A rose by any other name would smell as sweet? Not so, argues Andrew Cole, if the rose in question is the Wycliffite heresy, and the “other name” is “lollardy,” that near-ubiquitous epithet employed by ecclesiastical officials, poets, and others in late medieval England to deride John Wyclif's followers. Cole's study presents a series of refreshing and compelling readings of the works of such canonical authors as William Langland and Margery Kempe, situating them in relation to the emergence of Wycliffism and its effect on the literature of late medieval England. Cole's goal is to treat Wycliffism as “an emergent fund of ideas, forms, and rhetorics that helped various medieval authors think anew about the past and the present … about, fundamentally, what it means to write” (186). In short, he suggests, Wycliffism provided not just a context but the most significant context within which late medieval English authors wrote.

This volume will repay careful reading not only by literary scholars but also church historians, cultural and political historians, and theologians interested in the Wycliffite controversy and its historical, theological, and literary afterlives. Cole's prose is lucid and accessible, even to the non-specialist, and the conclusions he offers are thought provoking. Without doing too much violence to the intricacy of its arguments, the volume can be divided into two parts: the first dealing with the invention of Wycliffism as a discrete and dangerous heresy, and likewise of “lollardy” as a category of both condemnation and approbation; and the second dealing with the resonances of Wycliffism that can be traced in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (the Man of Law's Tale, the Parson's Tale, and preeminently the Treatise on the Astrolabe), Thomas Hoccleve (“The Address to Sir John Oldcastle” and the Regiment of Princes), John Lydgate (“Procession of Corpus Christi”), and Margery Kempe. What links the two is perhaps the most crucial, a three-page “intermezzo” titled, simply, “Wycliffism is not ‘lollardy.’”

Specialists may quibble with particular aspects of Cole's readings of individual writers, but readers interested more generally in the history of the late medieval church in England and its response to the Wycliffite heresy may find greatest value in Cole's trenchant discussion (in chapter 1) of the proceedings of the so-called “Blackfriars Council,” which met in 1382 and condemned twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif's writings.

The conventional wisdom has held that the council marks a turning point in the repression of heresy in England: it declared certain topics off-limits and, over time, medieval authors responded by censoring their works. The view has also been that its actions were, in the short term at least, relatively ineffective. Cole sets out to demolish both of these theses, showing through a careful reconstruction of extant documents that Archbishop William Courtenay used the council to “overcome the jurisdictional distinctions between church and university” that had protected Wyclif throughout his career (5). In a delightful chapter that is simultaneously detective story and political thriller, Cole shows that Courtenay's primary charge against Wyclif and his followers was that they had preached without authorization outside Oxford. He goes on to demonstrate that the very day the council approved its decrees, one of Courtenay's fellow bishops, William Wykeham of Winchester, provided just the proof the archbishop required: a mandate to the vicar of Odiham requiring him to prevent certain Wycliffites from “usurping the office of preacher” (12). But had these men actually done so? No, Cole argues; there is no evidence. “In more plain terms, Wykeham made it up—inventing the very problem that Courtenay would amplify” in his later mandate claiming that the Wycliffites were “conspiring to infect the whole realm by preaching their heresies outside of Oxford” (14). Over time, Courtenay and his suffragans used similar devices to construct Wycliffism as a coherent heretical movement with a discrete set of doctrines.

This carefully researched, sensibly iconoclastic account of the politics of the Blackfriars Council is paradigmatic of Cole's approach in this volume. But what, to ask the larger question, does Wycliffism have to do with “lollardy”? Cole first investigates (in chapters 2 and 3) the complex invention and re-invention of “lollard” as a term of both abuse and praise. There is not space to describe in detail his readings of the so-called “loller” passages in Piers Plowman or his analysis of the word's appearance in dissenting as well as mainstream texts, for instance, John Clanvowe's The Two Ways and the anonymous The Fyve Wyttes.

Yet what is more significant, indeed what should be required reading for scholars of medieval and Reformation literature, theology, and ecclesiastical history, is Cole's short “intermezzo,” where he aims to deconstruct the scholarly cliché that Wycliffism and lollardy are synonymous. Instead, to treat these terms as mutually equivalent is “an error of historical condescension … a foisting of our preferences onto those of the past” (73). Wycliffism may have been a (relatively) coherent set of beliefs and practices, even if we lack the evidence to investigate those beliefs and practices in all their diversity; “lollardy” was (and still is) in the eye of the beholder. For ecclesiastical authorities it was a tool to censure individuals who stood outside the religious mainstream; for Wycliffites it was a shorthand term for ideas about “lay moderation and Christian discipleship”; and for non-Wycliffite authors such as Langland it had an altogether wider range of meanings (72). Cole's point is that we must take careful note of the ways in which “lollard” was used and not used, for the absence of the term from a particular text may be just as important as its presence.

This is a volume that hardly shies away from controversial claims, and therein lies much of its value: Cole has served up a hearty helping of provocative, challenging theses about the religious controversies that dominated the late medieval church in England and shaped the works of the most prominent writers of the age. It would be to our discredit not to engage these ideas in the dialogue they demand.