With Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. In the process, she paints a picture of unexpected histories of tolerance, intellectual freedom, and failures of censorship in an era far more renowned for its purported obsession with and persecution of heresy.

Weighing in at a hefty 562 pages (not counting the 52 pages of prefatory material), the book is composed of an introduction, 10 chapters, a conclusion, and three appendices. Interspersed with the chapters are three “case studies,” as Kerby-Fulton terms them, of “Dangerous Reading among Early Piers Audiences.” As Kerby-Fulton describes it, her topic is the “censorship and tolerance of controversial revelatory theology in England from 1329 to 1437” (2). This deceptively simple summation inaugurates a complex set of historical, theological, and literary investigations that at times read like a gripping detective story. Texts under consideration range from those of the aforementioned centrally canonical Middle English writers to lesser-known works in both Latin and the vernacular; other topics treated include the long history of alternative salvation theologies in England, the untold story of Joachite Franciscan influences in England, and the English “vogue for Hildegardiana,” just to name a few. Given the book's size and scope, it is impossible to do full justice to the subtlety, range, and complexity of all of Kerby-Fulton's arguments in such a brief review. In what follows, I thus attempt to highlight her overarching key points as well as to give a taste of her innovative methodologies.

One of the main results of Kerby-Fulton's research is to destabilize what have become received narratives about Wyclif, Lollardy, and their influences, both theological and literary. As she notes, Wycliffism was not the first, nor the only, “brand” of heterodox thought to make waves on the English religious scene. She argues that other issues, most especially the complexly overlapping ones of orthodox but “left wing” revelatory theology and Continental heretical movements (both arenas in which women played key roles) occupied major English writers and ecclesiastical authorities. She lays the groundwork for these arguments in her introduction and first chapter, in which she explores non-Wycliffite heresy in later medieval England and such “pre-existing rivals to Wycliffite thought” (45) as Hildegard of Bingen and Joachim of Fiore, both of whom crafted influential alternative salvation theologies and both of whom figure prominently in Kerby-Fulton's study. Kerby-Fulton also provides a more nuanced and complex view of Wycliffism than is often seen in recent scholarship. Her fifth chapter, with its discussion of what she calls “an early dialect of Wycliffism” and the Wycliffite “road not taken,” is particularly admirable.

Another major point of the study is that English “insular” religious culture is in fact far less insular, and far more international, than has typically been granted. Chapter 2, which examines, as the title states, “Codicological evidence for Joachite Franciscanism and Censorship in England before and after Wyclif” is a brilliant case in point. As Kerby-Fulton points out, “The story of Joachite and Franciscan Joachite impact in England is virtually untold” (72). She uncovers a fascinating history of widespread and long-term dissemination of “serious Joachimism … from across the Channel” (74), dissemination representative of widespread English interest in and concern with Continental heresy.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are equally compelling explorations of the international quality of English religious culture and writing. In chapter 6, Kerby-Fulton provides a new angle on Margery Kempe's relationship to Continental female spirituality. Rather than focusing just on hagiographical and mystical “role models” for Margery, Kerby-Fulton argues that “one of the key motivations for Margery's public teaching and mysticism may have come from alternative European models of urban devotion” (249). She focuses on the influences in England, especially in Margery's home region of East Anglia as well as in the Carthusian circles with which Margery and her Book are associated, of “three particular groups of Continental women” that “encouraged women to teach”: the Beguines of northern Europe, especially those associated with “alternative mysticisms” and the heresy of the Free Spirit; the sister houses of the devotion moderna; and the “Olivian inspired Beguini and Beguinae” (250).

Chapter 7 examines English reception of Marguerite Porete's Mirror. She considers the Middle English translation by “M. N.,” whose identity is unknown. M. N.'s glosses and emendations reveal an important strand of English concern with “doctrinal pressure associated with Free Spiritism” (281). The translated text also reveals, though, that “at the end of the day … an orthodoxy/heterodoxy binary is simply not sophisticated enough to understand Middle English reception” of the Mirror (289).

Kerby-Fulton observes that Porete's Mirror “at least anticipates” and “perhaps even impacted … possibly two, and maybe even three, very important vernacular writers: Langland, Julian, and the Pearl poet” (275). In chapter 8, in a further instance of her internationally focused approach, she analyzes, among other aspects of what she calls “Julian's daring” (298), the ways in which “at least in reception, her text sounds like Porete's Mirror” (298). This chapter also provides a compelling alternative to Nicholas Watson's arguments concerning Julian's anxieties about Lollardy as motivations for changes from the Short to the Long Versions of Julian's text. Kerby-Fulton lays out an argument concerning “visual orthodoxy” in fourteenth-century England that reveals much about Continental influences, including the revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, on English religious culture.

Kerby-Fulton's readings of Chaucer and Langland also move in at times unexpected, but always highly productive, directions. She presents us with a Chaucer who, in the House of Fame, echoes Langland's voice and concerns with revelatory material and matters of salvation. We also see a humanist Chaucer, and a Chaucer who, in spite of his “Langlandianism” in the House of Fame, differs strongly from Langland on prophecy and its uses. Whereas for Chaucer “dreams foretell … and events concur,” for Langland, “prophecy and revelation” are “always heavily qualified with ‘unless’ clauses” (347). Kerby-Fulton's Langland is “at least as much, if not more” interested in “kinds of radicalism other than Lollardy” (12). Indeed, perhaps most refreshing, given years of criticism setting out arguments both for sympathies with and anxieties about Lollardy in Chaucer's and Langland's work, are Kerby-Fulton's claims that neither writer “revise[s] out of fear of inquisition” (357), while at the same time neither exhibits overmuch affinity with a hard-core Wycliffite agenda. Chaucer and Langland were by no means, though, outside the fray of religious controversy. Kerby-Fulton argues that “neither Chaucer nor Langland seems cowed by ecclesiastical repression of Wycliffite ideas… . They were, however, concerned about some things” including “an older, partially revelatory-inspired way of thinking about topics like prophecy, church reform, and salvation history” (357).

I stress again that such a brief review of necessity leaves much out. I can only end by asserting that no scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume.