Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (review)

Andrew Cole’s book is a welcome contribution to the recent nuancing of the study of the Wycliffite heresy and its literary and other affiliations in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England. The 2003 collection of essays to which Cole contributed, Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England (edited by Fiona Somerset, Jill Havens, and Derrick Pittard), already raised important questions about the various, and variously debated and co-opted, meanings of “orthodoxy” and “heresy,” “Wycliffism” and “Lollardy,” a development that has since seen much illuminating scholarship (from Ian Forrest, Mishtooni Bose, Fiona Somerset, and Anne Hudson among others), and to which a recent Oxford conference (“Lollard Affiliations,” 2008) was in part devoted. Cole’s new book further refines and interrogates many of the crucial terms of the debates and their scope and implication. Beginning with a detailed study of the 1382 Blackfriars Council, Cole proceeds to consider a range of Middle English authors, both major and minor, including William Langland, John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Trevisa, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and Margery Kempe. Cole’s major claim is that Wycliffism was “an ideologically diverse and aesthetically enabling feature of late medieval literary culture and politics,” and thereby “one of the central forces that shaped English literary history” (xiii). This clear enunciation of his main thesis, with its notable emphasis on the aesthetic, is followed by chapters that attempt to tease out, with impressive, though not always wholly convincing subtlety, the details of this fruitful exchange between the radical, sometimes sensational ideas of John Wyclif and his various followers, opponents, interlocutors or observers.

The book importantly suggests that ecclesiastical censure and legislation could function not only as an inhibitor or dampener but also as an unintended spur to creative and innovative developments in literary and intellectual history. However, Cole’s presentation of the English church at times risks portraying it as overly monolithic and endows it with an almost creative malignity. “For whatever multiplicity of theological and political ideas among Wyclif and his students, Courtenay and his bishops at the Blackfriars Council constructed Wycliffism as a cohesive body of heretical thought and practice in order to render religious dissent as publicly visible, legally troublesome, conceptually easy to understand, and equally easy to fear,” says Cole in his chapter on the Council (19). Yes and no, surely. It could be argued that heresy has always to be “invented” (though, equally, one has always to ask why; cf. Monique Zerner, ed., Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’inquisition, 1998). But the brilliantly idiosyncratic philosophy and polemics of Wyclif (as increasingly underlined by, among others, Alessandro Conti, Maarten Hoenen, Laurent Cesalli, and Paul Bakker),which yet built upon much that was already present and problematic (anticlericalism, a growing unease with inherited rhetorics and hermeneutics, the spread of academic ideas outside university genres, conventions and procedures), had as much to do with the peculiar resonance and visibility of what the Church tried to counter as “heresy.” It is worth recalling that the late medieval era was a time of increasing porosity of the boundaries between academic speculation and extramural religio-intellectual endeavor across a range of European cultures. Wyclif’s explosive and intransigent presence in such a context could have unforeseen effects. In other words, the material that Cole sees as “the [suspect] story of ‘lollards’ and ‘lollardy’ filling up England almost overnight” (18) could be read rather differently.

Cole’s approach is most rewarding when he suggests that one should think of “‘lollardy’ as a typology evoking rather specific topics,” a typology that opened up “a space within which to articulate alternative and newer models of lay piety that became prominent during the age of Wycliffism” (53, 159); though one would have been interested in knowing how Cole would have engaged with the evidence of widespread continental usage of the word “lollard,” both before and during the spread of Wycliffite ideas, as presented by...