Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent: The Lollard Context and Subtext of the Parson's Tale (review)

Over the past few decades, the reinvigorated study of Lollard groups and their writings has added a great deal to our knowledge of the cultural context of literary production in late-medieval England. In ways not foreseen by earlier scholarship, the Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite environment of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has seemed in recent years almost to establish the critical limits of religious and political inquiry into Middle English literature produced in this period. Yet this discussion has also tended to occlude the realm of reform Christianity as a legitimate expression of orthodoxy in late-medieval England, no matter how critical it was of the institutional church, for orthodoxy regularly admits reform even as it delegitimizes revolution. Chaucer, of course, has been a familiar figure in this reassessment of Lollard influence, and the Parson and his tale have been essential elements in the discussion of Chaucer's religious-political sympathies, among other reasons because of the Host's characterization of the Parson in the Epilogue to The Man of Law's Tale as a "Lollere" (The Canterbury Tales, II.1173, 1177). Still, Chaucer has in general continued to be understood as an author who fits comfortably within orthodox positions supporting reforms among the clergy and the fraternal orders. Not so, however, in Frances McCormack's view, whose book under review here claims that "Chaucer may well have been a Lollard" (p. 15) and that "he intended his audience to search for Lollard motifs" in his characterization of the Parson and in the Parson's tale (p. 20). Though these claims are not ultimately proven, her book remains a vigorous expression of the controversial view that Chaucer had Wycliffite sympathies.

How McCormack understands these sympathies is dealt with in detail in chapter 1, with predictable references to studies of Chaucer's relationships with the circle of "Lollard Knights," but also with an appreciation for the wide spectrum of possibilities in Lollard beliefs. Chaucer's well-known masking of his personal convictions, the way in which he seems to disappear behind his narratorial personae, is asserted here as a consciously political decision: in the late decades of the fourteenth century, he would not have been so foolhardy as to openly advocate heterodox positions in his presentation of the Parson and the Parson's tale (p. 38), no matter how much he might have been calling "for a subversive reading of this Tale" (p. 74). In McCormack's reasoning, then, the major clues to Chaucer's religious-political leanings are to be found in the undertones and signals in the verbal structure of the characterization of the Parson and his tale. In this way, much of her book is devoted to analyses of the vocabulary and translations involved in these parts of The Canterbury Tales.

The analysis of the Parson's undertones of Lollard language in chapter 2 uses critical tools developed by Anne Hudson, Helen Barr, and others to characterize the Wycliffite vocabulary as composed of "essentializing terms," "reverse discourse," and other marked features. Yet, such terms as "weye" (pp. 58–61), "ordre" (pp. 61–64), and "noumbrid" (p. 63), for example, seem so generally applied in all registers in English as to be relatively unremarkable as linguistic features of a sect vocabulary. Indeed, when they are seen in their contexts in the quotations McCormack provides here and compared to the Parson's tale, what stands out often is the disparity between their partisan uses in recognized Lollard texts and their employment by the Parson. Drawing on material from Andrew Cole in chapter 3, McCormack analyzes the translations in the Parson's tale, asserting that while its Scriptural renderings are not always particularly close to the wording of the early or late Wycliffite versions of the Bible, Chaucer still probably used the Wycliffite texts as a "crib" for his rendering of Vulgate passages. She sees in the many selections...