Aside from the crusades, there may be no phenomenon more associated with medieval religion and more disdained by modern opinion than the inquisition. Now nearly synonymous with interrogation, the mere term “inquisition” evokes institutional repression and persecution of scientists, free thinkers, and heretics, of anyone, in other words, who dares question church or state doctrine. Yet, as the editors and contributors to this collection make clear, the practice of inquisitio emerged from and developed within a complex set of ecclesiastical and juridical contexts in the years following the Fourth Lateran Council. And, attending to these larger cultural contexts complicates many of our long-held assumptions about inquisition. Rather than being solely a strict system for ferreting out heresy and prosecuting dissenters, this book shows that inquisition was often a flexible set of practices that emphasized correction, advocated discernment, and even created new spaces for theological inquiry, self-expression, and literary invention. Like confession (its more private sibling), medieval inquisition was a dialogic mode that was generative as well as restrictive, enabling opportunities for personal and social identity formation. Focusing on the cultural effects of inquisitional processes in England, this collection offers an important and novel set of studies of the public and private significance of inquisition, confession, and the dynamics of religious dissent in England from the late Middle Ages through the early years of the English reformations.

The book is falls into two parts. Its first three chapters examine the legal and ecclesiastic contexts in which the practice of inquisition takes shape in medieval England, with the remaining chapters building on this background to explore the ways in which Middle English literature engages, reflects upon, and appropriates inquisitional practices and modes. Henry Ansgar Kelly's impressive opening essay surveys the juridical and historical terrain of inquisition in medieval England, considering its rise in the ecclesiastical courts, its association with the prosecution of heretics, and its emphasis on prior public knowledge (publica fama) of the accused person's crime. Edwin Craun's chapter, on the other hand, explores the practice of disclosing another's private sin to the authorities, showing that for medieval pastoral writers and canonists such denunciation was an alternate way of beginning the process of inquisition, and one that aimed to move the accused to penance. The next chapter, Ian Forrest's essay on lollardy, inquisition, and English provincial constitutions, finds a revival of provincial canon law in the wake of heresy in England. Ultimately, as Forrest shows, “for English churchmen, inquisition was an intellectually creative activity and an activity inseparable from their broader pastoral and judicial operations” (59).

As the remaining essays in this collection make clear, this creative potential extended far beyond legal culture. After establishing the historical and juridical contexts of and issues surrounding inquisition in England, the volume turns toward the literary engagements with it. Focusing primarily on the writings associated with John Oldcastle's heresy trial, Diane Vincent considers how the publication of both inquisitorial questions and the defendants' responses were used to shape public opinion about the process. Yet, inquisitorial questions and answers also revealed how difficult it was to accurately access the defendant's interiority, an issue taken up in the following essay. As Flannery and Walter show, the representation of interiority in Middle English pastoral texts and poetry is sometimes shaped by the public judicial forum as well as the private penitential spaces of confession and conscience. Next, Jenny Lee explores the representation of inquisition and confession in the work of a single author, Thomas Usk. Drawing on both Usk's Appeal and his Testament, Lee elegantly demonstrates that Usk uses writing both to perform confession and resist the coercive discourses of the inquisitorial system and in so doing treats inquisition as “as a discourse, rather than a legal procedure” (97). James Wade offers a study of confession and inquisition in Middle English romances, focusing on how the Erle of Tolous employs inquisitional and confessional rhetoric to call attention to the interiority of its protagonist, Beulybon. These confessions, like those of other contemporary romances, Wade demonstrates, craft “exemplary selves” and drive the larger narratives (114). Genelle Gertz considers how some defendants in medieval and early modern heresy trials appropriated the rhetoric and practice of the abjuration as a platform for first-person narration of their beliefs and as a way of ensuring their dissent found its way into the written record. In a somewhat similar vein, Ruth Ahnert focuses on the appropriation of the rhetorical forms and stances of the trials by defendants, examining the use of bias in representations of interrogation in sixteenth-century heresy trials.

As this brief overview might suggest, and as Emily Steiner notes in her closing response, this volume is driven by an interest in what inquisition has “to do with imagination” and invention (164). It compellingly demonstrates how inquisition moved from the courts to the culture where it became esthetically and intellectually generative for late-medieval writers and thinkers more generally. It should be required reading for scholars working on the relationships of legal culture, penance, dissent, and literature in late medieval England, but also to those working on the inquisition in continental contexts. Not only does it offer a fresh look at the relationship between legal and ecclesiastical discourses and literary practices in late-medieval England, but it also models, as Steiner insightfully comments, how attentiveness to the subtleties of the inquisition in text and practice “confront us with our own desires to inhabit the past as prosecutors and advocates” (166). This book thus admirably illuminates how important it is to give a “fair trial” to the inquisition itself by moving beyond its reputation for institutional repression to attend to the complexities of its motives, practices, and cultural effects.