For many years, the study of Wycliffism and lollardy has been the study of what Wycliffites or lollards rejected: transubstantiation, church hierarchy, pilgrimages. Using inquisitorial records, clear lists are often easy to produce. Such lists, though, do not necessarily reveal what would have been appealing about Wycliffism or lollardy. In Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif, Fiona Somerset persuasively argues, as she has been doing over the past few years, that the best way to understand the positive doctrine of lollardy is to read the texts that lollard writers produced. According to Somerset, these texts develop a religious identity, based on feeling and affectivity, that is at once distinct from and yet similar to contemporary religious writings.

In her introduction, Somerset discusses the nature of lollard writings. To decide what would constitute a lollard writing, Somerset suggests that they “are influenced by the writings of John Wyclif” (5). She identifies a “core group” of Middle English texts that translate or cite Wyclif. She then describes other writings that “exhibit strong similarities” with the core group (6). While Somerset recognizes that naming a work as “lollard” or “lollard affiliated” is an interpretive move that scholars might dispute, she convincingly explains her choices.

Following the introduction, the book contains seven chapters divided into three parts. The first part explores, over the course of three chapters, the practices that lollard writers wanted their readers to undertake. In her first chapter, Somerset focuses on the cycle of sermons contained in Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 74. This collection uses the Sunday gospel sermons from the English Wycliffite Sermons, but expands upon them to provide pastoral teachings. lollard writers generally agree with their contemporaries about the content of pastoral teachings, namely the items included in Pecham's syllabus, though the two groups tend to emphasize different aspects of the syllabus. Most notably, Somerset argues that distinct from their contemporaries, lollard writers emphasize the importance of “loving together,” or following pastoral teachings in a way that allows them to communally love God.

The commandments, also referred to as “God's law” or “Christ's law,” are among the most commonly commented upon pastoral items in lollard writings. In chapter 2, Somerset turns her attention to lollard commentaries on the gospel precepts as well as the Ten Commandments. She observes that all of the extant Middle English commentaries on the gospel precepts are either lollard or lollard affiliated. Again, she emphasizes that the distinguishing mark of these commentaries is that they depict love as the act of a community.

In her third chapter, Somerset addresses the question of lollard prayer. One of the main ways that lollard writers talk about prayer is as a way of life. Wyclif expresses this idea in his writings, but it is also present in earlier Christian teaching. In addition, lollard writers, like their contemporaries, tend to privilege the Pater Noster as a prayer, and they produced a number of commentaries on it. Somerset suggests, in agreement with Matti Peikola, that these commentaries provide catechesis in the course of their commentary.

In chapters 4 and 5 in part 2, Somerset examines the ways that lollard writers wanted their readers to feel and how those writers taught people to change and shape their feelings. In chapter 4, she focuses on the way that lollard writers use narrative forms to train their readers to “feel like saints” (137). lollard confessions of faith often narrate or recommend that a person imitate the behavior of a character or place themselves within a biblical narrative. This technique is perhaps no more obvious than in the autohagiographical works the Letter of Richard Wyche and the Testimony of William Thorpe. Chapter 5 examines the ways that lollard writers shape and comment on the biblical text in their writings. Far from being literalists in their presentation or interpretation, they often interpolate the biblical text or offer only a partial rendering of the text. Somerset skillfully examines interpretive biblical summaries that have oftentimes been ignored as a source for understanding lollard teachings about scripture.

In the third part, containing chapters 6 and 7, Somerset emphasizes the important role that metaphor and imagination play in lollard writings. In chapter 6, she explores lollard biblical hermeneutics and the ways that those overlap with and differ from contemporary hermeneutics. The final chapter examines lollard forms of living. She argues convincingly for dating Book to a Mother to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and, thus, in conversation with other lollard writings.

In her conclusion, Somerset reexamines the “orthodox” text the Fyve Wyttes and suggests that it is more in congruence with her expanded idea of lollard pastoral theology than with a tolerant orthodoxy, as has been previously suggested. Throughout her book, Somerset demonstrates that lollard writers were concerned with pastoral formation in ways similar to their contemporaries. While emphases change when a lollard writer adapts or responds to a mainstream work, the pastoral and devotional content remains broadly the same. As we look more closely at the things that lollard writers care about, we might, as Somerset invites, begin to learn more about the social groups that gathered around the texts that they left behind.

Somerset's method for reading lollard writings offers an important corrective to a field long under the shadow of inquisitorial records. However, this book is valuable, not only to scholars of Wycliffism, lollardy, and heresy, but to any scholar or advanced graduate student interested in late medieval religion or vernacular texts in England. In Somerset's account, there are not just grey areas between “orthodox” and “heretical” texts in England but rather places of interdependence and influence. This book is an important and necessary invitation to begin to attend to those places.