Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has written a challenging study—one that seems likely to provoke further research and discussion. The core term in her investigation is “censorship.” This, especially as it has come to be used in contemporary historical and literary criticism, is a capacious and somewhat slippery term. In reference to an age of manuscript circulation rather than print, it is used in a variety of ways that arguably could helpfully be differentiated. This claim is illustrated by some specific examples: when, during the investigations against sympathizers of the heretic John Wyclif (d. 1384), Archbishop Chichele's officials in 1415 ordered the scrutiny of books owned by the Londoner John Claydon, a list of seventeen reprobated opinions was compiled from Claydon's copy of The Lanterne of Light. Following Claydon's affirmation that he agreed with these opinions, and his admission that he had abjured heresy once before, he was condemned, and he and the book were consigned to the fire. The case is well documented, and here censorship cannot be doubted: the ecclesiastical and civil processes of inquisition and execution are plainly located, and the copy, along with its owner (who had commissioned and paid for it), was destroyed in pursuance of those authorities’ edict. The authorities were only sporadically effective: two other copies of the work survive, though from these it is possible to verify all but one of the seventeen opinions. It is interesting to set alongside this a couple of cases discussed by Kerby-Fulton (Claydon is only mentioned, perhaps inappropriately, in the prefatory “Chronology of Non-Wycliffite Cases of Heresy and Related Events”). A notebook put together by Peter Partridge and mostly in his hand begins with a list of its contents;Footnote 1 among these contents are “Epistole multe Iohannis Wytcliff,” but at the point where, according to that list, these should occur, two leaves have been cut out. But when? By whom? And why? Kerby-Fulton (175–80) assumes that their inclusion dates to Partridge's early academic career, when, as other evidence suggests, he was not entirely hostile to Wyclif, and that the excision reflects Partridge's later apprehension that it was imprudent for one who was rising in the established ecclesiastical hierarchy to be associated with such material; to her this is equally censorship, albeit self-censorship. This provides answers to my three questions, but only by hypothesis. A number of alternative answers could be formulated—at an extreme is the possibility that a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Protestant antiquarian extracted the leaves as a memorial to an admired predecessor. The other case concerns two poems, one English, the other Latin (this is also included in Digby 98), that have been roughly crossed through, leaving the texts legible.Footnote 2 Kerby-Fulton (162–64) again sees this as censorship, though she explains the continuing legibility as a deliberate ploy to allow for the apprehension of the material, while apparently condemning it. All the problems of the Digby 98 example are replicated here with the added uncertainties deriving from our ignorance of both scribe and owner for the booklet in which the poems are contained (other sections of the composite manuscript may or may not be relevant); and is there any firm evidence or parallel for such a devious ploy?

If these cases indicate a range of physical situations covered by the term “censorship,” they are far from exhausting the issues that Kerby-Fulton engages with in her ambitious study. At least as important to her are cases of what might more neutrally be termed “nonmaterial revision,” in a variety of circumstances, sometimes in translation from one language to another as in the modifications made in the Middle English version of Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls (Porete had been burned as a heretic in Paris in 1310) and in the comments added by “MN” to that version, sometimes in authorial reworking of his or her own previous composition, sometimes modifications of uncertain, probably scribal, origin. The most important cases of the latter to Kerby-Fulton are William Langland's changes between the versions of Piers Plowman and Julian of Norwich's suppressions and expansions in the long version of her Revelations. It would be foolish to deny that one factor in these alterations, and in other late medieval examples, could well have been the result of apprehension of authoritative disapproval associated with the views or language expressed; but they must usually be much less certain. Each case requires much fuller argument than in the case of Claydon where I started, not least because so many alternative explanations are available and each instance is likely to be individual.

The introduction to Kerby-Fulton's book raises some of these problems, but a fuller exploration of individual cases would have been welcome and consideration might have been given to the demarcation of alternative terms, each with a more restrictive range of meanings. The book tries to cover a vast range of issues and texts, many of which need more detailed attention and space than can fully be covered in a single study. One major concern, as the subtitle reveals, is to show that “Revelatory Writing,” whether derived from Joachim of Flore and his followers or associated with beliefs labeled often by contemporaries as pertaining to the Free Spirit “sect,” was a familiar form in late medieval England and that ideas from these backgrounds entered into mainstream texts. Given the survival of three copies of the English version of Porete's Mirror (plus a Latin translation made from that version), material from Ruysbroek in The Chastising of God's Children (argued here, surely correctly, to be directed against Free Spirit notions and not, as the modern editors of the text tried to persuade, against Lollardy), and the knowledgeable questioning of Margery Kempe, the basis of that case seems firm. Much less persuasive, it seems to me, is the attempt to argue that revelatory writing and the notions it purveyed were more widely disseminated than the ideas of the Wycliffite movement and attracted as much censorship. Bonfires of Wycliffite adherents and their books are attested from Sautry in 1401 to the 1530s; but where are those of the favorers of revelatory writing and their texts? Arundel's legislation against prophecies certainly antedated his Constitutions that were directed primarily against Lollardy, but chronology does not inevitably reflect importance: is there any parallel against protagonists of Joachim to the subsequent refinement of anti-Lollard heresy procedure under Chichele, which in turn is reflected in the campaigns of, for instance, Chichele himself and Alnwick of Norwich in the late 1420s; Warham of Canterbury and Blythe of Coventry and Lichfield around 1511–12; and Longland of Lincoln and Tunstall of London in the 1520s?

But Kerby-Fulton has enough fascinating material that deserves closer scrutiny; issues of relative importance could have been left to the reader's interests. One of the areas that would benefit from more consistent scrutiny is that of circulation. In a period of copying by hand, and a period around half a millennium distant, this is a very difficult issue to judge: we usually have no idea how many copies of a text were made or how those copies gained circulation and over what geographical area and have to take into account both the natural destruction by time and use and also the unnatural destruction by those who for some reason (a reason or reasons not always transparent to our eyes) did not like the work in question. And often censorship can only be discerned from an absence, with all the problems of proving a negative that that involves. A text that is here frequently cited (see notably 206–33, 350–57) is a good example: this is the Latin commentary on the Apocalypse known from its opening words as the Opus arduum; the author of the text is unknown but declares himself to be writing in an English episcopal prison between Christmas 1389 and Easter 1390 and shows himself sympathetic to Wyclif's ideas. We have then an unusually closely circumscribed production, though no explanation of how, if correctly described, the text escaped the prison. No copy of the text written in England survives or is discernible in the writings of Bale, Leland, or Foxe (all men anxious to look for antecedents to the sixteenth-century Reformation); no trace of its influence in England has been found—let alone any sign of a vernacular translation. It is only accessible to us through copies made in Hussite Bohemia, and there it proved influential on native radical preachers. An abbreviated version of it appeared in print in 1525 with a preface usually accepted as by Luther that shows no recognition of its ultimate place of origin. The questions that surround this case are posed in extreme form, but our ignorance of their answers should be taken as salutary: Were no copies made in England? Were they made but efficiently destroyed, or did the author immediately send the text abroad? This may be extreme, but the case of William of Ockham's political writing is less dramatic but not entirely different: almost no copies of these works made in England survive (some now in English libraries derive from Continental scribes) despite Ockham's English origins and the fact that one of his texts, An princeps, was addressed to Edward III. Admittedly, most of Ockham's political texts were written on the Continent, but is this absence of English copies the result of censorship, and, if so, by whom? Or is it chance? Were no copies made in Ockham's homeland? Equally important, the loss of almost all evidence concerning the contents of medieval English fraternal libraries makes it hard to be sure whether Kerby-Fulton is justified in her claim (101–8) for the particular interest of the York Augustinian friars in revelatory writing: is this just the chance result of the unique survival of the detailed listing for this house?

The issues that Kerby-Fulton is concerned with are important, and many of the texts with which she deals are often central to modern critical interests. But neither issues nor texts are easy or transparent, and some readers may well find it difficult to keep up with the rather breathless gallop at which the argument often proceeds. A number of the longer texts under review have never been printed, and a more detailed analysis with generous quotation would have helped: thus Kerby-Fulton maintains that Olivi's Apocalypse commentary is an important source for the Opus arduum commentary on the same biblical book; neither of these texts is available in print, but we are given no parallel passages to prove the assertion. And some endnotes are frustrating: rather than providing the expected detail to support a claim, we are passed on to another piece by the author (at least two unpublished) or a complete book with no further assistance. Many would welcome a straightforward account of the origins and nature of the Joachite and similar revelatory texts and of their characteristic ideas. To Kerby-Fulton this may seem elementary and pedestrian, but most of her readers are unlikely to have sampled the sources that she argues to be so important for our understanding of later medieval literature and the various efforts to censor it.