give him the freedom to write, away from the restrictions imposed on him at Bury St Edmunds.4 However, Lydgate’s considerable religious credentials undermine this polarization. Lydgate directly confronts the conflict of interest perceived by critics between his religious and secular obligations, in a distinct challenge to those who regard him as primarily a worldly poet rather than the devout ‘monk of Bury’. A panoramic view of Lydgate’s canon establishes the religious context that enabled and encouraged an earnest retraction of his secular works. His numerous religious poems are pious, conventional and practical in their plain intention to assist worship. Miri Rubin uses poems such as the ‘Exposition of the Pater Noster’ to cast Lydgate as a typical representative of fifteenth-century parochial teaching.5 The ‘Procession of Corpus Christi’ (1427–29) shows that Lydgate ‘was primarily

2

Fiona Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”: Lydgate the “Poet-Propagandist” as Hagiographer’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. by Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 258–78 (p. 258). 3 Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 8. Christopher Cannon, ‘Monastic Productions’, in Christopher Cannon, ‘Monastic Productions’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 316–48 (p. 342). 4

Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 190. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, p. 25. 5

Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 103–04. The shorter religious poems cited in this paper, including the ‘Testament’, are in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, E. S. 107 and O. S. 192, 2 parts (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1911–34).

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interested in helping the layfolk of his day with their faith and with their prayers’.6 It was this practical utility that merited two prints of the ‘Interpretation and Virtues of the Mass’, a guide for priest and layperson, by Wynkyn de Worde (1501, 1520). In these poems, Lydgate confirms a much deeper familiarity with the mechanics of preaching than might be expected from a fourteenth- or fifteenthcentury Benedictine.7 Recent work on the only known book containing Lydgate’s hand, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 233, shows his interest in its conservative twelfth-century sermons by Geoffrey Babion in addition to, or possibly even instead of, its slim pagan florilegium.8 Nicholas Heale goes further, arguing that two of Lydgate’s inscriptions in the book’s back flyleaf (‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum’ and ‘Et veniat super nos misericordia tua domine’) ‘point us towards a Marian devotion and an awareness of our need for the mercy of God’.9 Lydgate’s shorter poetry is steeped in piety and a thorough concern for the spiritual lives of his readers. Autobiography is scant in Lydgate’s œuvre, but that which exists promotes the seriousness with which he approached his monastic vocation. Lydgate’s only description of his physical appearance, in the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, is a deliberate effort to emphasize his monastic status.10 Lydgate’s primary reason for being in Canterbury is pilgrimage — his ‘vowes to aquyte’ (72) — and he restates and maintains this proper monastic purpose throughout the Prologue. Lydgate consciously separates his persona from Chaucer’s Monk, featuring extremely specific details: Lydgate is lean (Prol., 102; cf. General Prologue, I.200), pale (Prol., 89; cf. I.205), wears a ‘thredbar’ hood (Prol., 90; cf. I.192–96), rides a slender horse (Prol., 102; cf. I.168) and his bridle has no bell (Prol., 85; cf. I.169–71 and

6

Nicholas Heale, ‘John Lydgate, Monk of Bury St Edmunds, as Spiritual Director’, in The Vocation of Service to God and Neighbour, ed. by Joan Greatrex (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 59–71 (p. 62). See also the orthodox interpretation in Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 232, and the heterodox interpretation by Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, pp. 131–52. 7

See Margaret Jennings, ‘Monks and the Artes praedicandi in the Time of Ranulph Higden’, Revue Bénédictine, 86 (1976), 119–28, and Patrick J. Horner, ‘Benedictines and Preaching in Fifteenth-Century England’, Revue Bénédictine, 99 (1989), 313–32. 8

See my forthcoming article with Mark Faulkner, ‘The Autograph Hand of John Lydgate and a Manuscript from Bury St Edmunds Abbey’; cf. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 36, and Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, p. 16. 9

Heale, ‘John Lydgate, Monk of Bury St Edmunds, as Spiritual Director’, p. 61.

10

References are to John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. by Robert R. Edwards, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2001).

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VII.2795).

Patterson and Bowers suggest that the Host’s approval of the monk’s appearance is Lydgate’s covert attack on Henry V’s efforts to reform the Benedictine order; efforts which were intimately felt in Bury St Edmunds.11 There is much evidence of Lydgate’s loyalty to the abbey: his translations of the list of royal charters of privilege, his fulfilment of the commissions of the Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund, which Fiona Somerset demonstrates to be an effort to defend the privileges and rights of the abbey at Bury, and of the Legend of St Austin at Compton and Miracles of St Edmund.12 William Curteys, Lydgate’s closest abbot at Bury, probably owned the substantial Lydgate collection, London, British Library, MS Harley 2255, perhaps a measure of institutional approval of Lydgate because of his faithful fulfilment of monastic duties. That Lydgate felt a conflict between his Christian obligations and his obligations to fulfil the poetic demands made of him by his patrons is communicated through his five-part ‘Testament of Dan John Lydgate’. In this late poem, Lydgate describes his life and religious calling in a selective manner that suggests the deliberate suppression of unpalatable material. The second and third parts of the poem describe the poet’s childhood misdemeanours, including a memorable account of his applestealing at the age of fifteen (lines 638–41). Lydgate is surely recalling Augustine’s pear-stealing in Book II of his Confessions, an audacious association that links him with orthodoxy and suits the confessional tone of the ‘Testament’.13 However, after Lydgate’s childhood epiphany, the poem jumps straight to Lydgate in old age: ‘Age is crope In, calleth me to my grave’ (l. 217). This apparent omission of the

11 Lee Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in New Historical Literary Study, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 69–107 (p. 95) and J. M. Bowers, ‘Controversy and Criticism: Lydgate’s Thebes and the Prologue to Beryn’, Chaucer Yearbook, 5 (1998), 91–115 (p. 94); cf. Horner, ‘“The King Taught us the Lesson”’. 12

The charters are in Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, ed. by Thomas Arnold, Rolls Series, 96, 3 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H.M.S.O., 1890–96), III, 215–37. See Katie Lowe, ‘The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 50 (2006), 134–48, and Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 59–61. On Ss Edmund and Fremund, see Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”’, pp. 258–78. On St Austin and Edmund, see Lowe, ‘The Poetry of Privilege’, pp. 163–64. 13

Similarly, Ruth Nisse (who supplies further reasons to associate Lydgate with Augustine) argues that Lydgate associates himself with St Ignatius and St Edmund in the first part of the poem rather than with classical poets as he does in his epics: ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom’, in John Lydgate, ed. by Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 279–98 (pp. 289–91).

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entire period of his life between the ages of 15 and 70 consciously raises the question, as Ruth Nisse asks, ‘What is the status of Lydgate’s long and extremely prolific career as the pre-eminent court poet?’14 In fact, Lydgate himself answers this very question in the poem, since it features an indictment of the aureate Chaucerian-Lydgatean diction with which he had become associated. Part II contains almost no Christian imagery until the final few stanzas. Lydgate instead presents us with what appears to be one of his characteristically long-winded aureate prologues. This aureate scene blends parts of the Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe.15 It is no coincidence that the action of the poem has the same spring-time April setting as his Chaucerian, pagan histories: Ther leves splaye at Phebus vprysyng, Thamerous foules with motytes and carolles, Salue this sesoun euery mor[we]nyng, W han Aurora hir licour distyllyng […] (lines 284–87)

Troy Book ( III.9), Siege of Thebes (Prol.1), Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe (3)

Tyme whan tyme maketh his resorte In geryshe Marche toward the Ariete […] (lines 294–95)

Siege of Thebes (Prol.1)

This tyme of ver Flora doth hir cure […] (line 332)

Siege of Thebes (Prol. 13), Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe (1)

Troy Book ( III.1), Siege of Thebes (Prol.9)

This aureate description has become so much a part of Lydgate’s poetic vocabulary (and there are countless other examples besides those listed above) that it is at first glance hard to tell whether he intends an allusion to Chaucer or to himself. Lydgate has honed his imitation of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Proem to Book II of Troilus and Criseyde and Book of the Duchess over his career.16 There are references to Chaucerian texts too (lines 325–26 refers to ‘Zepherus with his blastes sote’), but there is a strong case to be made that by the time of the ‘Testament’, this diction provoked overwhelmingly Lydgatean rather than Chaucerian associations

14

Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”’, p. 292.

15

Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Bergen. Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe, in Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. by Dana M. Symons, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). 16

See Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”’, p. 291, on this Chaucerian ‘sexy style’.

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in readers.17 Lydgate is being self-reflexive here, drawing attention to his own style, as we should expect from a poem claiming to be his ‘Testament’. However, having established this Lydgatean locus amoenus, Lydgate promptly shatters it. He situates himself in the idyll, but removes its typically restorative qualities and regrets his presence there: And for my part, I can remembre weell Whan I was gladdest in that fresshe sesoun, Lyke brotel glasse, not stable nor like stell, Fer out of harre, wilde of condicioun, Ful geryssh, and voyde of all resoun, Lyk a phane, ay turnyng to and fro, Or like an orloge whan the peys is goo. Youe to onthryfte and dissolucioun, Stode onbrydeled of all gouernaunce […] (ll. 395–403)

This association of the Lydgatean aureate scene with the folly of youth is befitting, since its Chaucerian diction occurs most frequently in his earliest poems, the Temple of Glass, the Complaynt, and the Troy Book. Lydgate describes himself as out of control: he suggests an awareness that such scenes serve no useful purpose. Lydgate intends to abandon the pagan and classical projects that were predominantly a product of his younger commissions in order to focus on explicitly religious verse. As part of this abandonment he describes himself in youth as ‘Lyk a phane, ay turnyng to and fro’, a phrase he uses to describe fickleness in the pagan protagonists of the Troy Book (I.3507–09). By the law of Lydgate’s epics, people are out of control and subject to Fortune in this way only when they are not accessing Christian values. As Lydgate explains in the Troy Book: For þer is nouther prince, lord, nor kyng, Be example of Troye, like as õe may se, Þat in þis lif may haue ful surete. Þerfore, to hym þat starf vppon þe rood, Suffringe deth for our alder goode, Lyfte vp õoure hertis & thinke on him among. (V .3576–81)

Much of the tragedy in the Troy Book and Siege of Thebes occurs because the pagan Trojans and Thebans have no means of turning to a Christian God to cope with the oscillations of Fortune. In Book II of the Troy Book, for instance, Lydgate

17

See Lois Ebin, ‘The Theme of Poetry in Dunbar’s “Goldyn Targe”’, Chaucer Review, 7 (1972), 147–59, on Lydgate’s aureate vocabulary.

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expresses bemusement at the translation of Guido delle Colonne’s digression on the perils of idolatry (II.5925–59): he argues that it can serve no purpose in the pagan universe of his protagonists. Scott-Morgan Straker and James Simpson both find that the Christian and Lancastrian commendation at the end of the Troy Book is too little too late.18 In the ‘Testament’, Lydgate tackles this directly. Whereas he was forced by fidelity to his sources to avoid Christian lessons in his epic translations, he can turn, in the ‘Testament’, from the locus amoenus to Christ in full willingness: Whiche remembryng, be meke confessyoun, Now with my potent to fynde allegeaunce, Of olde surfetes, contrite with repentaunce, To the Iesu, I make my passage, Rehersyng trespaces don in my tender age. (ll. 404–08)

Having damaged the aureate idyll beyond repair, Lydgate makes the turn to Christ required to control the instability that it inspired in him, speaking of ‘repentaunce’ and ‘confessyoun’. Lydgate has shown the religious, didactic inadequacy of the epic poetry with which this diction is associated. He describes the instability of the world in the same terms as in the Siege of Thebes: The world vnstable, now ebbe, nowe is flood, Eche thyng concludyng on mutabilite, Geyn whos daungeres I holde this counsel gode, To prei for mercy to Iesu on oure kne. (‘Testament’, 205–08) And our lif her, who tak hed therto, Is but an exile and a pilgrymage, Ful of torment and of bitter rage, Lich a see rennyng to and fro, Swyng an ebbe whan the flood is do. (Siege of Thebes, III, 3418–22)

Whereas the pagan Thebans were unable to access this lesson, Lydgate shows that, in his awareness of the vacuity of the aureate idyll and thus the futility of nonreligious poetry, he himself did finally access it. Only Christian beliefs and the religious texts that accompany them can cope with earthly mutability. In its rejection of his aureate diction and associated epic values, this expression of regret constitutes a retraction.

18

James Simpson, ‘The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 397–423 (p. 418). Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’s Troy Book’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 119–47 (p. 147).

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That the epic language with which Lydgate has forged his career is largely inadequate to convey Christian ideas is a motif of the ‘Testament’: Ther is no speche nor language can remembre, Lettre, sillable, nor word that may expresse, Though into tunges were turned euery member Of man, to telle the excellent noblesse, Of blessed Iesu […] (ll. 57–61)

Lydgate signals an awareness of the limitations of this language and its ability to convey religious lessons. The poetic language used to describe the aureate idyll failed to serve a higher purpose and this is now contrasted with religious writing. The frequent textual references in the first part of the ‘Testament’ are wholly religious. Besides the repeated invocation of the ‘name of Iesu’ (line 113 et passim), he describes the writing engraved in St Ignatius’s heart, refers to ‘Poules pysteles’ (74) and depicts the ‘T’ with which repentants are marked. This textuality culminates in the two acrostics spelling ‘JESVS’ (169–84). Lydgate’s childhood epiphany is itself highly textual: he sees a crucifix ‘With this “vide”, wrete there besyde’ (745). The poem itself is grandly called a ‘trites’ (238) or ‘testament’ (212, 239). The cumulative effect of this is to figure the word of God as the competitive rival of Lydgatean aureate, epic diction. Lydgate’s epiphany was occasioned not by courtly or epic poetry, but by the word of God. Late in life, Lydgate is repenting, arguing that the only texts worth reading are religious texts. As if in answer to the critics who regard Lydgate as primarily a courtly poet, Lydgate himself refuses to square the aureate language of courtly poetry with his Christian convictions. He thus ends the ‘Testament’ with Christ speaking down to him from the cross; the word of God has replaced courtly verse.19 This is put to apt use in the Clopton Chapel of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Long Melford, on the cornice scrolls of which are painted thirty-two stanzas from the ‘Testament’, still legible today.20 The lines above the altar are taken from the final part of the poem, in which Christ speaks to Lydgate from the cross. Similarly, in London, British Library, MS Arundel 285, Part V of the poem has been anonymized and extracted from the poem.21 Thus Lydgate has been 19

See Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”‘, p. 293, on the disappearance of the first person in this part of the poem. 20

See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 86–90. 21

Devotional Poems in Verse and Prose from MS. Arundel 285 and MS. Harleian 6919, ed. by J. A. W. Bennett, Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser., 23 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1955).

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successful in asking that his religious poetry and devotion to God supersede his epics, which cannot be instructive in the same way. Besides the ‘Testament’, there are three other texts in which Lydgate explicitly draws attention to his old age and which can therefore confidently be dated to his later years. They support the thesis of a retraction. These poems are ‘On De Profundis’, ‘An Exposition of the Pater Noster’ and the ‘Prayer in Old Age’. All are patently religious, devout poems, the first of which was obediently written by Lydgate for William Curteys to hang on the wall of the church, and the second of which Rubin describes as ‘typical of the current vernacular pastoral manuals’.22 Lydgate does seem to have withdrawn into poetic religious conformity on this evidence. The third of these poems, the ‘Prayer in Old Age’, is worth quoting at length, because Lydgate fills in some of the years so conspicuously absent in the ‘Testament’: The myspende tyme of all my mydle yeris, When lust with fors was fresh yn that sesoun, My froward fals foren desires, Wyth many old diuerse transgressioun, Fer fro vertu, contrarye to resoun, — O lord, late pite thy rygore qveme Or that Iugement do execucioun; Blyssid Iesu! do mercy or thou deme. Duryng that age I coude not aduertyse, Of necligens in my memoriall, By providens to see this straunge gyse, Alle wordely fresshnesse by processe shall appalle; And how fortune amonge hir chaunges alle When folk lest wenyth, her servauntis cast doun; Then is no mene, but to clepe and calle To mercy and grace and Cristes passioun. (ll. 9–24)

Lydgate regrets not emphasizing religion in his ‘mydle yeris’ as the antidote to Fortune, recalling the discussion in the ‘Testament’ of ‘myspent tyme’ (248). He uses the same vocabulary of mutability that characterizes his epics. Just as he did at the end of the Troy Book and Siege of Thebes, Lydgate turns to God as a defence against Fortune. However, whereas the pagan protagonists of these epics are excluded from the Christian lesson and therefore suffer through Fortune, Lydgate instead uses his faith as a defence. This Boethian resolution is predominantly absent from his epics. The alliteration in lines 10–11 of the ‘Prayer in Old Age’ encourages poetic 22

Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 100.

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connotations, suggesting that he regards his epic, courtly poetry, as in Chaucer’s Retraction, as one of those ‘transgressiouns’ mentioned in the first stanza. The poem is a strong confession of ‘necligens’ in not seeing or emphasizing the importance of God when he was writing his earlier works, confirming the implications of the ‘Testament’. The religious turn requisite in this poetic retraction is in abundant evidence not only in the ‘Testament’ but also in contemporary accounts of Lydgate. John Shirley’s rubric for Lydgate’s ‘Every thing to his Semblable’ in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59, a manuscript compiled in the late 1440s and thus near the end of Lydgate’s life, reads: ‘made by Lydegate affter his resorte to his religyoun’.23 Whether or not Shirley had independent evidence of Lydgate’s ‘resorte’, the rubric shows a contemporary awareness of a retraction.24 ‘Every thing to his Semblable’, which cannot accurately be dated, advises man to ‘drawe to God, to whome he was semblable’ (line 176) rather than ‘Chase eorþely thinges of nature corumpable’ (174). This is consistent with the religious turn described in the ‘Testament’. Shirley’s rubric can be taken as evidence of a contemporary awareness of Lydgate’s retraction and religious turn. This fits with what we know of Lydgate’s return to Bury from Hatfield Broad Oak: the wording of the dimissio releasing him in 1434 gives the impression that Lydgate asked to return to Bury in order ‘as you say, to receive the benefit of a better life’.25 This does indeed give the impression that Lydgate was anxious to return to Bury and its more closely guarded religious environment. One objection that might be raised to this model of a retraction in old age is that the ‘Testament’ is not thought to be the last thing that Lydgate wrote. The Secrees of Old Philisoffres has long been held to be Lydgate’s last poem because it was unfinished at the time of his death, requiring completion by Benedict Burgh.26 23

On this manuscript, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley, pp. 145–69, especially p. 161.

24

Boffey and Edwards note ‘some grounds for concern about Shirley’s reliability as attributor’, but critical opinion is in fact divided on Shirley’s closeness to Lydgate, as Connolly, John Shirley, attests. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘“Chaucer’s Chronicle,” John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 20 (1998), 201–18 (p. 208). 25

Green, Poets and Princepleasers, p. 190. Cf. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Biobibliography, p. 25, who argues that Lydgate sought to stay in Hatfield Broad Oak ‘because the presumably more relaxed regime left him more leisure to write’. The dimissio is edited by Pearsall in John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, pp. 12–13. 26

References are to Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres: A Version of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, ed. by Robert Steele, EETS, E. S. 66 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1894).

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This translation, whilst moral in focus, is profoundly secular. If the ‘Testament’ and the other poems describing his mid-life indiscretions are really in the nature of a retraction, it would certainly be peculiar if Lydgate subsequently composed the Secrees. It is time for critics to question this received chronology. For the detail of Lydgate’s death in the middle of writing the Secrees, we rely on a rubric telling us that ‘here deyed this translator and nobil poete: and the yonge folowere gan his prologe’ (1491.0). If this rubric is true, then Lydgate died at an extremely opportune moment: at the exact moment, in fact, that the poem discusses death. Steele’s note lamely reads: ‘this line is one of those coincidences which look like design’, but he elsewhere admits that Lydgate’s contribution to the Secrees is ‘little more than the fragments of a translation, begun at various points, and brought together afterwards’, a view with which Pearsall agrees.27 The intriguing circumstances surrounding Lydgate’s composition and abandonment of the Secrees are beyond the scope of this paper, but there is evidently no reason to assume that death was the reason that Lydgate failed to complete it. A frustrated, deliberate abandonment of the poem, whilst speculative and in need of further research, would be consistent with the retraction proposed here. It is, furthermore, in keeping with what we know of Lydgate’s attitude to the material he was forced to translate for the Fall of Princes, as discussed below. In Shirley’s words, then, Lydgate underwent a ‘resorte’ to his religion, distancing himself to some extent from his epic poetry in his final years. So far, this retraction has, like Chaucer’s, been placed at the end of Lydgate’s life. There is, however, a credible case that the retraction can be taken further back; a case that Lydgate was never entirely comfortable with his commissions; a case that the retraction and pose as unwilling scribe of pagan history is a fundamental part of Lydgatean poetics. This topic is broached in the conclusion to this paper. A number of Lydgate’s shorter poems specifically criticize the type of epic writing through which Lydgate had made his name. His ‘Gloriosa dicta sunt de te’ (also known as the ‘Balade of Oure Ladye’) is a pertinent example of Lydgate rejecting the matter of Troy and Rome in favour of the Virgin Mary: Auctours whylome gaf a prys to Troye Laude and honnour and comendacyoun In Remembraunce of þeyre olde Ioye Þat whylome was wel vsed in þat tovne, And eeke of Roome for domynacyoun,

27

Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres, ed. by Steele, p. 109 and p. xv. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 297.

354

W. H. E. Sweet Cytees þat tyme of mooste souereyntee; But al þeyre booste may nowe be layde adowne, So glorious thinges beo sayde and song of þee. (ll. 25–32)

This stanza is Lydgate’s original addition to what is otherwise a largely accurate translation of Psalm 87 and Revelation 21. 19. The poem is especially fruitful for analysis because, unusually for Lydgate’s short texts, there is some evidence of its date of composition. Shirley’s rubric in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 20 records that the poem was written ‘at þins[t]aunce of þe Busschop of Excestre’ (fol. 1). This is undoubtedly Lydgate’s long-standing acquaintance Edmund Lacy, who became bishop of Exeter in 1420. Elsewhere in the same manuscript (in the rubric for ‘Benedic anima mea domino’, p. 165), Shirley refers to Lacy as Dean of Windsor, suggesting that Shirley (or his exemplars) were able to differentiate the circumstances and date of composition. Lydgate therefore certainly wrote the lines quoted after 1420; which is to say after he had finished the Troy Book. There is no useful terminus ante quem since Lacy remained bishop of Exeter until past Lydgate’s death. In effect, Lydgate criticizes purveyors of the very subject with which he made his name: Troy. Lydgate’s only surviving prose work, the Serpent of Division, deals with Rome, another of the subjects dismissed in the ‘Gloriosa’. This short poem amounts to a rejection of the applicability of Troy and Rome to Christian themes, and because of the date, it might even be termed a retraction of his Troy Book or Serpent of Division. Lydgate is suggesting that Troy is not a suitable vehicle for Christian didacticism any more than it was for Lancastrian propaganda: he is implicitly retracting his classical poetry. This rejection of the matter of antiquity occurs in several of Lydgate’s shorter poems, which are more difficult to date than the ‘Gloriosa’. In successive poems, Lydgate rejects various genres and pagan subject matters. His ‘Ballade at the Reverence of Our Lady, Qwene of Mercy’, for instance, opens: A thowsand storiis kowde I mo reherse Off olde poetis, touchynge this matere, How that Cupide the hertis gan to perse Off his seruauntis, setting tham affere; Lo, here the fin of the errour and the weere! Lo, here of loue the guerdoun and greuaunce That euyr with woo his seruauntis doth avaunce! Wherfore I wil now pleynly my stile redresse, Of on to speke at need that will not faile […] (ll. 1–9)

This is an explicit echo of Troilus and Criseyde (V.1849–55), in which Chaucer suddenly (and notoriously) addresses the paganism of his protagonists at the end

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of the poem. Whereas Chaucer, it has almost universally been felt by critics, intends some sort of irony in this sudden attack on paganism, Lydgate takes Chaucer’s conclusion seriously. He starts where Troilus and Criseyde ends, turning from the pagans to Christ.28 Lydgate’s lines amount to a rejection of the amatory style. It is thus remarkable that his poem was later printed amongst the pagan works of Thynne’s Chaucer. Similarly, in ‘Misericordias domini in eternum cantabo’, Lydgate writes not of the ‘Canticulis of Conquest’ (line 33) or ‘Laureat tryumphes’ (37) or the ‘Bildyng of Ylioun in many stoory told’ (58), into which categories most of Lydgate’s pagan, classical, secular, laureate and occasional poems might be put, ‘But of Iesu’ (63). Lydgate condemns the representatives of pagan history, even Dares, who had escaped censure in the Troy Book (Prol. 310). Although he does not explicitly indict his own poetry, this reference to Troy cannot help but implicate his own texts. He terms pagan history ‘feynyng’ (78), to be contrasted with his own poetry ‘of Iesu’ (passim). There is no occupatio in these dismissals: the pagans are invoked specifically to emphasize the truth in the religious matters to which the poems immediately turn. In these shorter texts, Lydgate again and again articulates a rejection of the matter of Troy in favour of Christian piety. Finally, there is some evidence that this motif of regret and retraction is visible even in the epic poems themselves; that Lydgate was never really comfortable writing his pagan histories. He voices a weariness at completing the Troy Book: For almost wery, feint & weike I-now Be þe bestes & oxes of my plow, Þe longe day ageyn þe hil to wende. But almost now at þe londes ende Of Troye boke […] (V .2927–31)

This expression of relief at nearing the end of his translation immediately precedes the Christian turn in the text; Lydgate is happy to be able to turn away from this relentless pagan tragedy that cannot convey any Christian redemption. This can be contrasted with, for instance, Gavin Douglas’s use of the same topos in the Eneados, in which the poet’s sense of the ethical and stylistic importance of the text enables him to overcome his exhaustion: ‘thocht I wery was, me list not tyre,/Full laith to leif our wark swa in the myre’ (VII, Prol., 155–56).29 There is no such assurance in Lydgate’s translation. Lydgate’s own weariness fits with the change of attitude towards his task evident in the latter stages of the Troy Book and with his 28 29

Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 269.

Gavin Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid Translated into Scottish Verse by Gavin Douglas, ed. by David Coldwell, Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser., 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1957–64).

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frustrations in the Fall of Princes (discussed below). We might speculate, in view of this, that the extraordinarily slow speed at which the Troy Book was written (around ten lines a day for eight years) is a reflection of an author who would prefer to be writing other things. He was at least distracted by his other Henrician commission, the straightforwardly pious Life of Our Lady. The Siege of Thebes, too, might be seen as an anxious text in its attitude to Lydgate’s own pagan histories. It has been persuasively argued by critics including James Simpson, Scott-Morgan Straker, and Robert Edwards that Lydgate intends his narrator in the Siege of Thebes to fail in order to favour the predestination-based explanation of the tragedy over the moral one.30 Yet Lydgate explicitly identifies himself, by name, as the poem’s narrator. Thus, if Lydgate intends the narrator to fail, then he is to some extent drawing attention to his own failure. This textually self-conscious companion to the Canterbury Tales, which was written without a patron around a year after finishing the Troy Book, should be seen in part as a commentary on Lydgate’s commissioned texts, as the monk expresses dissatisfaction at classical history and secular poetry. The Fall of Princes is Lydgate’s most extended articulation of frustration at translating largely pagan material at the behest of a patron. Its probable composition in the late 1430s places it in the same period as his other texts of ‘resorte’ in old age, particularly the ‘Testament’. Lydgate is forced to pander to Duke Humfrey’s demands in undertaking this translation of Laurent de Premierfait (see especially II.141–61).31 As Daniel Wakelin shows, the Fall of Princes is one of many texts that Duke Humfrey commissioned to ‘flaunt his erudition’.32 It seems likely that he specified the text for translation rather than that Lydgate suggested it. The most telling instance of Duke Humfrey’s intervention in Lydgate’s work is the forced insertion of a passage, despite Lydgate’s reservations (II.978), from Coluccio Salutati’s Declamatio into the part of the text dealing with Lucrece: ‘my lord bad I sholde abide,/By good auys at leiser to translate/The doolful processe off hir pitous fate’

30

James Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies and fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in The Long Fifteenth Century, ed. by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 15–33. Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 52 (2001), 1–21. Robert R. Edwards, ‘Translating Thebes: Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Stow’s Chaucer’, English Literary History, 70 (2003), 319–41. 31

References are to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. by Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS, E. S. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1923–27). 32

Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, p. 32.

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(II.1006–08). Pearsall explains that Lydgate ‘wearily obliged’ by inserting texts belonging to Duke Humfrey into the Fall of Princes, ‘not seeing anything particularly gratifying in it, but glad to humour his patron’.33 Lydgate certainly emphasizes his servility: A, how it is an hertli reioishyng To serue a prynce that list to aduertise Off their seruantis the feithful iust menyng And list considre to guerdone ther seruise. (III.78–81)

There was no need for Lydgate to include these lines in the text at this juncture. His decision to do so is occasioned by a desire to warn readers that he is writing under orders. By comparison, Lydgate’s additions to Guido delle Colonne’s text in the Troy Book are never attributed to Henry V’s intervention. In different circumstances, Lydgate’s involvement of Duke Humfrey in the Fall of Princes might be interpreted as a topos of the commissioned author, but the persistence with which this message of reluctance is communicated throughout Lydgate’s commissioned œuvre is surely beginning to look more deliberate. The Fall of Princes, like the Troy Book, was a monumental undertaking for Lydgate and one in direct conflict with a ‘resorte to religyoun’ that discouraged precisely these types of largely pagan histories. The enormity of the task would have been painfully exacerbated if he was forced to complete the commission by Duke Humfrey (possibly out of financial hardship, as described in his ‘Letter to Gloucester’). The Fall of Princes should be interpreted with due regard for the circumstances of its composition: a poet writing a text most likely specified by his patron. Throughout, Lydgate exhibits an explicitly ‘inert response to the materials’ given to him by Duke Humfrey.34 As Nigel Mortimer notes, ‘Lydgate’s exhortations to princes to regulate their moral behaviour frequently clash with his pathosarousing laments on the inconstancy of Fortune and the ephemerality of human power’.35 These contradictions and expressions of pessimism at the text’s lessons corroborate a poetics of retraction. Perhaps we should take Lydgate’s Retraction even further back, then, to before the Fall of Princes; to 1420, to the end of the Troy Book and to the self-reflexive Siege of Thebes. There is some evidence that 33

Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 245. Also Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 38. 34 35

Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, p. 33.

Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 60, accompanied with numerous examples of these contradictions throughout the text.

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Lydgate was loath to complete such pessimistic, pagan commissions in the first place; that Lydgate was something of a reluctant laureate because he felt a conflict of interest with his religious obligations.36 The recognition of Lydgate’s retraction and of his discomfort with the very subjects that secured his fame has profound implications for delineations of Lydgatean poetics and of fifteenth-century laureate poetics in general. As is well known, Lydgate’s commissions ranged from the evangelically religious and Christian to the uncompromisingly secular and pagan. The charge frequently levelled against him is thus that he was terminally inconsistent and contradictory. Reviews of Nigel Mortimer’s and Maura Nolan’s recent monographs on Lydgate, for instance, observe that he remains ‘a slippery entity’, eluding any ‘grand narrative of his voluminous output’.37 The struggle for Lydgatean critics has been to find a paradigm that takes account of all of the strands of Lydgate’s poetry and poetics. Whilst an awareness of Lydgate’s efforts at retraction does not wholly solve the problem of his alleged inconsistency, it does — in its introduction of the idea that Lydgate was self-aware and self-critical — indicate in strong terms that Lydgate was himself conscious of the contradictions that he had introduced in his earlier poetry. This is a challenge to the arguments of Lee Patterson, Alan Ambrisco, and Paul Strohm that Lydgate was not a poet in control of his material; that his efforts to provide Lancastrian legitimation texts failed because the political situation was ‘a recipe for inevitable cognitive/aesthetic breakdown’.38 If Lydgate was aware of the bind in which his patrons placed him, as his Retraction suggests, then this assumption of political naivety and poetic ineptitude must be revisited. This concurs with the commendable reassessments of fifteenth-century laureate poetics

36

This agrees at least in principle with Seth Lerer’s account of Lydgate’s attitude to laureateship, in which Lydgate contrasts the golden age of Dante and Petrarch with his own ‘debased environment’ in which ‘the business of writing becomes writing about business’ (Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, pp. 37–39). Implicit in Lerer’s account is the same notion of conscious poetic compromise voiced more explicitly here. 37

Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’; Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture; and Anthony Bale, ‘Twenty-First-Century Lydgate’, Modern Philology, 105 (2008), 698–704 (p. 701). See also Nicholas Perkins’s review of Nolan in Notes and Queries, 251 (2006), 554–55 (p. 554). 38

Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England’; Alan S. Ambrisco and Paul Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to the Troy Book’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1995–96), 40–57; Paul Strohm, ‘Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 640–61 (p. 659).

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in the Lydgatean criticism of James Simpson, Scott-Morgan Straker, and Robert Meyer-Lee.39 A thorough redefinition of Lydgatean poetics would require a much fuller survey of Lydgate’s œuvre than is possible in this paper. However, the evidence provided here of Lydgate’s poetic conscience does contribute to the ongoing rehabilitation of Lydgate as a poet whose poetics emerged entirely by design. There is, in conclusion, substantial poetic evidence to support Shirley’s claim that Lydgate underwent a ‘resorte to his religyoun’. In Lydgate’s autobiographical poems, the ‘Testament’ and ‘Prayer in Old Age’, he alludes repeatedly to his regret at the activities of his ‘mydle yeris’. Whilst he never explicitly specifies his own poetry, it is a reasonable assumption that this refers primarily to his poetic activities. His short religious poems directly reject the matter of antiquity in favour of Christian piety, implying a rejection of Lydgate’s own secular and laureate poems. There is a poetics of reluctance running through the epic poems themselves, as Lydgate vents frustration at fulfilling such pagan commissions. The holistic view of Lydgate’s œuvre encouraged in this paper indicates that Lydgate was fully aware of his twin duties as monk and court poet. The composition of pagan histories appears to have been a prerequisite for laureation, but one that Lydgate eventually revolted against. The circumspection with which he treats the types of text with which he originally made his name does constitute, in a much more consistent if less explicit way than Chaucer, a poetic retraction.

39

Besides articles already cited, see particularly: James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 34–67; Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Propaganda, Intentionality, and the Lancastrian Lydgate’ in John Lydgate, ed. by Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 98–128; and Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt.

Part VII The Codex as an Instrument of Reform

D EVOTIONAL C OSMOPOLITANISM IN F IFTEENTH -C ENTURY E NGLAND Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry

I

n reflecting upon the discussion of Arundel’s Constitutions and its supposed effects at the Oxford conference from which this volume proceeds, and in scholarship of fifteenth-century religious writing more generally, the present authors were reminded of remarks made by the late cultural historian Michel de Certeau, in an incomparable account of the politics of reading: Inclined to believe that its own cultural models are necessary for the people in order to educate their minds and elevate their hearts, the elite […] always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it. To assume that is to misunderstand the act of ‘consumption’. This misunderstanding assumes that ‘assimilating’ necessarily means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating and reappropriating it. Between these two possible meanings, a choice must be made, and first of all on the basis of a story whose horizon has to be outlined.1

The following essay will attempt to trace some of the lineaments of that story. It will assess a number of fifteenth-century devotional compilations which demonstrate the vitality of religious debate in the years and decades after Arundel. The books we discuss elide completely the fixities of that pervasive — and all too persuasive — sectarian historiographical binary of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ which has come to define pre-Reformation English religious history. In turn, they evade the efforts of fifteenth-century ecclesiastical authorities for whom their ‘own cultural models are necessary for the people in order to educate their minds and elevate their

1

Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 166.

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hearts’. In other words, these compilations challenge our conceptualizations of how fifteenth-century religious readers and compilers confront the theological issues of their day and they chastise the scholarly tendency to fix ‘mainstream’, ‘conservative’, or ‘radical’ religious thought. For the present authors, their experience of growing up in a sectarian society has provided an invaluable frame of comparison with fifteenth-century devotional controversies. Contrary to the assumption that religious and political sectarianism is predicated on a public rhetoric of oppositional cultural identification to which individuals must pledge allegiance, the practice of everyday life in such societies involves citizenry in regular acts of improvisation, adaptation, evasion, and creativity, as different social situations, their participants and audiences, require strategic self-reinvention, sometimes denying, sometimes affirming membership of one or another camp or tribe, and yet always evading all-out occupation of one political place or another. This is not to deny that for groups of fifteenth-century individuals, the attachment to Wycliffite or clerically orthodox positions did not carry the weight of conviction. But conviction is a state of mind: identifying oneself as ‘Wycliffite’ or ‘orthodox’ brings about no ontological transformation. Scholarship too regularly assumes that taking a position in the devotional controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries effects a material change from one thing — say, Catholic — to another — Lollard, or, later, Protestant, as if ‘Catholic’, ‘Lollard’, or ‘Protestant’ had some sort of qualia immune to mutability. To do so is to succumb to the seductions of martyrology, in which identity is ossified for eternity. But religious and political affiliations were and are subject to the provisionality of circumstance. As the authors recall, real people occupied oppositional positions in sectarian Northern Ireland and acted from those positions to destroy their perceived enemies, with an inexcusable cost in lives. Paradoxically, both ‘republican’ and ‘loyalist’ factions did so by drawing on precisely the same discursive field. A shared discursive field is also in operation for those individuals and groups in fifteenth-century England for whom the ‘threat’ of a tyrannical church or poisonous heresy was absolutely real: thus the counter-reprimands concerning the true Church and real heretics. However, for others, such discourses and the actions they sponsor have to be negotiated tactically. Our suggestion is that fifteenth-century devotional compilations remind us that one’s political and cultural place is never fixed, even if a momentary attachment is inscribed in an act, a declaration — or a book. In the midst of religious controversies, one may occupy a place, but, says de Certeau, places ‘are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in

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reverse, remaining in an enigmatic state […] a place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions’.2 The assumption that the fifteenth century witnesses the contraction of religious speculation made famous by Nicholas Watson’s Speculum essay of 19953 is simply not supported by the material evidence. Instead, it testifies to an altogether different and arguably more significant flowering: that of an appetite for books, their production, circulation, ownership, and reproduction. The fifteenth century is, in fact, the true age of ‘vernacular theology’. As we shall argue, fifteenth-century religious writing, at least as manifested in devotional compilations,4 sponsors what we will term ‘devotional cosmopolitanism’: a radical openness to the suggestions of antithetical theologies which produces among readers a form of ‘hospitable reading’ in which difference is tolerated, re-thought, adapted and appropriated in the interests of re-imagining Christian community in England.

I The books we will discuss here might seem to contradict any simple understandings of ‘hospitable reading’, and have been deliberately chosen because their contents (and the reception of those contents) might be construed as repudiating a notion of devotio-literary openness. Our first book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 789 (hereafter B), contains evidence of censorship, and it is possible to map its expurgations onto a bifurcated divide between ‘orthodox’ and ‘Lollard’, although, we would argue, it would be wrong to do. Even so, there would appear to be nothing particularly ‘hospitable’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ about censorship, wherein readings are rejected, in fact, are sometimes utterly voided because a reader has found text that he or she finds objectionable, or perhaps even dangerous. Censorship, the neutralizing of certain readings, or indeed, the rewriting of passages that dealt with contentious points of theology, is something Havens describes in ‘grey area’ texts, with Lollards apparently adapting devotional literature to reflect their 2

De Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, pp. 108, 117.

3

Watson, ‘Censorship’.

4

Devotional compilations may have been among the ‘best sellers’ of the fifteenth-century book trade, a possibility hinted at by their survival in large quantities (eighty-six in Robert Raymo’s survey of ‘Miscellaneous Manuals’) in spite of the fact that such books often occupy the lower end of the vernacular manuscript record; see A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung, 11 vols (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967–2005), VII (1986), 2495–99.

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distinct beliefs and non-Lollards removing and adapting texts so that ‘their orthodoxy is in no doubt’.5 Here we pause to discuss a related censored book which retains the stark glaring voids and the scratched querying notes that preceded the scraping of text from parchment. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 938 is a large compendium of often reformist texts (though not, by any means, definitively Wycliffite texts) which was carefully audited by a contemporary reader who disagreed with a number of perspectives in the book, noting offending passages by penning ‘quere’ in the margin, and very occasionally scraping particularly problematic lines from the book. Such expurgations are usually accompanied by the marginal note ‘quere ipsa materia’. It is generally the most extreme positions that we associate with Lollardy that are marked — for instance, the refutation of priestly celibacy and instructions for prelates to marry, or the articulation that bishops and priesthood should be replaced by ‘trewe prechours’ of the gospels; several attacks on the friars have also come to the notice of the auditor. Interestingly, the auditor also scrapes out a wholly orthodox passage describing the second part of Holy Church as comprising the souls in purgatory, apparently demonstrating an objection sometimes attributed to Lollards in the fifteenth century.6 Such residual scars suggest an ideological clash, which inevitably draws the liberal scholar into imagining a binary encounter between reactionary reader and heterodox text that precipitated an act of violence against the book. And yet, in pruning only small gobbets of disagreeable readings from the volume whilst retaining so much that remains radical, censorship might actually establish the reformist interests of the reader to a much greater degree than it gives evidence of his or her sectarian difference from the book’s original compiler. In signalling a number of readings that are suspect or voiding text completely, the censor, a meticulously careful reader of the book, simultaneously accommodates the vast majority of the book within his political purview. Such activities might even hint at hybrid variations in Lollard belief, just as such compilations may also reveal myriad blends of radical and neutral interests that were held independently of Lollardy. Such readers ‘poach’ — they meld texts to their own beliefs, rather than being passive recipients of ideology.7 It is thus possible for a compiler or reader of devotional miscellanies to accommodate texts emerging from theologico-political poles: for someone to identify with vehement 5 For these examples of textual adaptation according to non-Lollard or Lollard belief see Havens, ‘Shading the Grey Area’, pp. 337–52 (pp. 344–51, citation from p. 351). 6

For discussion of Lollard responses to Purgatory see Hudson, PR, pp. 309–10.

7

See De Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, p. 116.

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clerical criticism, to believe in the necessity of biblical translation, or even to support the withdrawing of tithes from unfit curates, but simultaneously to believe in the spiritual efficacy of confession to an ordained priest and the corporeal presence of Christ in the eucharistic host. It is also possible that readers might sympathize with certain radical theologies, but not with the hectoring sectarian exploitation of such beliefs by some authors of pastoral literature. We believe the messy inter-penetration of reformist and Wycliffite texts with normative religious literature contrasts powerfully both with scholarly conceptions of Lollardy and with accounts of its suppression. B is a devotional miscellany probably dating to the first half of the fifteenth century. The twenty and some texts are written into the book with little sense of economy, leading Thomas Arnold to speculate that the book was made ‘for some person of rank’.8 The leaves are sized approximately 215 x 150 mm, and the mere eighteen lines of large, beautifully written textura formata script are penned in a text frame that occupies only 130 x 83 mm of each side. A. I. Doyle described the script as fit ‘for some ecclesiastical purpose’9 and the handwriting and commodious dimensions of the eighteen lines of text to each leaf perhaps suggest a scribe practised in penning high-quality liturgical books for the professional religious, although it is not necessarily the case that B was itself produced within, or for, a religious house. There is a fascinating blend of vernacular and Latin contents that signals, typically for such collections, a book intended to service a number of functions, from facilitating basic catechesis in texts such as the ‘ABC on the Passion’, couched as a work for ‘children to scole’,10 to works demanding more sophisticated readers, such as the Speculum peccatoris and Bernardine tracts in Latin.11 The book opens with one of a number of Middle English translations of the short pseudo-Bonaventuran treatment of the Last Supper and Passion, 8

Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III (1971), xiii.

9

Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English’, II, 36–37, n. 20. The book was in the hands of lay readers by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century judging by the writing at its rear. 10

IMEV 1483; closely related to IMEV 1523, in London, British Library, MS Harley 3594, and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18. 7. 21 (fols 152r–156r (fol. 152r)); introductory section from Harley 3594 in Reliquiae antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, Illustrating Chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language, ed. by Thomas Wright and J. O. Halliwell (London: Pickering, 1841–43), pp. 62–63. 11

The Latin items, which break the run of quire signat