Books under Suspicion stands as a major literary contribution to the historiography of late medieval England. It will be read by historians as well as literary critics, and will challenge both groups to rethink their perspectives on the period. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton brings not only a fresh vision to existing areas, but opens up new vistas for future research and draws attention to the exciting potential of some neglected methodological tools. In this piece, I hope that Books under Suspicion will be suitably honored if I (1) highlight some particularly powerful topics, then (2) briefly mention a few specific areas where I would demur, and finally (3) raise a particular theme that might present one future path leading out from the work.

The specifics that Kerby-Fulton draws into view—the contours of revelatory writing, the hitherto neglected importance of the Olivian tradition in England, the fact that orthodox fears were not solely focused on Wycliffism, and the imprint that all this left on Chaucer and Langland—are all of great importance. But I was particularly interested in what the book does methodologically, in both empirical and conceptual terms. Its confident utilization of not only the literary but also the historical realm attests to the potential power of interdisciplinarity and demonstrates that work on the cutting edge can be inspired not only by the intellectual stimulation of critical theory, but also by the complex demands of the archive. Who would have thought that the simple act of compiling a chronology could carry such suggestive power? Who would have suspected that the painstaking treatment of texts as material culture would provide such dazzling intellectual insight? I would love to see Kerby-Fulton's careful enquiry into where, how, and why manuscripts suppress texts extended to a wider European context. What do French or German or Spanish manuscripts of the same period delete, conceal, or otherwise treat nervously? One suspects that such a project would further reveal an uneven terrain of considerable intellectual complexity, something we currently glimpse only at more lurid moments of condemnation and struggle. Kerby-Fulton already makes considerable moves against what one might call “insular insularity,” the assumption of English exceptionalism. National myopia is a sin to which all histories are liable, but late medieval English religious history is perhaps particularly prone. The continental usage of the term “Lollard”—or rather “Lollaert,” as Kerby-Fulton emphasizes its probable Dutch origin—provides a wonderful example of how a dilation of focus opens up new perspectives. So too does an emphasis on the shared origins of inquisitorial procedure, which Kerby-Fulton correctly demonstrates links English experience to that of the rest of Europe. One notes also shared strands of faith, such as the potential Dutch influences on Margery Kempe, facilitated by her home town's cross-Channel trading connections.Footnote 1

For Books under Suspicion the most important theme of this kind is of course the shared intellectual heritage of revelatory theology, and further work will be extremely welcome on how these currents connect and intersect across Europe. But Kerby-Fulton is also pointing the way ahead for social histories of late medieval English religion. The only comparative study in this field that I can think of—and more a work of ecclesiastical than religious history—is Robert Brentano's The Two Churches. Footnote 2 If Books under Suspicion does nothing other than provoke more such reflections, it will change the historiographical landscape in profound and important ways. Finally, with a difference in emphasis to which I shall return below, I was inspired by Kerby-Fulton's rejection of what she calls the “Foucauldian gloom” beloved by literary study in this area. Depictions of the Church and polity in late medieval England (and indeed elsewhere) that assume vast, efficient, monolithic and hegemonic power wielded from above—against which we can position our heroic Lollards, or other dissenters such as Margery Kempe—have increasingly struck me as inadequate. The complexity of medieval repression, tolerance, and control that Kerby-Fulton seeks to evoke is a much more productive strategy for reading both past heroes and villains. Ecclesiastical authorities may have desired control over the contours of faith, but in practice repression was subject to shifting currents of secular support, lay enthusiasm, individual episcopal innovation in procedure, and the potential distraction of other diocesan matters. And even in conception, “repression” does not adequately describe the mentality of the period: as Kerby-Fulton here demonstrates, there were shifting areas of potential danger, which incorporated, but were not limited to, Wycliffite theology. “Danger” does not here imply silence but, rather, areas where academic thought had to tread warily, and discussion move cautiously and somewhat indirectly—not least because the precise limits of “orthodoxy” were not pre-given, but being set via this very process.

In all these areas, therefore, I salute Books under Suspicion. Three notes of dissent can now be registered, though in a spirit of exploration rather than correction. First, the argument that late medieval England imposed a “visual orthodoxy” on religious imagery (317) rests on the case of the “crux horribilis” opposed by the canons of St. Paul's in London in 1306. As Paul Binski has shown, there may be familiar undercurrents of shrine competition lying behind this apparent assertion of aesthetic repression.Footnote 3 But more importantly, recent work by Jean-Claude Schmitt suggests that this may well be the only occasion of religious art being “censored” by the authorities, anywhere in Europe; in fact, art was remarkably free from external constraint and repression, more so than any other form of cultural production in the Middle Ages.Footnote 4

Second, I am not entirely persuaded by some of the contexts into which Kerby-Fulton places Margery Kempe. The suggestion that Arundel's “anti-revelatory” constitutions and Archbishop Scrope's execution played a role in provoking worries about Margery in York (247) is intriguing, but one notes that Kempe was visiting the city a decade after his death, and that the initial disquiet at her presence in the city, as noted in her Book at any rate, was connected to her own reputation (York and Lynn having strong trading links, the possibility of Margery's fame having preceded her is perfectly possible). Subsequent problems she experienced in the region were explicitly linked to the aftermath of Oldcastle's Rising and Margery's interference with the marriage politics of the nobility. While supporting the drift of arguments that further connect Kempe to continental strands of piety, I am also not sure that one needs to limit the discourse of “spiritual admonishment” to the New Devout of the Low Countries (255–56). As Edwin Craun has recently argued, such ideas can be found in the mainstream of late medieval Christianity and were potentially the source of Margery's authority in such matters.Footnote 5 Nor, third, do I believe in the presence of “Free Spiritism” in England as a source of ideas or justifications about sex (260). It does seem possible that fears of this heresy were sometimes projected onto certain statements made before English inquisitors, but the idea of an actual influence in beliefs is doubtful in the extreme—not least because, as Robert Lerner demonstrated some years ago, the sense of a Free Spirit “sect” capable of disseminating ideas was essentially an inquisitorial invention.Footnote 6 There seem to have been several overlapping strands in what English deponents actually said regarding sex: challenges to the importance (or de facto existence) of clerical chastity, perhaps associated particularly with one form of Lollardy; challenges to clerical sacramentalization of marriage, with a similar association but also doubtless resonant in wider lay contexts; and justifications for imagined or real sexual freedom/licentiousness (depending on one's viewpoint) that only intermittently came under clerical scrutiny as potential heresy rather than run-of-the-mill sins of lust. Those Beguines or other persecuted “Free Spirits” in Germany seem to discuss the possibility of sinless sex as a kind of limit-case demonstration of their transcendent spiritualism. Nothing like this can be seen in England, and English evidence regarding sexual licentiousness does not, in my view, suggest any influence from such ideas, any more than early fourteenth-century statements in southern France that if sex is fun it is not a sin need imply either Cathar or Free Spirit influence.Footnote 7

My doubts here are those of a sociocultural historian looking at what is at heart an intellectual history. The ideas discussed are undoubtedly interesting and important, but they can too quickly be taken as enjoying a hegemonic importance and influence over all cultural expression, regardless of other social or political factors. And this leads me finally to an area that the intellectual history of Books under Suspicion lightly touches upon, and in so doing will hopefully inspire more historical exploration. “Censorship in a manuscript culture is especially difficult to enforce,” Kerby-Fulton argues at several points (397), and within the literary intellectual realm with which she is primarily concerned she is absolutely right. But there is another perspective from which this diagnosis is arguably less valid. It is true that the confiscation, censorship, and repression of manuscripts were not easy policies to implement, not consistently desired, and perhaps not even much done in practice. But another, wider form of censorship was the attempt to stop those views reaching a broader audience—not through writing, but through oral delivery. And here we glimpse a much stronger attempt at control. For, as Kerby-Fulton also notes in passing, “the more public—that is, the more exposed to the laity—censurable ideas were, the more severely they were punished” (137). This is an essential pillar of the argument, but one not yet fully explored. In this wider sense of “publicness,” manuscript culture had a form of built-in censorship through its limited circulation and reproduction, one which later print culture, in its mature seventeenth-century form at any rate, would explode. The other part of the story is, then, the efforts of authorities to control preaching as well as writing—and, on certain areas, to limit lay discussion. The first article of Archbishop Arundel's 1409 Constitutions, the control of unlicensed preachers, is indebted in this sense to several centuries of intermittent concern over what laypeople might be hearing and discussing, and it is clear that even in the late fourteenth century, it was not only Wycliffite preachers who worried the authorities. Similarly, while ecclesiastical concerns over lay Eucharistic doubt and other sacramental matters were given a considerable urgency by Wycliffite statements in the late 1370s, they did not originate in anti-Wycliffite literature or legislation.

One might argue, in fact, that for much of the Middle Ages, religious authorities were fairly relaxed about the limited circulation of the written word, including in the vernacular, but much more concerned with the wider dissemination of potentially radical ideas through preaching (an activity which also, of course, usurped a key clerical role). Thus it was preaching that hereticated the Waldensian sect, rather than their interest in radical poverty, scriptural literalism, and vernacular bibles. The case of vernacular bible readers in Metz in 1198, brought to the attention of Innocent III by the local bishop, aroused particular concern over preaching and lay discussion of faith; but Innocent thought their reading could continue unchecked as long as limited to a small group of litterati.Footnote 8 As Shannon McSheffrey has recently demonstrated, the social status of a group of readers could make a substantial difference to how religious authority perceived their activities.Footnote 9 The world of texts could, as Kerby-Fulton shows, admit a considerable degree of intellectual flexibility under various circumstances. In this realm, one might in fact demur from her passing comment that “ambiguity … was the last thing the medieval church wanted when confronted with claims to visionary experience” (23). In true Foucauldian fashion (the Foucault of reversed expectations, rather than the “and ever it was worse and worse” Foucault imagined by some of his interpreters) one could invert the argument: within intellectual debate, the church was delighted to be confronted by ambiguity, because it provided the need for interpretation, intercession, codification, the whole intellectual apparatus of power that constitutes a major plank of ecclesiastical authority. Where divergence and dissent took on a very different hue, however, was when it escaped from this intellectual sphere and became of concern to secular as well as religious authority. The revelatory discourse uncovered by Kerby-Fulton resonates here too, in the radical political impetus popular groups could potentially draw from the (Joachite and Hildegardian) idea of reform here on earth (46)—a phenomenon present throughout the fifteenth century in parts of medieval Germany, and arguably also of considerable importance in many earlier popular risings. For the wider realm of repression and censorship in late medieval England, it is thus perhaps 1381 that looms largest; and, as one of the opening stories in Books under Suspicion makes clear (5), the chancellor of Oxford's willingness to oppose the archbishop of Canterbury, but not the king, the ultimate issue in repression came down to the role played by secular authority.

In a passage that discusses the English translation of Porete's work, by the mysterious author known only as “M.N.,” Kerby-Fulton notes that “an orthodoxy/heterodoxy binary is simply not sophisticated enough to understand Middle English reception of this text” (289). One can but agree, and a great strength of Books under Suspicion is the degree to which this insight underlies its analysis of the whole landscape, not only this particular work. My comments here have ultimately sought to support, explore, and expand that analysis, and I thank the author for the opportunity her wonderful book has provided for so doing.