Over the last fifteen years, literary scholars’ and historians’ assessments of the importance of John Wyclif and the Lollard movement have diverged significantly. Among historians, the majority has retreated from the once dominant view, exemplified by the work of A. G. Dickens, that Lollards were in some way a harbinger of Protestant modernity. Many later medieval historians, although by no means all, now follow instead Eamon Duffy and Richard Rex, who assess the importance and influence of the Lollards in late medieval English religious and social thought to be relatively slight. By contrast, over the last fifteen years among scholars of late medieval English literature, Wyclif and Wycliffites have come to assume central importance in their understanding of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as seen particularly in the work of Anne Hudson, David Aers, Rita Copeland, Nicholas Watson, and Fiona Somerset. Katherine Little's new book, written originally as a thesis under the supervision of David Aers, follows this direction of literary scholarship: in her book, the Wycliffites become central to debates about the nature of the self in late medieval England, their challenges to traditional orthodox understandings of self-formation shifting the terms of discussion in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parson's Tale and even in the virulently anti-Wycliffite writings of John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve.

For Little, the key to understanding the particular historical moment with which she is concerned—the period between the rise of Wycliffism in the 1380s and Archbishop Arundel's crackdown of 1409—lies in contemporary questioning of the place of confession as the foundation for medieval understandings of the self. Wycliffites both reflected and fostered late medieval English concerns about the inadequacies of the language of confession, sin, and contrition for revealing interiority. Little argues that Wycliffites, especially in their sermon cycles, provided an alternative model of Christian identity, promoted through lay, vernacular instruction and based on scriptural models of resistance. The first two chapters of the book focus on this Wycliffite reform of lay instruction and its implications for the definition of the self, using the English Wycliffite Sermons and The Testimony of William Thorpe. Little argues that these texts challenge traditional discourses of sin and confession, offering new ways for the Christian to define the self, to reveal the interior, through narratives of resistance. In the third and fourth chapters, Little examines how her insights regarding self-definition and the language of confession and contrition might shift readings of Chaucer's Parson's Tale, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes. She finds that each responds to the Wycliffite challenge but in different ways, reflecting a chronological divide in late medieval English thinking precipitated by the Wycliffite texts. Hoccleve's text, the latest of the three, reflects assimilation of the Wycliffite challenge to confessional language despite its open hostility to Lollardy.

Little's book will be read with great interest by late medieval English literature scholars, at whom it is squarely aimed—the discussion is premised on familiarity with both the recent literature on early Wycliffism and the texts she discusses. Little also engages almost exclusively with that specialist scholarship and relatively little beyond it. This is most strikingly apparent in the afterword, where she does not—as the framing of the introduction suggests she will—consider more broadly the implications of her important arguments about self-formation/definition for at least early modern English literature, if not for medieval and early modern European culture more generally. Instead, she does little more than tentatively suggest that her approach might fruitfully be used to study John Lydgate and other fifteenth-century writers. For those immersed in Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, a new way to understand the texts written by those men seems like an end in itself, its importance obvious. For those outside that field, however, it is the broader connections that are of interest: between the ideologies expressed in texts and the lived lives of late medieval people, between the ideas of selfhood Little finds in Wycliffite texts and other Western conceptualizations of the self (only briefly addressed in the introduction, with a challenge to Michel Foucault, but otherwise left implicit). Little has missed an opportunity here to “cross over”—to reach the broader audiences of medievalists and European cultural historians who would find her ideas interesting and important.