Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's recently published work of intellectual and literary history, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England, places medieval English religious thought squarely within a European context and at the same time challenges scholarly views about Wycliffite dominance in dissenting thought. The book's claims are bold and the argument complex; the Journal of British Studies has invited four scholars in relevant fields to discuss its impact and the challenges it raises.

Kerby-Fulton makes three interrelated arguments about the body of religious literature she terms “revelatory theology.” First, this revelatory theology is deeply influenced by the reception of Continental writing, including texts by followers of the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore, the intellectual father of the Spiritual Franciscans; by Hildegard of Bingen and her interpreters; and by participants in the Free Spirit movement and the Modern Devotion of the later Middle Ages. Second, the revelatory tradition comprises a body of dissenting texts independent from, but as important as, Wycliffite or Lollard writings. So much scholarship has focused on Lollardy that the centrality of other texts and traditions has been overlooked. Third, revelatory theology, while controversial indeed, nevertheless was tolerated in practice by the medieval English state and church; censorship, attempted on occasion, did not work and, indeed, could hardly be very effective in a manuscript culture. Mysticism and apocalypticism became means by which dissenting voices, at least for a while, could find a place to be heard within what “modern scholars too easily assume to be the monolithic power structure of the medieval church” (8). Late medieval English culture, she concludes, was far more pluralist than we have thought. An important feature of Kerby-Fulton's argument is her use of codicological evidence, both for transmission and influence (e.g., the way prophetic texts are included in the same manuscripts as canonical texts reveals something about the way the latter were read and understood) and for censorship (the excision of controversial passages or the use of annotations and glosses to self-censor by muting their impact).