Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif by Fiona Somerset (review)

In Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif, Fiona Somerset explores (at least) three crucial questions about the study of lollardy and of late medieval devotion in general. First, what constitutes a lollard text? How many kinds of lollard text were there? Second, what do we mean by the term lollard? How can we remain sensitive to the elements of Christianity that were the most lollard-inflected—as, for example, a concern with “liv[ing] the best form of life” (17)—without discounting the substantial overlap between lollard and mainstream religious texts? Third, how can we extrapolate lollard beliefs and emphases from lollard writings themselves, rather than relying on, for instance, heresy trials—on what detractors of lollardy said, rather than on what lollards themselves wrote?

In this deeply learned study, Somerset approaches these questions by investigating a core group of lollard and mainstream texts and manuscripts, asking what sorts of texts lollards wrote, read, and studied; how these writings contributed to a lollard “ethics of everyday life,” centered around action (18, 21); and how lollard texts are just as invested in a social ethic of love as they are in polemics. Over the course of Feeling Like Saints, Somerset engages with an astonishing range of material in order to examine the lollard pastoral program (chapter 1); the Decalogue (chapter 2); prayer (chapter 3); tale-telling (chapter 4); Bible commentaries (chapter 5); metaphor and allegory (chapter 6); and forms of living (chapter 7). As but a small sample of the works discussed: Five Questions on Love, the Dialogue Between Reson and Gabbyng, Book to a Mother, Speculum ecclesie, the Lay Folks’ Catechism, Memoriale credencium, the Rosarium, the Dialogue Between Jon and Richard, and Rolle’s The Form of Living. This is to say nothing of lollard Bible commentaries, sermon cycles, or treatises on the Decalogue that are also addressed at length. Somerset illustrates how, in these various genres and modes, lollard and lollard-leaning texts

• • Highlight love, emotion, and consent, ideas that express a lollard concern with the “mutual obligations of the Christian community” and with social responsibility (75, 95, 275);

• • Focus on virtues of truth and truth-telling;

• • Are most concerned, in pastoral writings, with having, knowing, and keeping God’s law and hence place special emphasis on the Commandments and the Gospel precepts (63);

• • Are interested in how metaphor and allegory might help incite Christians to right belief and action;

• • Depict prayer as a form of action involving both will and feeling;

• • Are not necessarily polemical or strident in tone;

• • Are not committed to a narrow idea of literal biblical interpretation;

• • Do not necessarily reject the sacraments;

• • Are not in fact predestinarian.

I have culled this list from the entirety of Feeling Like Saints, which is a book that should, indeed, be read in its entirety: every single chapter explores these elements of lollardy. It would be very difficult to extract one chapter, for they are all, importantly, interdependent and essential to advancing Somerset’s argument that we should be thinking about lollardy as a dynamic way of living, centered on action, rather than as a reactionary way of thinking about mainstream religion (20). Hence, Somerset argues, lollard writings invite their audiences to envision how the world should be and then “conduct themselves as if it were” this way (282), thereby acting to change the world (176). Changing the world involves the very set of precepts that Somerset identifies over the course of the book—and, crucially, these lollard precepts insist that Christianity means both mutual responsibility and care for one’s neighbors.

As should already be evident, for Somerset, the term lollard is a flexible one; capital-L “Lollard” is not a stable category that describes a stable group of people who all believed, for example, in the harmful properties of religious images or in the inevitable corruption of monks and friars. In this framework, lollard is adjectival—it is not a noun. Somerset...