Books under Suspicion, as the full title of my book announces, is about the reception of revelatory writing, that is, writing that lays claim to revealed origin. Revelatory writing comes in myriad genres (listed on 20–29), ranging from literature through theology, and it has provoked a spectrum of attitudes from tolerance to anathema, plus a full range of censorship types (15–20, 205). Since Wycliffism did not much foster revelatory genres, apart from the evidence of two early maverick writers, my aim was to get at questions of pluralism and non-Wycliffite dissent in late medieval England, a subject hitherto not really studied. I am honored that the historians assembled in this panel took the time and trouble to read a book that is not short and particularly that they welcomed it as new intellectual history. I am also a tad relieved that not one of the four respondents has added unnoticed information to the sources I knew. They have, however, set the material in exciting new contexts: in relation to earlier medieval English history (Elliott), to Europe (Arnold and Elliott), and to Reformation England (Lucas). Anne Hudson offers a selective reading of some sections on Wycliffism, mainly raising small queries, though I had hoped, with her participation, to have Wycliffism emerge as the fourth large context. None of these queries touches the book's main arguments, however, and overall I am grateful for the enthusiasm with which those arguments were received. My goal here is both to review the larger points in the responses briefly and, more important, to offer some new directions and material for future research on non-Wycliffite censorship issues in England.
Writing history involving literary sources is not easy (I particularly admire Lucas's agility in this regard), and I am especially grateful to Elliott for her generous comments on literary and historical dexterity—dual magistrationes she herself commands. As a lifelong inmate of English departments, I am humbled, and most especially by Arnold's comparison of Books under Suspicion to Robert Brentano's Two Churches. If so, it rests only dwarflike on the shoulders of that gentle giant. But like Brentano, I have tried to do something here that has not been done before; I have tried to survey (because one volume would be inadequate to fully study) how revelatory writing was received in late medieval England and how it might have influenced our poets—two different topics that sometimes overlap and very often do not. The question of the elusive relationship between self-censorship and poetic revision raised by Hudson, I did actually take up at length in the Introduction, noting that self-censorship is only one possible reason that poets revised their work or used dream vision to disguise it (I list six reasons in total, among which escaping censorship is only the last [21]).
Central to the book is the challenge to the “doxy” that, as Elliott amusingly puts it, could “allow reform thinking of whatever persuasion to share center stage with dear old Wycliffe” (754). Wyclif was not even first; not even Father Sheehan's English Templars were the first. But, as I am very careful to say in the Introduction, Wycliffism “dominates the official records. Undeniably, no other suspect doctrine of the period managed to draw upon the same potent configuration of political and ecclesiastical forces and fears” (12). Hudson somehow missed this point, both misstating the book's thesis and also overstating its transmission evidence for non-Wycliffite heretical materials, like Joachimism and Free Spiritism.Footnote 1 Elliott, Arnold, and Lucas clearly understand that I am supplementing modern Wycliffite history, not supplanting it. On this point, Arnold kindly notes the power of constructing a chronology chart (748). What I mainly remember was the enormous amount of archaeology it took, the difficult decisions; some things are included because they are major reference points for how the field currently thinks of its history; for example, I mention Claydon, though he was a Wycliffite, because his is the best-known case in our field of prosecution explicitly for books. Any chart, of course, is an imperfect image of history, and mine mentions many cases I could not actually discuss in a book on revelatory writing—a large enough category already. I was able to point out, however, that Continental waves created ripple effects on the white cliffs of Dover, beginning with the Cathars (who did make it intermittently to England but did not survive there). I offered a brief sketch of the ripple effects over nearly three centuries in the hope that someone not limited to my particular topic would take up these shipwrecked European waifs and bring them further ashore for examination. But, as the chart shows, there were also homegrown cases of non-Wycliffite heresy, and I would like to offer here a list of a few (most only mentioned in Books under Suspicion) for further study or simply as a way of broadening the picture:
1. Sheriff's inquisitions of heretics: The early development of English common law allowed for an alternative to ecclesiastical prosecution, and some cases are known where secular and ecclesiastical powers fought over the right to handle heresy cases (e.g., see Chronology for 1236 and 1284).
2. Library regulations: There were controls not only on what could be removed from a library (obviously) but also on what could be added. So, for instance, at Syon Abbey, the Additions to the Rule explicitly state under “most greuous defautes” both the destruction of books and the adding of “any thynge in the comen registyrs or comen bokes” without general approval. Moreover, one of the bishop's prerogatives at visitation was perusal of the “inuentory or register of the bokes.”Footnote 2 (Of course, given the flexibility of medieval booklet and florilegium design, a great deal could still have slid past the bishop.)
3. Judaism: Several cases, including a few of apostasy from Christianity to Judaism, appear in the records, usually with brutal results. But England, long considered a uniformly hostile place after the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, was home nonetheless to significant numbers of Joachite manuscripts, a mode of thought that tended to be more pro-Jewish than others (see, e.g., Case Study 1).Footnote 3
4. Sorcery: Often, like Judaism, sorcery is connected with sacrilege, apostasy, and doubt in inquisitional records; there are several instances of heavy-handed church intervention in late medieval England. Only those directly relevant to revelatory or literary texts (like Alice Perrers; see Chronology 1376) are mentioned in Books under Suspicion, but sources abound (see, e.g., the confession about charms cast with threads made before the archbishop of York in 1481).Footnote 4
5. Ireland: The complex medieval colonial history exacerbated heresy prosecution (as it did the vicious rise of antimendicantism there), accounting in part for the large number of Irish burnings (see Chronology 1279, 1324, 1327, and 1353).
6. Doubt: A striking fact is that doctrinal doubt accounts for the sizable majority of pre-Wycliffite cases of heresy prosecution in England; sacrilege, apostasy, and doctrinal “aberration” on topics like the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, the Real Presence, and so forth (see, e.g., Chronology 1353, 1355, and 1369). This seems to me important: homegrown heresy, when it was not just the product of mental illness (as some sad cases appear to have been), was a cultural expression of something that is usually only admitted to in orthodox sources after a declaration of having overcome it.
The history of English medieval heresy, then, is in part a history of religious doubt. This, too, has been skewed in our emphasis on Wycliffism as a unicum and primarily a bastion of reform issues.
Elliott wonders aloud about precisely this topic, especially the fact that in England “the impetus toward radical church reform should take so long to surface” (755). Although reform itself did not take quite so long as her engaging narrative suggests (the Gregorian Reform did have early major proponents in England, including Lanfranc, Anselm, and Becket), Elliott is speaking here, I believe, about radical church reform. This too England had, if not in the larger screen formats Europe did, and had it in part, as Elliott observes, courtesy of the importation of Hildegard. To stick with women writers alone for the sake of brevity, not only were Hildegard and Elizabeth of Schönau (the latter also popular in England) imported to carry the reformist (and, incidentally, anti-Cathar) message at least by 1200, but we also have a homegrown instance of radical reformism, even before the arrival of Hildegard. This—I am proud to say—was also a woman: Christina of Markyate (1096–ca. 1155?). The anonymous author of her Vita takes every opportunity to align Christina with the Reformist camp—in fact, there is strong reason to believe that the motivation for the writing down of her Vita was in part to promote the Reform. As Dorothea Todd has shown, the politics of the Vita are complex (Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman clerics vie for power, for instance), but those who defend Christina are always fervently on the side of reform issues: episcopal probity, independence from lay interference, the new eremitical poverty, and the latest ideas of marriage as consensual.Footnote 5 Just in the reception of these three great twelfth-century women, we can get a window, conveniently small for present purposes, on England's clerical participation in Continental reformist trends. As Elliott notes, however, Hildegard may well have been alone, or nearly so, in her innovative connection of disendowment to clerical chastisement. (John of Rupescissa and Bridget of Sweden, both popular in England, make similar claims, but, as I discuss elsewhere, they were themselves influenced by Hildegard.) Hildegard's position required considerable finesse on the part of a heavily endowed Benedictine abbess, and she achieved it by stressing that only the bad abbeys would come under the Divine rod. But that sort of finesse was largely lost on later users, and, as Elliott rightly notes, turned on its head by the antimendicant propagandists (all conservatives on religious property rights). That disendowment in England was an important topic long before even Ockham (443 n. 44), quite apart from Hildegard, can be easily epitomized in a sardonic pictorial symbol used in Exchequer cataloging of documents relating to church reform and disendowment: it shows an image of a bishop (Becket?) with a sword cleaving his skull. This official symbol dates from at least the time of Archbishop Pecham—that is, a hundred years before Wyclif.Footnote 6 This is indeed, to use Elliott's phrase, a robust anticlericalism.
The survival of such satirical Exchequer cataloging symbols is proof positive that book production in a manuscript culture militated against effective censorship. Arnold observes in addition that perhaps the most important censorship was exercised over preaching, a form of officially controlled discourse (“It was preaching,” he notes, “that hereticated the Waldensian sect” [751]). I agree, but this raises some interesting considerations. The twelfth century was, of course, a different world—a world much more heavily dependent on orality (authors still dictated to secretaries, and reading practices were viva voce). These were factors that, as Paul Saenger has suggested, tamped down the development of intellectual heresies in particular until the advent of silent reading in the fourteenth century. As a genre that rarely took in controversial visionary materials, homilies do not figure much in my book. But is it an accident that some of the most famous sermons are relatively inflammatory: Wimbledon’s, FitzRalph’s, and Brinton’s, to name but a few? Apparently, there was a certain tolerance for anticlerical (or intraclerical) polemic, even from the pulpit. I mention this because it gives me a chance to plug the half of the book's subtitle that gets a great deal less attention: tolerance.
Literature is the trickiest of the genres and perhaps, as such, buys a good deal of tolerance for its authors. Scott Lucas makes this very point, insisting that visionary texts are literary texts and subject to multiple interpretations. As he shows, in 1551 Thomas Churchyard overtly exploited visionary literary ambiguity in his own defense, inspired by a prophecy from Piers Plowman involving “Dawe þe dykere [digger]” (B.VI.330), which I think Churchyard must have read in Crowley's third printing.Footnote 7 As a Langland scholar, I cannot help but wonder if we are dealing here with a pen name, an allegory implying an alter ego (the kind of digging done in churchyards being suitably foreboding for reformist prophecy). Surprisingly, given the political firestorm Churchyard's prophecy invoked, “Dauie” in Piers Plowman is only a fleetingly mentioned type figure for those who will die unless slothful manual laborers reform in time to prevent famine and divine chastisement. The foreboding quality from the original source, then, is the only aspect relevant in its new 1551 context, and since there are passages from Piers Plowman that he could have reached for which more explicitly match that historical moment (like the one on a child king: “Ther þe cat is a kitoun þe court is ful elenge” [B.Prol.194]), one has to believe Churchyard was a cautious appropriator. He probably diluted the text (I would wager) with another popular medieval prophecy about kingship roles, “Adam Davey's Dream.”Footnote 8 Lucas's ability to lay hands on a text that would fit so nicely into Books under Suspicion had it been born two centuries sooner suggests the continuities we too often miss in our arbitrary divisions of literary history.
Moving now from suspect books to suspect church art, Arnold raises an important question when he writes that “the argument that late medieval England imposed a ‘visual orthodoxy’ on religious imagery (p. 317) rests on the case of the ‘crux horribilis’ opposed by the canons of St. Paul's in London in 1306” (749). In fact, the argument of chapter 8 is a good deal more complex than this, because inquisitorial evidence is just one small category art historians use to reconstruct medieval theological attitudes toward church art. One such source I had mentioned, for instance, is Theophilus Presbyter. In his famous practical guide for church artists, the Diversarum artium schedula (well represented in English manuscripts), he makes it very clear that church art is an inspired medium and has been since Solomon's building of the temple (a theme many, many writers, from John of Damascus to Peter Lombard to the humanist Leonardo Bruni, use). “And lest perhaps you are diffident,” Theophilus writes, having just delivered this astonishing news to apprentice artists, “know … [that this] is bestowed upon you by the grace of the seven-fold Spirit.” The artist must however remember, he warns, that “of yourself you are nothing able,” a statement paralleling the instrumentality of the visionary writer.Footnote 9 (Giraldus Cambrensis, in fact, makes exactly this point in one of his own tales of a working artist who “copies” from a visionary source, in chap. 71 of the Topographia.) As Paul Binski shows, following the work of Creighton Gilbert and other art historians, a variety of sources on official attitudes survives, ranging from the ordinances on sacrilege (e.g., Council of Lyons in 1274) to attacks on the visual art of heretics, like the internationally known one of Bishop Lucas of Tuy, circa 1227 (Bishop Lucas explicitly discusses, for instance, “what images are permissible”).Footnote 10 These indicate that some official idea of visual orthodoxy was always present, even when exact iconographical forms were disputed (as they were in 1227). Yes, Binski does also discuss shrine politics in the 1306 case, but he by no means sees this as undercutting the question of visual orthodoxy. The case shows, rather, Binski writes, that this sense of decorum in church art is “more honoured in the breach” (202)—thus for all art historians the prominence of the 1306 case, the language of which (e.g., that the offending cross did not represent veram crucis formam) alludes to an accepted standard.
Arnold cites an unpublished paper by Jean-Claude Schmitt saying that the London case may be the “only occasion of religious art being ‘censored' … in Europe” (749). Not having seen the paper, I do not know what definition of church art censorship the author has used, but it would indeed be a bold claim, first of all, given the state of our sources (e.g., bishops' registers, many unedited). Second, the church frequently intervened in shrine control and monument suppression, which is certainly a form of church art censorship: even my present book discusses the prohibition against the Scrope cult at York Minster, which forced deflection of all donations to the cult of St. William under Arundel's constitutions, thus explicitly preventing visual memorials of Scrope (see Case Study 3). Nor can we say that the English were unaware of Continental attack on heretical church art, like Lucas of Tuy’s: he most famously complained that representations of Christ on the cross showing only three nails (rather than four) were heretical, a controversy that is mentioned by the Middle English author of Ancrene Wisse (pt. 7), written at just about this time (ca. 1215). Apparently news traveled fast (the Ancrene Wisse author was likely ahead of Bishop Lucas in putting pen to parchment). England was, then, hardly a backwater. My point in mentioning the 1306 case (along with Theophilus and others in chap. 8) was to give evidence for Julian's assumption that the church art she saw was approved and therefore deserved her faithfulness. One would imagine, however—and perhaps this is what Arnold is driving at—given the stable and largely representational iconography of parish church art that cases of confiscation of art already in situ were quite rare. Priests and bishops likely rejected anything they saw as inappropriate at the moment it was first presented or even proposed in sketch form, long, that is, before a situation like the unusual one Baldock confronted with a foreign artist in 1306 arose.
Hudson questions the frequency of censorship acts in a different way when she suggests that a seventeenth-century “souvenir hunter” might as easily be responsible for the excision of Wyclif's letters from Digby 98 as Peter Partridge himself (the manuscript's medieval compiler). While I would never want to underestimate Early Modern engagement with reformist writers like Wyclif, Langland, and Hildegard (as Case Study 2 shows), and I share her awareness of the limitations of codicological evidence (which, however, I had set out very clearly in chap. 2), the case for self-censorship here is still the strongest any of us can make. To recap briefly: though not the only contributor, Partridge was the primary compiler of the manuscript during the decade when death penalty legislation for Wycliffism was introduced. Case Study 2 details the circumstantial evidence (such as Peter Payne's charge that Partridge had dropped his Wycliffism midcareer and Partridge's careful copying of official anti-Wycliffite documentation into the book), concluding that self-censorship appears to be the case (175). Ralph Hanna, the most recent scholar to have looked closely at the codicology of the manuscript, posits early excision of the leaves for the same reasons.Footnote 11 While it is possible that some seventeenth-century admirer of Wyclif might have wielded the razor, we have not even circumstantial evidence for such a theory. Absent new concrete evidence, the razor that works best is Ockham’s.
Turning from the razor to Ockham himself, Hudson implies a difficulty with the scanty extant manuscript witness to his work in England. The scantiness, however, was precisely my point: his writings contra papam were confiscated by the bishops of Oxford and Salisbury—something that might well account for scanty survival. In fact, it was Hudson's own superb work that first brought the confiscations to light. In her 1985 essay, “A Neglected Wycliffite Text,” she even suggested that the bishops were burning these Ockham texts. Needless to say, I would have loved to have had some official bonfires in my book to stack against the sensational ones of the Wycliffite record, but caution prevailed: as my appendix B on the Opus arduum points out, I think the syntax of the Latin does not stretch quite as far as Hudson thinks it does. What both of us would welcome, however, is new evidence. The other authors these same bishops were confiscating were Olivi, Rupescissa, and William of St. Amour, and, interestingly, in our present exchange Hudson asks rhetorically where the bonfires of “the favorers of revelatory writing and their texts [are]?” (759). In 1985, then, she answered her own question: in Oxford and Salisbury. (Their authors could not have been burned: they had all long since inconsiderately died on the Continent, thereby ensuring my dearth of bonfires.) I agree with her, however, that a lengthy study of the Opus and Olivi is a desideratum. But the chapter on Langland (which she suggests sacrificing in favor of such lengthy study) is actually the only one the book could not have done without. It deals with the question of Uthred de Boldon's impact on Langland's poem. Uthred was an Oxford professor censored in 1368 for his theory of clara visio, one of the most famous cases of the fourteenth-century English censorship prior to Wyclif, and a case, too, of revelatory theology. This was itself related to the most famous case of papal heresy of the century (John XXII's posthumously condemned opinions on Beatific Vision). Its prominent position at the end of the book is no accident.
Moving now from book confiscation and academic censorship to the inquisition of laity, Arnold suggests that it was Kempe's “own reputation” (750) that furnished the reason for her interrogation at York. Let me hasten to say that nothing I have written was meant to exclude the significance or plausibility of established understanding of Kempe's controversiality but rather to add to them. So, for instance, what we knew of her own reputation prior to York did not entirely explain her being asked the Free Spiritism test question there. And Kempe's own reputation as a visionary cuts both ways, that is, it might be precisely the reason York officials presiding after Arundel's anti-Scrope constitutions would examine her, having previously conducted discretio interrogations of visitors claiming visions. The ten-year time lapse since Arundel's York constitutions were issued would not, in this particular case, much matter: the cult of Scrope was raging and growing throughout this period, as were local and legal tensions, and for some decades afterward, even though pressure from the king had subsided by then. Since one of Kempe's hosts at York was a chantry priest at Scrope's tomb, the connection, I thought, seemed at least worth adding to our list of what we know about this perennially enigmatic woman.
A related but more surprising query from Arnold is the role of sex in English Free Spiritism. The topic barely sees the light of day in my book: I mention it only with passing reference to the charges laid against William Ramsbury in 1389 and Friar John Russell in 1424 (where, however, the charges on sexual irregularity are an unmistakable matter of record) and in relation to the Norwich Lollards (all three cases first raised in relation to Free Spiritism by Anne Hudson). My interest, in a book on revelatory issues, is in the mystical dimension of Free Spiritism (as firmly witnessed in writers like Hilton, The Chastising author, and especially Porete). In fact, the book agrees wholeheartedly with Arnold that sex plays a minimal role in the English Free Spiritist scene, which explains my microscopic treatment of these cases. As such, I cannot see much danger of it becoming “hegemonic”! It had to be mentioned, however, if only to help account for the fact that Kempe is asked the Free Spirit ‘test” question (designed to winkle out precisely such libertine ideas). But, like Arnold, I have no desire to make the Norwich Lollards who express sexual irregularities into hard-core neo–Free Spiritists. We should also note, however, at least for the Continent, that recent German scholarship has reopened the door Robert Lerner shut in his cogent book of 1972, so it is no longer possible to just dismiss Free Spiritism as a creature of inquisitorial literature.Footnote 12 But I leave this to the Europeanist experts.
In all these demurs, Arnold quite rightly points to his own proclivities for finding a social historian's issues in a book on intellectual history (slim pickings, in spots, I’m sure): thus his assertion that the 1381 Rising figures largely in my book, when for me it is 1378, the Great Schism, that looms large. Perhaps my “textual unconscious,” to use Paul Strohm's phrase, may be playing tricks on me. I’m especially delighted, however, that Arnold enjoyed the book—what more could any author ask?—and that he found, in Steve Justice's apt phrase, that the “Foucauldian gloom” beloved of literary studies is dissipated in it.Footnote 13 That conscious mission, at least, was accomplished.
