Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages (review)

156 Reviews of the last book of the Morte Darthur. By reducing Malory'sfictionalworld to a person-by-person analogy with a real-time world, Astell's approach ignores the extent to which the Morte Darthur deals with overtly political issues—of power, hierarchy, loyalty and leadership—which have significance beyond individual personalities. Ultimately, Astell's readings, like all hermeneutic endeavours, are a matter of opinion. Her book is itself a comment on its o w n time, on the millennial vogue for seeking explanations in the behaviour of individuals rather than in the workings of social institutions. But the book is to be recommended for its n e w look at some familiar texts and its reminder that their authors must have been engaged, at some level, with the politics of their contemporary worlds. Helen Fulton Department ofEnglish University of Sydney Aston, Margaret and Colin Richmond, ed., Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, Stroud, Sutton Publishing and N e w York, St. Martin's Press, 1997; cloth; pp. viii, 280; 6 b / w illustrations, 10 maps and tables; R.R.P. not known. The twelve papers collected here were written to mark the 600th anniversary of the affixing of a Lollard libel (libellus) to the doors of Westminster Hall during the Parliamentary session of 1395, to 'denuncyn to the lordis and the comunys of the parlement certeyn conclusionis and treuthis for the reformaciun of holi chirche of Yngelond' (Twelve Conclusions, ed. Anne Hudson, Selectionsfrom English Wycliffite Writings, Cambridge, 19 p. 24). Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond claim in their introduction that 'this bold move amounted to an open declaration of [the fact that] the issues raised by Wycliffe had moved outside the university of Oxford' (p. 1), although not outside the world of learning: the fourth conclusion (in the English version preserved in Roger Dymmok's refutation of the Conclusions) quotes Wycliffe on the Eucharist in Latin (Selections, p. 25). Aston and R i c h m o n d invite particular attention to the parliamentary gentry addressed by the Conclusions of 1395. Did the anti- Reviews 157 clericalism of Lollardy speak to the worldly interests of this group? Anne Hudson argues that the sixth conclusion, concerning the perverse union of temporal and spiritual estates that results in an as-it-were 'hermofrodita or ambidexter', could be so read (pp. 41-51). Specifically, it might be read as addressing 'the interest of the lesser gentry, those w h o might, or whose sons might, fill the offices vacated by the clergy' (p. 48). Insofar as Dymmok, a Dominican friar, is refuting the Conclusions on the clergy's behalf, Hudson finds the clerical reply to conclusion 6 unpersuasive (pp. 42-3). Fiona Somerset makes the case that D y m m o k would like to be accessible to lay readers, but only if, like Chaucer's Monk, they 'seyn his opinioun is good'. In fact, however, his logic is specious and his intellectual arrogance overweening (pp. 52-76). Not only D y m m o k but perhaps, Aston and Richmond suggest, the late fourteenth-century Church as a whole 'underestimate[d] the literate layman' (p. 5), leaving it to Lollardy to occupy the devotional and spiritual, as opposed to philosophical and theological, high ground. But, i f so, why was 'the idea that religious life was very m u c h the laity's business' not widely accepted among the gentry between 1395 and the Reformation (p. 10)? H o w m a y expressions of orthodox and non-orthodox gentry-piety be mapped, and which of their cultural practices deterred or favoured the dissemination of Lollardy? If popular religion inclined naturally to orthodoxy, as Eamon Duffy maintains, were the gentry more prepared to question what the Church told them? Of course this volume does not answer these questions, but it makes available a wealth of n e w material, chiefly from historians, legal, religious and social, but also from literary historians. Happily, 'literary' Lollardy (the study of Lollard texts) and 'historical' Lollardy (what Lollardy was and w h o were Lollards) are no longer perceived as separate enterprises. Geoffrey Martin firmly restores to Henry...