Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (review)

In Sanctifying Signs, David Aers continues his incisive examination of late medieval religious beliefs and practices and their representations in and development by late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English textuality. The book's six chapters are effectively framed by an introduction (Chap. 1: "The Sacrament of the Altar in the Making of Orthodox Christianity or 'Traditional Religion'") and conclusion (Chap. 6: "Home, Homelessness, and Sanctity: Conflicting Models") that compellingly support what Aers has argued elsewhere: Late medieval Christianities were multiple in both word and deed, a spectrum of beliefs and practices that cannot be homogenized into one set of beliefs, whether an abstract "orthodoxy" in competition with "heresy" or a nostalgically unitary "traditional religion" of the type so powerfully traced by Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars. Although wide-ranging, these enveloping chapters pay particular attention to Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the popular vernacular retelling of Christ's life wielded by Archbishop Arundel as a weapon against Wycliffites that, in its "domestication of Jesus" (p. 172), also departed from Gospel accounts.

Analysis focuses on the sacrament of the altar and the diverse rhetoric and debates concerning the eucharistic sign that would lead the institutional church to "the committed persecution and burning to death of Wycliffite Christians..." (p. 27). Lucid chapters on Wyclif's De Eucharistia (Chap. 3) and on Walter Brut's trial and William Thorpe's Testimony (Chap. 4) thus form the book's central core. Wycliffite thought is neither romanticized nor is its complexity simplified, a refreshing change from its popularized treatment as "rebellion" in some recent literary studies. Instead Aers shows that "the linguistic, theological, and political homogeneity of Wycliffites has been seriously exaggerated by enemies and friends, past and present" (p. 68).

Aers has long been interested in William Langland, so it is not surprising that the two chapters he devotes to Piers Plowman comprise nearly half the book. They envelop the core chapters, the first (Chap. 2) examining this sophisticated poem's "profound and coherent theology of the sacrament of the altar, a theology at the heart of its ethics and ecclesiology" (p. 51), the second (Chap. 5) tracing how an alternative sanctifying sign—of poverty, as set forth by the mendicants—is poetically rejected. Langland shows not only "that Christian perfection consists not in poverty but in following Christ" (p. 147), but also that "the very commitment to living and wearing the fraternal sign of poverty makes people vulnerable to the gifts of Antichrist..." (p. 152).

In both scope and depth this well-written inquiry will interest many medievalists studying late medieval theology and social and religious history. It should be thoughtfully considered by literary scholars, not only for its fresh reading of Piers Plowman, but also because it exemplifies the critical rewards of an approach that Aers acknowledges "may not be congenial to the ideological predispositions of many colleagues... ," one that "demands that we engage with writers like Langland, Brut, or Love in a manner that takes their theological and ecclesiological terms utterly seriously" (p. ix).