This book is a fascinating, if challenging, exploration into the materiality of the Bible in the theology of John Wyclif and his followers. Despite its title, this book's notion of materiality differs from the material turn in medieval studies. Rather, it explores a ‘theoretically-oriented concept of materiality’ (p. 14). Based on an extensive knowledge of Latin and Middle English theology, David Lavinsky offers a nuanced and highly intelligent exploration into late medieval views of Scripture, as well as the way in which scholastic thought and the high theology of Wyclif were explored and mediated by Wyclif's followers.

Lavinsky explores the appearance of manuscripts and their use in fascinating ways. Manicules, erasures and codicology (as well as human DNA and digital environments) are all evoked by him, most notably in chapter iv. This, however, is often presented in insightful afterthoughts, or explicated in footnotes. This book is not an examination of the manuscript culture of Wycliffite texts, nor a book-historical analysis of their creation, use and reception (although all these facets are present). Lavinsky's interests, and capabilities, lie firmly in ‘authorial intention’ and in providing the link between academic theology and popular movement. His insights into the reception of Wycliffite thought could support further studies into the cohesiveness of the movement, the role of Wyclif's works in it and the ways in which dense philosophical ideas were disseminated to wider audiences.

The book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, ‘“De pellibus bestiarum”: Scripture, realism, and material form’, explores the concept of Scripture within the writings of John Wyclif himself. Demonstrating an enviable command of this complex set of texts, Lavinsky traces how the concept of Universals was instrumental to Wyclif's understanding of Scripture. This supports Lavinsky's exploration of Wyclif's renowned quintuple hierarchy of Scripture: (1) The Book of Life; (2) The truths inscribed in the Book of Life; (3) Truths in their proper genus; (4) Truths inscribed in the soul; and (5) Manuscripts, sounds and artificial signs.

For Wyclif, the lowest manifestation of Scripture were the manuscripts in which it was inscribed. This enabled him to circumvent some difficulties in studying sacred Scripture. Harming books did not harm the truths contained in them; unlike later Reformers, Wyclif was more tolerant towards the apocrypha or flawed manuscripts, saving the need to fully engage with canon formation and philology. Such rejection also led Wyclif and his followers to repudiate customs privileging the physical object, most notably rejecting oaths. Wyclif's theology of Scripture contained an innate tension between the immaterial Scripture and the need to scrutinise extant books to reveal its truths. This gap had informed the reception of Wyclif's theology.

Chapter ii, ‘“Stories of þe elde testament”: adherence, supersession, and the “proces” of reading’, moves to explore the materiality of Scripture in the Wycliffite Bible, and in particular the general prologue – a lengthy tract prefacing it. Lavinsky reveals how the author of the General Prologue (and the editors of the Wycliffite Bible at large) differed from Wyclif in their concerns about canon and the materiality of biblical books: ‘If for Wyclif it was the dematerialized book that ensured or guaranteed the displacement of truth into the new law, here it is precisely the material book that seems to enable the same supersessionist logic’ (pp. 95–6). Strategies for reading the Bible, and the general prologue's interest in the historical and literal sense, underpin Lavinsky's analysis. Such a view of the literal sense, and ambivalence towards the Bible's original languages, can extend to explaining the omission of the most common Latin glossary, the Interpretation of Hebrew names, from the Wycliffite Bible, explicating Mary Dove's assertion that ‘a decision must have been made by Wyclif and the translators to exclude it as extraneous to the Bible proper’ (The first English Bible: the text and context of the Wycliffite versions, Cambridge 2007, 87). The chapter moves to explore the question of Hebrew origins, and – importantly – Jewish ceremonies. Despite the lack of Jews in England, the author of the general prologue was concerned with Jewish ceremonies, applied allegorically to other facets of medieval Church and society, most prominently to the mendicants.

Chapter iii, ‘“We speke not of enke and parchemyn”: voice, form, and textual supplement’, explores the cycle of English Wycliffite sermons. Lavinsky follows polemics against Jews and mendicants, which associated both with the materiality of the letter (as, for example, in reproving mendicant letters asking for financial support). In the cycle, preaching is presented as a transparent medium of the biblical truth. It was to be the ‘unsensible’, the ‘immaterial and unwritten scriptural truth that can only be voiced in preaching’ (p. 128). Lavinsky sees the concept of ‘voice’ as key to the cycle's notion of biblical mediation. Voice was ‘the term through which the cycle understands its own investment in a direct and open apprehension of scriptural meaning’ (p. 124). Lavinsky demonstrates how the scholastic distinction between the substantive and accidental forms extended from discussions surrounding the eucharist to understanding Scripture itself, although admittedly ‘vernacular audiences may not have heard the scholastic resonance of these constructions’ (p. 140).

‘Rolle's “blessyd boke”: heresy, interpolation, and the material text’, the fourth and longest chapter, constitutes a three- or even four-layer investigation. It follows the text of the Psalms, Rolle's extremely popular Middle English translation of it, Wycliffite rewriting of Rolle's work, and manicules and erasures made by subsequent readers. Lavinsky achieves this highly complex task with ease. His comparisons enable him to reveal similarities and differences between textual layers, showing both the affinity between Rolle and Wycliffite thought, as well as major points of disagreement (as in extreme devotion, key to Rolle but not Wycliffites; Rolle's aim of reforming the individual as differing from Wycliffite's emphasis on reforming the Church). Tribulations emerge as a central theme in the Wycliffite appropriation of the biblical text, mirroring the views of the Marian exiles compiling the Geneva Bible a century and a half later. Extending his discussion to Arundel's 1407/09 Constitutions, which aimed to curb unlicensed vernacular Scripture, Lavinsky reveals how ‘the interpolation of the English Psalter challenges dichotomies between reformist discourses and popular devotion’ (p. 172), a point reaffirmed by a study of manuscripts’ compilation, often mixing Wycliffite and Orthodox texts. The chapter ends with a partial stab at materiality, as related to digital technologies and DNA analysis.

The last chapter, ‘The “sentence of olde holy doctouris”: Gospel commentary and the materialities of the literal sense’, follows the complex layout and contents of the Glossed Gospels, a Middle English rendering of the highly popular form of medieval exegesis: the glossed Bible. At its best the chapter unfolds the theology embedded in the layout of the glossed page, demonstrating how scribes and readers of the Glossed Gospels engaged in ‘exteriorizing scripture's manifold truths’. This is manifested in concrete examples of glosses. Lavinsky reveals the attention given to the structure and arrangement of the book, whose ‘codicological literacy’ differed from Wyclif's view of Scripture. The Glossed Gospels’ fragmented reading strategies agree with evidence of provenance, which links these manuscripts with clerical audiences and pastoral care responsibilities.

This is a dense book, in form as well as in content. The main text is printed in small type, nearly the size of its notes; notes often take a third of the page, if not more, and constitute fascinating side-discussions. The book's arguments are complex, drawing on the works of Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Foucault, to name but a few. This book is not aimed at the uninitiated nor at the student. But scholars taking the time to engage with it would greatly benefit from a unique understanding of Scripture, theology and heterodoxy.