During my graduate days, I remember asking my thesis supervisor, the late Michael Sheehan, about the activity of the heretical inquisition in England. He was clearly taken aback, instantly responding that there was no was such activity. The sole exception was the Templar arrests, clearly ensuing from a Continental swell so vast that it could not but fail to trouble the waters of even that serene island. I felt duly chastised. Now, however, anyone who has read Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's groundbreaking Books under Suspicion would have to acknowledge that my question was dismissed too quickly. But lest historiographical hindsight knock too loudly, I hasten to add that Father Sheehan was simply enunciating the reflexive but seemingly impeccable and, until now, virtually unchallenged orthodoxy of late medieval historians. The vigilance of England's monarchy and the competence of its episcopacy not only kept the heretics out but saw to it that England was spared the kind of heretical and mystical excesses that had been destabilizing the Continent for centuries. This is why the “sudden” appearance of Lollardy, England's only homegrown heresy, took everyone by surprise.

Moreover, I was inclined to accept this answer uncritically because it corroborated everything that I knew and had internalized about the British Isles, generally, and England in particular. These different “doxies” are as familiar and well-fingered as the beads of a rosary. First, the Irish “saved” Western civilization with their pure Latin, beautiful manuscripts, and introduction of word separation (thank God), all in blessed readiness for their eventual conversion of Scotland and Northumbria and the subsequent reformation of the hopelessly corrupt Continental church. English monasticism would, in turn, offer up Bede, who stood head and shoulders above the other plodding historians of barbarian nations. It furnished Boniface, that timely papal legate who, lucky for the Carolingian wannabes, was in the right place at the right time to anoint Pepin. Then there was Alcuin, the intellectual motor behind the Carolingian renaissance. England, first in the development of an estimable vernacular literature, produced Alfred, a king remarkable enough to foster English precocity in his own renaissance, despite the unfavorable climate of Viking (read Continental) madness—until English letters were eventually snuffed out by more Continental interference in the form of the Norman Conquest. (And Alfred was undoubtedly more learned than Charlemagne!) Yet once planted on sane English soil, these Continental marauders did quite well: they introduced a singularly rational form of feudalism buttressed by a common law “with legs,” managed to keep out the Cathars, and still had time to take over much of the Continent. Even a rotten king like John proved but a fortunate fall. The disaster at Bouvines eventuated in Magna Carta, Europe's first charter of rights, in addition to providing France with its first taste of a decently run bureaucracy. The impression of late medieval England as something of a spiritual backwater is clearly deceptive: obviously a prolonged gestation was necessary for producing someone of the stature (and sanity) of Julian of Norwich—everybody's favorite mystic. (In contrast, the excesses of her contemporary Margery Kempe clearly demonstrate the deleterious effects of extensive Continental travel.) By the same token, Lollardy broke at exactly the right time—when the English church could, in fact, do with some modest tweaking. (And even though it may have been a “Premature Reformation”—in the words of Anne Hudson—it was clearly the wave of the future.)

The case can be adumbrated beyond the Middle Ages. Henry VIII's uxorious break with Rome considerately left most ecclesiastical records intact, unlike the lamented depredations of Continental reform. English had the first and, arguably, the most rational revolution (they didn’t knock as many heads off religious statuary). Because I was a Canadian studying at a Canadian institution under a Canadian supervisor, this narrative of English exceptionalism enlisted all of my colonial loyalty. It was as familiar, comforting, and yet as invincible as the face of the queen on the Canadian penny.

But Kerby-Fulton's brilliant exposition of English anxiety over suspect religious texts has gone a long way toward unseating this narrative of the longue dureé of English exceptionalism, at least in the religious realm. She demonstrates that insular anxiety over perceived textual excesses was not only palpable but sometimes harshly punitive. Moreover, Kerby-Fulton is that rare scholar who interprets change like a historian but reads like a literary magistra. These twin attributes are absolutely essential to the daunting tasks of identifying England's censorious impulses and discerning the ways in which they fostered, both directly and indirectly, containment strategies of considerable virtuosity and malleability, operating across many fronts. Church authorities expressed their concern over suspect texts alternately through heightened vigilance and benign (but probably no less vigilant) neglect. Authorial responses, moreover, ran the gamut from colorful evasionary tactics to undeniable self-censorship. Meanwhile, the crown was more often than not aligned with the cause of intellectual freedom in various attempts to keep its more edgy writers from the long arm of Continental authorities. Gone are the days in which we can imagine pre-Wycliffite England as an island of pristine orthodoxy.

It is a remarkable book precisely because it succeeds in shedding light on an area where nobody thought light was needed. And, from the perspective of my personal learning curve, I can chronicle the telltale effects of this illumination precisely because the new trajectory being plotted required a necessary realignment of my long-held, but largely unexamined, views. At first, the demand for change was met by my commendably orthodox resistance: an undeniable reluctance to allow reform thinking of whatever persuasion to share center stage with dear old Wycliffe et al. But then there were the intellectual aftershocks in the wake of this historiographical Earthquake Council, taking the form of questions, some of which I will share.Footnote 1

In particular, I found myself wondering how it was that in a country known for its mordant anticlericalism, and blessed with a remarkably self-critical clergy, the impetus toward radical church reform should take so long to surface? The English monarchy had, after all, introduced mortmain legislation toward the end of the thirteenth century, attempting to staunch the one-way flow of property into the “dead hand” of the church. In view of this precocious sensitivity to the deleterious effects of church property on the state, what are we to make of the fact that concern for the spiritual consequences of church opulence, and the incumbent rhetoric of disendowment, was seemingly not indigenous but rather had to be imported from the Continent in the form of revelatory prophecy? And why, among the divergent voices urging disendowment, was it only the prophecies of (or those attributed to) Hildegard of Bingen that were capable of mustering an appeal that extended to both orthodox and heterodox camps?

The twofold answer presenting itself was embarrassingly simple and would hardly surprise even the greenest historian: the impact of the Gregorian Reform and the Cathars on Continental Europe. Without a proper apprehension of these factors, all subsequent Continental church history would be rendered entirely incomprehensible. By comparison, England experienced the first of these only in a blunted form and escaped the second altogether. And herein lies the sullen residue of the case for English exceptionalism in religion. The impetus for disendowment moved in lockstep with the reform movement from its earliest days. Already in the eleventh century, the Gregorian cardinal Peter Damian was urging apostolic poverty upon a resistant clergy. The painfully idealistic Paschal II won the universal displeasure of the clergy by presenting church divestment as a strategy for ending the Investiture Controversy. Yet when the suggestion was again made a century later by Frederick II, everyone saw it for what it was: the hyperbolic threats of a monarch teetering at the abyss of heresy.

In short, the downward transcendence of the rhetoric of disendowment resulted from the church's failure to reform itself. This left a dangerous repository of unfilled expectations, and the case for disendowment fell to the lot of popular preachers. In the hands of twelfth-century zealots such as Henry of Le Mans, Peter of Bruys, and Arnold of Brescia, disendowment became irrevocably aligned with a heretical platform.

It was the Cathars who, in a roundabout way, put disendowment back on the orthodox agenda. The earliest accounts of the movement all stress the Cathar Perfects’ attack on clerical property, buttressed by their extreme poverty and remarkable abstemiousness. While orthodox polemicists like Bernard of Clairvaux construed Cathar asceticism as hypocritical, Hildegard never doubted its sincerity, associating the movement with a natural revulsion to church decadence: “in their zeal toward the Lord … [the Cathars] will curse you, saying ‘the way of the wicked shall perish’ (Ps. 1.6).” These heretics “com[ing] with wan faces, and clothing themselves in sanctity,” are depicted as doing double service as God's scourge and the devil's pawns. They “will walk about in black robes, with proper tonsure, and will appear to men serene and peaceful in all their ways. Moreover, they do not love avarice, and do not have money, and, in their secret selves, they hold abstinence as so great a virtue that they can scarcely be reproached.”Footnote 2 Sensitivity to the power of this example gives rise to some of Hildegard's most celebrated excoriations of church decadence: “Wake up! The misguided people of today have no idea what they are doing. … [Those] who err … will fear them and will serve them slavishly, imitating them as much as possible.”Footnote 3

Hildegard certainly fulfills her reputation as a prophet in this instance insofar as fear of the Cathars gave rise to some pretty slavish imitation. Perhaps their most famous mimics were members of the circle associated with Bishop Diego of Osma and his famous follower, Dominic, during the years leading up to the Albigensian crusade. According to Jordan of Saxony, Diego counseled the Cistercian missionaries to rid themselves of their “enormous provisions and horses and clothing,” arguing: “Look how the heretics urge their ways on the simple people by displaying an outward show of holiness, by feigning an example of evangelical austerity and asceticism. … Use a nail to drive out a nail. Chase off their feigned holiness with true religious life. The imposing appearance of false apostles can only be shown up for what it is by manifest humility.”Footnote 4 In other words, Diego was urging orthodox imitation of heretical humility as an antiheretical strategy.

The impetus behind Francis of Assisi's attraction to poverty stands in stark contrast to Diego's pragmatic but somewhat disingenuous deployment, and doubtless the Cathars themselves sensed the difference. Francis received overtures from Cathar supplicants on the mistaken assumption that he sympathized with their cause.Footnote 5 Clearly by this time, no one who was truly orthodox would manifest such extreme aversion to property. And when Franciscan Spirituals gravitated toward Joachim's prophecies, the prophet went down with his followers.

Joachim's reputation was hopelessly compromised by his Franciscan devotees, while other orthodox proponents of disendowment dropped like a rock into the sea of oblivion.Footnote 6 But Hildegard managed to escape either fate, unsullied by her stern castigations of church decadence or even the many spurious interdictions that eventually became associated with her name. Kerby-Fulton is certainly right in associating the incredible resilience of her reputation with her unique possession of a papal imprimatur. This prompted a number of conservatives stung by the lash of her prophecy to question (with good reason) whether the caustic words could really belong to an approved (literally, “bona fide”) prophetess. But I would also suggest that Hildegard's remarkable buoyancy owed something to the original politics of her genuine polemic, which portrayed disendowment as a mechanism of chastisement as opposed to the clergy's ideal state. And this conviction seems to have persisted even in the spurious prophecies that became attached to her name, notably the notorious Insurgent that was used to stigmatize the “diabolical” Franciscans.

When Henry II kept the Cathars out of England, he also spared orthodoxy any productive self-examination that would necessarily ensue from heretical critique. Yet Kerby-Fulton's book demonstrates that the impact of Continental heresy was not, in fact, dispelled, but merely delayed. The heretics’ challenge was smuggled into England a century later by “Hildegard,” albeit in a palatable form that demonized apostolic poverty.