ABSTRACT

Considers an unusual set of “key-object” annotations, pictorial as well as verbal, that appear in the margins of the Middle English gospel harmony Oon of Foure in Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 978. Argues that the margins of Bodley 978 record a variety of conversations shaped by lollardy. After briefly locating the Bodley manuscript in relation to the larger Oon of Foure tradition, the article proceeds by tracing a set of often-repeated annotative objects across the Bodley margins—key, sword, cross, lantern, heart. Taking these messy and amateurish finding aids seriously as intellectual work, it finds the primary Bodley annotator(s) developing a nuanced response to lollard hermeneutics and ecclesiology. Rather than defending scriptural translation or asserting scriptural authority, the Bodley key-object annotator(s) explore the nature of scriptural signs and track shifting modes of divine communication across the gospel narrative. And rather than directly attack the abuses of the clergy, they explore the nature of works and the uses of power—clerical and lay, human and divine—as they evolve across the unfolding arc of salvation history. Other hands respond variously to this annotative project, sometimes developing and other times critiquing the readings developed by main hand(s)’ key-objects. Lollardy itself emerges from this study, les as a coherent set of doctrines identified by a “sect vocabulary,” and more as a scripturally-grounded language for thinking with, a set of discursive and conceptual resources for entering into conversation on reformist topics in the vernacular.

KEY WORDS

lollardy, Oon of Foure, gospel harmony, marginalia, annotation, image-text, passion, cross, lantern, annotation, finding aid, mnemonic, inventio

The margins of Bodleian Library MS Bodley 978, a modest but otherwise typical manuscript of the Middle English gospel harmony Oon of Foure, are unusually cluttered with annotations.1 In addition to the kinds of marginalia that commonly accompany Oon of Foure, such as chapter numbers, scriptural cross-references, and liturgical occasions, the Bodley margins also contain a series of keyword annotations and rough drawings, which replicate individual words and objects from the text at hand. The keywords include proper nouns (“Pilat,” “Peter”), abstract concepts (“mercy,” “power,” “ypocrisi”), and key phrases (“litil flok,” “ve vobis”), many of which had come by this time to carry significant weight in English reformist discourse. The marginal images similarly function by re-presenting material objects from the gospel text: a cup, a sword, a simple [End Page 328] two-line cross. An empty boat appears every time Jesus puts out to sea (fols. 52v, 61v, 69r, 70v, 78r, 103r); a lace dangles the shoe John the Baptist declared himself unfit to tie (fol. 15v); and in a rare glint of law-clerk humor, a snake devours a word in John’s diatribe against this generation of adders (fol. 14v). There are even efforts to draw the wind (fol. 70v).2 Altogether, Bodley 978 preserves over one hundred marginal images and over 380 keyword annotations (not counting scriptural or liturgical references), making it the most densely annotated manuscript of Oon of Foure to survive.

Here and in a companion piece to this article,3 I argue that the Bodley marginal images and keywords together develop a coherent system of “key-object annotation,” practicing a conservative model of scriptural inventio that reflects the influence of lollardy. This may seem a counterintuitive claim to make, especially given the long-standing association, dating back at least to the heresy trials of the fifteenth century, between lollardy and iconoclasm.4 As recently as 1997, Ann Nichols cited the simple presence of “iconography” in the Bodley margins as evidence of “orthodox ownership” for Oon of Foure.5 But more recent scholarship has nuanced our understanding of lollard hermeneutics and iconology alike, revealing the lollards to be neither universal iconoclasts nor narrow-minded bibliolators.6 And while [End Page 329] debates remain about exactly what makes a lollard a lollard,7 a spate of “revisionist” work on late-medieval English religious culture has called for us to move beyond the “antagonistic paradigm” of lollard versus orthodox, emphasizing instead the “devotional cosmopolitanism” of a world where “ideologically opposed texts” often coexist peacefully side by side, within a single library or even a single codex.8 Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry have coined the term hospitable reading to describe an approach in which “difference is tolerated, re-thought, adapted and appropriated in the interests of re-imagining Christian community.”9

What I see in the margins of Oon of Foure, however, is a bit different: rather than create a shared dwelling place for lollard and orthodox texts, these annotators enter directly into conversation with and through lollardy, deploying a common vocabulary of scripturally grounded tropes, images, and sayings that had accrued specific reformist associations. Lollardy itself emerges from this study, less as a coherent set of heretical doctrines or even as a “religious movement,” but rather as a set of discursive resources for reformist conversations in English.10

It is not my goal, then, to identify this manuscript or its annotators definitively as “lollard.” Rather, Bodley 978 records a variety of conversations shaped by, and responding to, lollard ideas and textual practices. [End Page 330] These conversations take place both on the level of form, through the integration of keywords and pictures into a single image-text annotative system, and on the level of content, in the hermeneutic work done by the annotations themselves.

In the companion piece to this article, I establish key-object annotation as a textual form, arguing that it responds to established Wycliffite forms for the transmission of biblical material in English. The manuscript tradition of Oon of Foure generally respects Wycliffite standards for biblical transmission: scrupulously corrected, written in (or mimicking) formal book hands, they deploy decoration as a navigational device and avoid extensive glossing. While the margins of Bodley 978 clearly deviate from such standards, especially in their use of representational imagery, the formal principles that govern key-object annotation nevertheless suggest the influence of Wycliffite thinking. Effacing any functional distinction between image and keyword as annotative res, the primary Bodley annotators work to render the gloss as transparent as possible to the text from which it is drawn. At the same time, by refusing to represent the human body (except in the atomized form of eyes, hearts, and hands), they draw an implicit distinction between the “dead” key object and the living gospel text, firmly subordinating the one to the other. These two formal principles, I argue there, engage creatively with lollard ideas about scripture and imagery alike.

The current article continues to explore the active reception of lollardy in the margins of Bodley 978 Here, however, I am focused on key-object annotation as hermeneutic practice. Easily characterized—and perhaps too easily dismissed—as “finding aids,” the Bodley key objects exemplify the function of mnemonic devices as tools or instruments of inventio. As Mary Carruthers demonstrates, the “essential generative process in composition,” particularly in medieval exegetical contexts, consists precisely in the “recollection of things.”11 In just the way that Carruthers describes, the things in the Bodley margins generate “locational networks” of gospel images, phrases, and passages, constructing or inventing paths of scriptural meaning. [End Page 331] Whereas Carruthers is focused primarily on monastic “orthopraxis,”12 how-ever, the Bodley marginal key objects seem most likely to be a preacher’s working notes, often highlighting lectionary readings keyed to the liturgical calendar that has been inserted between the two main sections of the manuscript. While I have not found the specific elements of the Bodley marginal system to map neatly onto any (published) preachers’ manuals, its logic is the logic of the florilegium, collecting passages under conceptual rubrics through the use of repeated/related keywords and weaving them into patterns of meaning.13

Keywords that are repeated more than once across the Bodley margins suggest the annotators’ interest in food and drink, dining and feasting; in family, marital relations, and violations thereof; in sin and penance, judgment and mercy, scripture and law; in life and death, health, sickness, and healing; in light and darkness, sight and blindness; in works, talents, tribute, treasure, and debt; in sheep and shepherds and corn and wheat; in the parables; in prayer; in the beatitudes and the vae octuplex; in faith and truth, power and law; in prophets and prophesy; in hypocrisy and blasphemy; in Sabbath and synagogue and temple, Elijah, Peter, and Christ. Images that appear more than once across the margins trace similar themes and patterns of interest: a cross (though only in Oon of Foure itself, and never with corpus), a sword (throughout), vessels (for wine, oil, water, and ointment), a boat (always empty), weather (sun, wind, rain), lanterns and/or eyes, keys (especially Peter’s), and corn (especially in the parables). While there is nothing here to allow us to label the Bodley annotators as lollard on doctrinal grounds, many repeated key objects appear in contexts that echo their use in lollard writings. Rather than a “sect vocabulary” used to identify like-minded thinkers, lollardy seems to have provided these annotators with a scripturally grounded language for thinking with.14 [End Page 332]

Key-object annotation as a hermeneutic practice has much in common with lollard approaches to scripture as we are coming to understand them. Challenging the notion that Wyclif and his followers were ideologically wed to the ipsissima verba of scripture, Mary Raschko and Fiona Somerset have found lollards happily glossing, harmonizing, and summarizing the text of scripture in order to offer the Bible to lay readers as a form or model for Christian life.15 Like the Bodley annotators, the authors of an unpublished Middle English Biblical Summary identified by Somerset as lollard use “a cluster of keywords” to “introduce a common terminology across the whole of the bible,” demonstrating the “completeness” of the Bible while focusing attention on particular sections and themes therein.16 The Bodley annotators develop a vocabulary of key objects to enter thoughtfully into larger cultural conversations, fueled by lollardy, about the uses of scripture, the authority of the church, and the nature of Christian community.

The analysis of those conversations that follows falls into three sections. In the first, I locate Bodley 978 briefly within the manuscript tradition of Oon of Foure, considering in particular two other manuscripts that also contain various forms of nonverbal marginalia, up to and including representational imagery: British Library MSS Royal 17 C.xxxiii (Royal C) and Royal 17 D.viii (Royal D). I then attempt to trace the sequence of events that produced the artifact we currently know as Bodley 978, tracking as far as possible the conversations that emerged over time between contributing hands. This initial section lays the groundwork for tracing specific hermeneutic paths that unfold across the margins of Oon of Foure in particular, considering their engagement with lollard discourse. In the remainder of the essay, I read Oon of Foure with and through the Bodley key-object annotations. The two most-repeated marginal objects, sword and cross, find the annotators centrally concerned with the uses of power and the meanings of signs, as both develop across the unfolding arc of salvation history. A multimodal group of annotations centered around the key object [End Page 333] of the lantern, in turn, enters into dialogue with lollard thinking about works and goods, exploring with remarkable sophistication the relationship between worldly goods and spiritual treasure, and between human agency and divine. In taking the time to follow these hermeneutic pathways through the gospel harmony, we can see (at least) one late medieval English preacher take up the discursive resources offered by lollardy to engage in distinctive ways with ongoing reformist conversations in the vernacular.

The Discussants: The Hands of MS Bodley 978

Oon of Foure is a close Englishing of Clement of Llanthony’s twelfth-century Unum ex Quattuor, a thorough and scholarly minded harmonizing of the four canonical gospels. Bodley 978 is one of fifteen manuscripts of the Middle English version to survive, though their editor’s inability to construct a stemma suggests that there must once have been many more.17 While the translation may or may not be a Wycliffite production,18 the manuscripts of Oon of Foure share many telling features with early lollard (para)biblical programs, reflecting the influence of Wycliffite principles for the transmission of scripture in English. Like those of the English Wycliffite Bible and related texts, manuscripts of Oon of Foure tend to be scrupulously [End Page 334] written and carefully corrected, in textura or what I have elsewhere called “aspirational textura” hands.19 Ruling and rubrication rise to professional standards of consistency, while “hierarchical” decoration facilitates navigation among texts and parts.20 Marginalia across the Oon of Foure tradition are generally kept to a minimum, confined to navigational and liturgical aids and avoiding even the kinds of explanatory glosses that commonly accompany the English Wycliffite Bible.21 Whatever the genesis of the text itself, these manuscript forms align Oon of Foure with Wycliffite biblicism, furthermore constructing gospel harmony as a particularly “open” biblical genre.22

There are, however, three exceptions to this general rule of annotative austerity. In addition to Bodley 978 itself, two manuscripts in the British Library include at least some pictorial annotation: MSS Royal 17 C.xxxiii and Royal 17 D.viii. It is hard to draw any other connections between these three manuscripts, which otherwise reflect the diversity in production values that characterizes the Oon of Foure tradition as a whole. The relatively amateurish Royal C is the collaborative work of two hands, the more formal of which may also have been involved in another Oon of Foure manuscript.23 Its margins are full of pen trials and doodles, among which emerge several [End Page 335]

Figure 1. Marginal image annotating the calling of Philip in Oon of Foure, late fourteenth century, London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C.xxxiii, fol. 24v. © British Library Board.
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Figure 1.

Marginal image annotating the calling of Philip in Oon of Foure, late fourteenth century, London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C.xxxiii, fol. 24v. © British Library Board.

abstract annotative symbols (a sideways figure eight, a cell-like symbol, a seesaw figure) and rough representational images (mostly faces and heads).24 A very rough picture of five haloed men in a boat annotates the calling of Philip (fol. 24v) (figure 1). Royal D, in turn, is a much higher-end professional [End Page 336] production, graced with multicolored champ initials and borders. Its spacious margins suggest a more systematic approach to visual annotation: here we find an occasional series of small, neat pen-and-ink drawings that function as finding aids, including boats, birds, a sword, a church, a praying layman, loaves, and fishes (fol. 87v) (figure 2). In this manuscript’s only narrative tableau, two men carry a litter on which rests a shrouded figure, marking Jesus’s raising from the dead of the son of the widow of Naim (fol. 55r).

Figure 2. Marginal image annotating the miracle of loaves and fishes, in Oon of Foure, late fourteenth century, London, British Library, MS Royal 17 D.viii, fol. 84v. © British Library Board.
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Figure 2.

Marginal image annotating the miracle of loaves and fishes, in Oon of Foure, late fourteenth century, London, British Library, MS Royal 17 D.viii, fol. 84v. © British Library Board.

Placed alongside Bodley 978, these two Royal manuscripts might tempt us to speculate about a lost, larger tradition of visual annotation of Oon of [End Page 337] Foure. As such, they invite further comparison with Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 32, an illustrated set of glosses on the gospels of Mark and Luke that, according to Ann Nichols, “significantly qualifies our understanding of the extent of non-Wycliffite gospel translation and commentary during the last quarter of the fourteenth century.”25 Nichols demonstrates clearly the independence of the CCCC 32 gospel translations and their glosses from Wycliffite versions, arguing further that the manuscript’s “elaborate programme of figural illustration” distinguishes it sharply from lollardy.26 The presence of imagery in the three Oon of Foure manuscripts might be read to associate the text with such “non-Wycliffite” projects. However, while “narrative illustration” in the Corpus manuscript does seem to serve in part as navigational aid, these framed scenes are quite different from the small marginal drawings we find in the two Royal manuscripts, where narrative tableaux are very rare, or especially in Bodley 978, where the primary annotators avoid the human form altogether. Where the Corpus scribes/illustrators adapt clerical habits into a “user-friendly system for the non-scholar,”27 our Oon of Foure annotators bring preacherly habits of annotation into dialogue with Wycliffite scriptural forms.

To see how this works, it will be helpful to describe the hands involved in Bodley 978 and to untangle as far as possible its sequence of events. Work on the manuscript began with a hand we will call H1, who wrote and rubricated all the main texts in two distinct sections: (1) Oon of Foure with Clement’s Prologue (henceforth OOF), and (2) a series of New Testament texts in “Wycliffite translations”:28 1 and 3 John, 1 and 2 Peter, James, Jude, and the Books of Acts and Revelations, both with Prologues (collectively, WNT). H1, apparently a professional or at least an experienced scribe, [End Page 338] writes in a neat aspirational textura hand, marked by an old-fashioned preference for thorn and an occasional reversion to the older, sinuous form of s at the end of a line; he corrects his own text and rubricates the manuscript throughout to high professional standards; and his marginal contributions are limited to gospel references. While a limner was apparently not budgeted, simple two-line blue Lombards following H1’s marks appear at all book, chapter, and section breaks, mimicking as far as possible the “decorative hierarchy” of Wycliffite (para)biblical texts.29 H1 himself and at least one other hand have corrected the text throughout, including, distinctively, expunging every instance of tru/truli and soþ/soþli, in a move that might reflect lollard antipathy to oath-taking. The result is a low-budget but otherwise entirely typical version of Oon of Foure, respecting Wycliffite forms for scriptural transmission and limiting annotation.

Once all the main texts were written and H1’s minimal apparatus was in place, the manuscript appears to have been used for a time unbound; the first page of OOF and the last of WNT are dark and smudged. But it did not travel far, for H1 remained involved after binding, adding a series of marginal notes correcting a mis-ordering of folia that occurred during binding (fols. 90r–93r). H1 also wrote the first four lines of the liturgical calendar, an independent codicological unit that has been inserted between OOF and WNT, presumably during binding, and keyed to the texts of both sections with marginal letters. Also entirely typical of the Oon of Foure tradition, the addition of the calendar is consistent with the theory that this particular manuscript, which is so small and thick as to be almost cubical, was designed with preaching—perhaps even itinerant preaching—in mind.

After writing those first four calendar lines, however, H1 passed the manuscript off—whether literally or effectively—to the much messier and more idiosyncratic H2 H2 does not feel as closely constrained as H1 by the formal standards of Wycliffite biblical transmission. While still plausibly described as an aspirational textura hand, here those aspirations are much less consistently met: strokes are heavy and uneven, and annotations vary considerably in size and density/color of ink, while distinctive horned [End Page 339] letterforms draw on elements of textualis, Anglicana, and even the later Secretary script.30 Moreover, in contrast to H1’s Type I (or Central Midlands) orthography, H2’s is so odd as to suggest unfamiliarity with writing Middle English.31 H2’s primary contributions to the manuscript, in addition to writing and rubricating the bulk of the calendar, are marginal. While H1 added chapter numbers and gospel references, H2 is responsible for canticle titles, liturgical occasions, calendar letters, and scriptural cross-references as well as the more unusual keywords that interest me here. All of these copious verbal annotations, along with the marginal images, seem clearly to have been added after binding: inner margins, which are tightly bound and descend precipitously into the gutter, are almost never used.

At first glance, the amateurish H2 might appear to be a later owner-annotator, cluttering the margins of a manuscript made circa 1400 by a professional or quasi-professional H1 However, the fact that we find both of these very different hands at work in the calendar, as well as in the notes correcting the mis-ordering of folia in quire 12, suggests that they may have worked closely together, at least in time. It is thus possible that the manuscript as a whole was produced in the late 1420s or early 1430s, in keeping with H2’s Secretary forms, with H1’s thorns and sinuous final s’s harking back nostalgically to fin-de-siècle Wycliffite manuscripts. Further supporting this suggestion, variations in the color of ink appear to find H2 at work in the margins both before and after the addition of the calendar. In a first annotative pass, working in lighter ink, H2 adds scriptural cross-references, canticle titles, and the kind of liturgical occasions [End Page 340] or tituli that would have been rendered superfluous by the addition of the calendar;32 in a second pass, working in darker ink, he adds calendar letters along with the keyword annotations.33 The overall impression, enhanced by the copious use of marginal trefoils throughout, is of a working preacher or preachers marking up a manuscript for use over a period of time.

While the revised dating and sequence of marginal events I propose here remain speculative, the evidence invites us to read H1 and H2 as entering into an unfolding conversation, framed by lollardy, about the forms and uses of vernacular scripture. I strongly suspect, moreover, that H2 also drew the bulk of the marginal images. While the vast majority of these are in ordinary ink, often supplemented with red or yellow wash, a handful are in H2’s distinctive dull red rubricating ink. To be safe, I will call the primary pictorial annotator L2, though images and keywords work so closely together that I will often refer to their makers collectively as H2/L2 Prima facie the manuscript’s least lollard-like element, the Bodley marginal images are in fact integral to the reformist conversations that play out across the manuscript, as we shall see in more detail below.

Other hands were drawn into these marginal conversations in turn. Most clearly identifiable is L1, an artist whose faces and demi-portraits sporadically grace the manuscript’s two-line blue Lombards, increasingly in frequency in WNT, where they morph into author portraits of Luke (fol. 205v), Peter (fols. 188v and 194v), and, in heraldic form, James (fol. 198v). [End Page 341] L1 is occasionally lured into the margins to participate in, or respond to, H2/L2’s annotative program; his most distinctive contribution is the full-length figure of Christ Ascending (fol. 168r) (figure 3), which stands as the final image to annotate Oon of Foure. Yet another hand may be responsible for a handful of crude images in brown ink and/or wash; these images occasionally double or even “correct” L2’s work, as when a squiggly brown crown of thorns appears alongside H2’s provocative royal crown early in the Passion sequence (fol. 154v) (figure 4). Finally, the entire manuscript—all of its texts and all categories of marginalia—has been liberally touched in yellow and reddish wash, though this need not have been done all at once or by a single hand.

Figure 3. Marginal image of Christ’s Ascension, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 168r.
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Figure 3.

Marginal image of Christ’s Ascension, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 168r.

Not surprisingly, given that H2 seems to have taken over the manuscript fully with his work on the calendar, the marginal conversations of Bodley 978 seem to have their genesis there. Marginal brackets in H2’s distinctive dull red ink, used to link different lections for the same occasion, gradually morph into fish-heads and finally sprout the image of a sword on folio 178v (figure 5). Higher up on this busy page, the abbreviated word Marie stands beside an ointment pot, both in L2’s dull red ink, marking the lections for [End Page 342] Mary Magdalene’s feast day. In between, a red marginal note identifying the feast of the Assumption is illustrated by a hand that appears to be L1: a moon, representing Mary, is connected by straight lines to two layers of squiggly lines above, which echo the clouds into which Jesus’s hands disappear in L1’s Ascension image.34 This single calendar page thus encapsulates—and perhaps initiates—the marginal conversations of Bodley 978 These and other calendar images, moreover, highlight (and perhaps introduce) figures of interest to the Bodley annotators throughout the manuscript. A brown key marks the vigil of St. Peter on folio 178r; Peter’s key and Mary’s ointment pot are the only saints’ icons to appear regularly in the Bodley margins. The only other such icon to appear, and the only one to commemorate a non-biblical saint, is Lawrence’s gridiron, marking the lection for his vigil in the text of Oon of Foure (fol. 88r)—which is keyed in turn by calendar letter back to the busy folio 178v.

Figure 4. Competing marginal crowns, annotating the crown of thorns, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 154v.
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Figure 4.

Competing marginal crowns, annotating the crown of thorns, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 154v.

Patterns like these can begin to suggest how closely H2’s keywords and L2’s images work together across the Bodley margins. In the remainder of this essay, I trace conversations that develop around a central set of key [End Page 343]

Figure 5. Marginal brackets with images in the liturgical calendar, Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 178v.
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Figure 5.

Marginal brackets with images in the liturgical calendar, Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 178v.

objects: ointment pot and key, sword and cross, lantern and eye and heart. I have selected these objects as being of particular interest to the primary Bodley annotator(s) themselves,35 recurring multiple times across the manuscript in various contexts and combinations; each also participates in larger [End Page 344] reformist conversations shaped by lollardy. In following the paths these objects trace through Oon of Foure, I find the Bodley annotators developing a nuanced response to lollard hermeneutics and ecclesiology. Rather than defending scriptural translation or asserting scriptural authority, they explore the nature of scriptural signs and track shifting modes of divine communication across the gospel narrative. And rather than directly attack the abuses of the clergy, they explore the nature of works and the uses of power—clerical and lay, human and divine—as they evolve across the unfolding arc of salvation history.

Marginal Conversations

Gospel harmony is in many ways a conversational mode, bringing the four gospels and their individual representations of Jesus into dialogue with each other. As closely as Clement of Llanthony cleaves to the gospel originals, Unum ex Quattuor—and, closely following it in turn, Oon of Foure—develops a logic of its own, as Jesus juxtaposes and repeats key sayings and images drawn from different individual gospel sources. The Bodley key-object annotators are very much attuned to the logic of Clement’s text, often reflecting and reinforcing it through their own hermeneutic practice.

The Magdalene’s ointment pot, which we encountered briefly above in the image-text annotation marking the calendar lections for her feast day (fol. 178v), is a case in point. As Raschko points out, Clement’s “presentation of text reinforces the popular association of Mary Magdalene with the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet in Luke.”36 This association is grounded in the liturgy: the two lections marked by the Bodley annotation—“A strong womman who shal find” (Proverbs 31) and “A pharisei preied Crist to mete.1.7.4.8.a.” (Luke 7)—identify the Magdalene allegorically with the “strong woman” from Proverbs and literally with the “sinful woman” at the Lucan dinner party. The Bodley annotators use Mary’s iconic pot, which appears as a key object no fewer than four times in the margins of Oon of Foure, to [End Page 345] reinforce this identification. It marks both the lectionary passage in Luke (fol. 48r, OOF IV.8) and the parallel dinner party in Part IX, where the expensive ointment that so offends Judas is identified explicitly as Mary Magdalene’s (fol. 115r, OOF IX.V). Later, a marginal ointment pot twice marks the Magdalene’s presence in passages where no such object appears in the text: at Christ’s initial post-Resurrection appearance (fol. 162r, OOF XII.I), and when she runs to tell the disciples he is risen (fol. 162v). The annotators’ desire to reinforce traditional accounts of Mary’s role in the gospel and enable the reader easily to trace her full story overrides their typical wariness of iconographic signs, though they are careful to ground this one in the gospel text.

While the Magdalene’s ointment pot does not figure prominently in lollard discourse, Peter and his key certainly do. Peter’s key is the only other saint’s icon to appear regularly in the Bodley margins. Here, the annotators enter more clearly into conversation with Wycliffite ecclesiology. Lollard preachers and polemicists commonly draw a distinction between the true, immaterial church and its institutional counterpart. This distinction is elaborated fully in the Lanterne of Liзt, whose author images the true church as (inter alia) “Petris litile boot [boat]” (we might think of all those boats in the Bodley margins), while insisting that only Christ, the key of David, has the power to bind and loose.37 The passage in Matthew where Jesus renames Peter as the foundational “rock” of the church and gifts him with the “keys” of binding and loosing (Matthew 16:18–19) was commonly [End Page 346] used to ground the institutional church’s authority over sin; as the preacher-compiler of Laud Misc. 511 puts it, clavis ista est penitentia, referring both to the virtue and to the sacrament.38 Not surprisingly, lollards developed alternative readings of this crucial passage. In the Lanterne, the two keys given to Peter by Christ are identified as “kunnyng of word” and “iudiciari power.”39 The former is often associated, in turn (via the Master of Sentences) with the key of knowledge unjustly withheld by the experts in the law in Luke 11: “Wo to you, wise men of þe lawe, which haþ taken þe kay of konyng, зourself haþe not entred, and þam þat entrid зe forbede or defended.”40 In the Middle English translation of the Rosarium, a Wycliffite preacher’s compendium, the entry for absolucio reserves the authority to absolve sins to God and allows only “absolucioun denunciatiue” to priests, who must act “confourmeley to keyes of holy chirche for to schewe þe absolucion of God” and thereby “schewiþ be þe key of konnyng and of pouer hym to be asolued of God.”41 The Rosarium further defines the stone upon which the church is founded as the words of God in the mouth of the preacher.42 Significantly, the Matthean passage does not appear under the Rosarium entry for pope.43

In Bodley 978, the marginal image of a key marks a series of interrelated passages that, when read together, engage subtly with Wycliffite anticlerical [End Page 347] discourse. A complex multimodal annotation marks the crucial Matthean passage where Jesus presents Peter with “þe keies of the reume of heuenes” (fol. 87v): two drawings of keys and the English keyword keies here sit atop a shield surrounding the words sapiencia / bonum / operum, implicitly glossing the two keys as wisdom and good works—or roughly, as the keys of knowledge and power (figure 6).44 Breaking the most fundamental principle of key-object annotation—that the marginal object replicate a textual one—the key annotates two further passages about Peter where no such object appears in the text: the calling of Peter in Luke 5:1–2 (fol. 25r, OOF III.3) and the gospel lection for his feast day in the calendar (fol. 178r, John 21:17), where Jesus enjoins Peter to feed his sheep.45 The linking of these three passages through Peter’s iconic object highlights the gospel grounding of the institutional church. But the Bodley annotators also use Peter’s key to express sympathy with Wycliffite anticlericalism: the image further marks Luke 11:52, a passage that does not mention Peter but was often used by lollard writers (as we have seen) to gloss his keys—“Wo to зou wise men of lawe, for зe han taken awey þe key of kunnyng. зe entriden not, & зe had forboden hem þat entrided” (fol. 57r). The Bodley annotators thus both assert the gospel grounding of the church and critique the hypocrisy of clerics who have withheld the “key of kunnyng” and refused to feed Jesus’s sheep.

Also associated with Peter in the Bodley margins is the key object of the sword. The image of a sword marks the passage early in the passion narrative when Jesus reproves Peter for defending him with the sword and cutting off the ear of Malchus: “all þat schuld take sword, schul perische bi sword” (fol. 148r, OOF XI.3, Matthew 26:51–52).46 This marginal sword participates in a complex annotative path that weaves its way throughout [End Page 348] Oon of Foure: the sword is one of the earliest images to appear (fol. 12r, where Simeon warns Mary that “A swerd schal passe þrow þin own soule”).47

It is also among the most common marginal images, second only to the cross, and it appears moreover in several different forms, in ordinary ink and red ink, dark and light, right-side up and upside down, plain and colored, or touched in wash. The annotative path traced by the marginal swords of Bodley 978 does not have a parallel in any other (lollard) text or preacher’s manual with which I am familiar. It is used here creatively to explore the nature and uses of power—lay and clerical, human and divine.48

Figure 6. Marginal shield and keys, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 87v.
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Figure 6.

Marginal shield and keys, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 87v.

Initially, the Bodley annotators use the sword key object to distinguish between properly lay and clerical uses of power. An early instance marks John the Baptist’s response to a group of “kniзtis” seeking his teaching: “smite зe wrongfulli no man” (fol. 15r, OOF II.3, Luke 3:14). The lay power of the sword must be used only in the service of justice. And it should not be used at all by the first estate: the sword appears next to mark Jesus’s [End Page 349] reproving of Peter for attacking Malchus. Linked by the marginal image of the sword, these two passages can be read as forbidding the clergy from usurping knightly power. Tellingly, then, the same image marks a complementary scene in Acts, when Paul, having broken out of prison, stops the terrified guard from killing himself with his own sword (fol. 239v, Acts 16:27–28). Here the annotators implicitly contrast Paul’s mercy with Peter’s unauthorized use of violence. Just as the knight’s sword must be used in the service of justice, so he who wields the power of the keys must keep his sword sheathed, focusing instead on forgiveness and healing.

In addition to ecclesiological questions, the Bodley annotators are interested in power as a historical phenomenon, whose nature and uses shiftat the kairotic moments of passion and apocalypse. In a passage that might excuse Peter’s actions later in the arrest scene, Jesus describes his coming passion in apocalyptic terms: “he þat has not [a sword] selle his cote & bi a sword … for þe þingis þat ben writen of me han an ende. & þei seiden, lord lo two swordes here. & he seide to hem, it is inou”” (fol. 137r, OOF X.5, Luke 22:36–38). L1 ventures into the margins here to contribute an elaborate coat, which he has squeezed between no fewer than three swords in L2’s hand, one above and two below. Whereas Peter seems to have understood this as an invitation to literal violence, and L1 perhaps heard an echo of Jesus’s seamless coat, H2/L2 might be thinking of those two sufficient swords as the two powers, secular and ecclesiastic, that will characterize Christian society in the long wake of Christ’s passion.

The same marginal image, moreover, marks a parallel shiftin divine power attending the Apocalypse. Jesus himself warns, in a passage so annotated, “in þo daies … greet tribulacion schal be on erþe, & ire to his peple. & þei schul fallen in þe mouþe of þe sword” (fol. 129v, OOF IX.3, Luke 21:24). No fewer than three passages, moreover, are annotated with the marginal image of a sword in the Book of Revelations itself, two describing the “swerd scherp” that “on eiþer side went out of his mouþ” (fols. 268v, 281r) and another the opening of the second seal, when “a greet swerd was зouen to him” (fol. 274r). With the exception of a sun that may be the work of L1, the last of these Apocalyptic swords is the final visual annotation in the manuscript. L2’s marginal program thus concludes by emphasizing the [End Page 350] ultimate power of the divine sword, which eclipses all thought of keys as church militant gives way to church triumphant.

In tracing the annotative path of the sword as key object, we can begin to see how, while they are interested in Wycliffite ideas and engage with the conceptual language of lollardy, the Bodley key-object annotators also take their own paths though the harmonized gospels. They are most interested not in developing polemical arguments but rather in tracing a narrative of salvation history. At the center of that narrative, and also at the center of many contemporary theological and pastoral conversations, sits the cross. Not surprisingly, then, the most common key object to appear in the Bodley margins is a simple two-line cross in black and/or red ink, always devoid of corpus, and sometimes standing on a simple base one or two levels high. The Bodley annotators use this key object to explore the nature of the cross as sign.

The first appearance of the cross as sign marks a passage in which no cross appears; like the use of Peter’s key to mark his presence in the text, this represents a noteworthy departure from the established methods of key-object annotation. In Oon of Foure II.11, the Pharisee Nicodemus asks Jesus about signs: “Rabi, we wete for of god þou hast comen a maister. For no man doþ þes signes which þou dost, no but god be with him.” Jesus deflects this confident reading of divine presence, in a passage whose “trulis” have, I believe uniquely, been allowed to stand un-expunged: “truli truli I seie to þe, no but a man schul be born eft, he mai not se þe reume of god” (fol. 20r, OOF II.11, John 3:1–3). Sight of the kingdom depends not upon the signs themselves but on the spiritual status of the viewer—recalling the Wycliffite assertion that scripture reveals its truths to the virtuous rather than to the (merely) learned.49 In the text of Oon of Foure, there ensues a discussion of what it means to be born again according to the spirit, in which Jesus continues to deflect attention from the miracles he has done to the baptism that alone enables salvation, from evidentiary sign to sanctifying sacrament. What God seeks to communicate in Jesus-as-sign is not knowledge but grace. In the margins alongside this discussion in Bodley [End Page 351] 978 stands a cross on a two-tiered stand—one of its more elaborate manifestations in the manuscript—identifying the cross as the absent object at the center of this crucial shift, the unique signifier that makes possible the salvation-historical transition from sign to sacrament, from law to grace.

To put it another way, where Nicodemus reads signs to know where Jesus has come from, the Bodley annotator follows Jesus himself in pointing forward to the passion. This is how the key object of the cross will continue to function, up to the point of the passion narrative itself. The cross marks two interrelated kinds of passage across the central sections of Oon of Foure: first, Jesus’s injunctions to take up his cross, often phrased negatively—he who does not take up my cross will not be saved50—and second, Jesus’s prophetic revelations about his upcoming passion and the “doom of the world.”51 The result is a layering of personal and eschatological narratives, interpolating the reader along with the disciples into the larger framework of salvation history.52 The marginal cross points to the kairotic sign/moment when the truth of all these overlapping stories is revealed.

In annotating the passion itself, Bodley’s H2/L2 take the cross as their central key object. While this may seem an obvious choice, it departs from mainstream representational traditions such as the arma Christi.53 In place of the elaborate array of “betokening,” “betrayal,” and “torture” instruments that appear in (for example) the popular Middle English image-poem “O Vernicle,”54 the main Bodley passion sequence is grounded in four simple [End Page 352] two-line crosses: floating up Golgotha; surrounded by the two thieves’ crosses (also empty); marking (but not representing) Pilate’s controversial addition of the title “king of the Jews”; and in a striking image-text stabat mater, in which the abbreviated keyword Marie stands beside an empty cross (fols. 155r, 155v, 156v, 157r).55 This central sequence of images transforms the cross from an instrument of torture to a signifying object. The Bodley sequence of crosses is interrupted only once, apparently to correct a scriptural inaccuracy in “O Vernicle”: where the Middle English poem erroneously associates the image of three dice with Christ’s purple robe, Bodley’s L2 restores the dice to the soldiers who gambled for Christ’s seamless robe.56 The only “betokening” instrument to appear in the Bodley key-object passion sequence is Peter’s sword (fol. 148r), while the only “torture” instrument, Jesus’s crown of thorns, is here represented as a royal crown (fol. 154v), shifting attention from Christ’s suffering human body to his divine kingship. The sequence closes with an image of the garden where Jesus’s tomb was located, showing not even the grave where his body was laid (fol. 159v).

As I argue more fully elsewhere, the Bodley sequence of passion images enacts several shifts of emphasis vis-à-vis the mainstream arma tradition: from Christ’s suffering body to the cross as sign, from instruments of torture to signs of Christ’s kingship, and from a narrow focus on Jesus’s relationship with his tormentors to a wider view of witnesses to his passion.57 Where the Fasciculum Morum, a contemporary Franciscan preaching manual, allegorizes a pilgrim’s garb as the arma Christi and then further allegorizes the arma themselves as moral clothes for us,58 and where the earlier Manipulus Florum, one of the foundational texts of the genre, treats not the [End Page 353] cross-as-sign but the powers inherent in making the sign of the cross,59 in the Bodley margins the two-line cross stands as a sign for the passion as salvation-historical tipping point, marking a fundamental shiftin the relationship between the human and the divine.

Consistently deflecting attention away from Christ’s body and its human suffering, the Bodley marginal passion sequence also repopulates the drama of the crucifixion, implying the presence of Peter and the thieves, Pilate and Mary, and thereby reversing the arma’s narrowing of focus to Jesus’s relationship with his torturers. Further redirecting attention from torture to witness, the nails of the arma tradition are displaced from the crucifixion to mark instead Thomas’s post-resurrection demand to see and touch Christ’s wounded body (fol. 165r). For Thomas, of course, bodily witness is central to belief. The Bodley marginal program insists by contrast that faith must transcend bodily experience, residing instead in the community of believers. In this stark re-visioning of the arma Christi, the crucifixion and its instruments become a site for meditation, not on the bodily sufferings of Christ, but rather on the nature of Christian discipleship and the historical contingency of power.

H2/L2’s revisionist engagement with the arma Christi tradition did not go unnoticed. Several other hands intervene in the primary marginal passion sequence, responding to H2/L2’s representational strategies. Most strikingly, alongside L2’s royal crown appears a traditional crown of thorns in yellow wash (fol. 154v, figure 4), as if correcting a misrepresentation. The same hand, it seems, adds seven drops of blood to mark Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane (fol. 147r) and gives Longinus back his spear (fol. 159r). These additions restore some potential for sensory engagement with Christ’s suffering and his blood, “correcting” or realigning L2’s reformist approach. L1’s response to the H2/L2 passion sequence comes a bit later, and, while more dramatic, is also less corrective and more conversational. L1 illustrates the Ascension with a full-body image of Jesus, arms raised and surrounded [End Page 354] by a nimbus-like cloud (fol. 168r) (figure 3). This image breaks the mold of key-object annotation; after the rigorously disembodied passion sequence, the Ascension figure is so startling as to provoke laughter from audiences at conference panels.60 L1’s image also diverges significantly from traditional Ascension iconography, which typically represents a circle of disciples gazing upward at Jesus’s body—or often just his feet—disappearing into the clouds.61 L1 thus represents more of Jesus’s body than is conventional in images of the Ascension, while at the same time eliminating everybody else from the scene. But perhaps this is not so much deviation as development. Read in conversation with, rather than against, H2/L2’s annotative program, L1’s unusual Ascension image suggests that we can only gaze upon the face and figure of Christ when he is leaving this world in the body, concluding the story of the Incarnation.62 Imagery, inherently more embodied than words, is perhaps safest when its subject is the end of history.

Multimodal Annotation and the Bodley Lantern Group

Thus far I have sought to demonstrate how the primary Bodley annotators use a select group of marginal images—ointment pot, key, sword, and cross—to enter into conversation on a variety of topics of interest to lollards and other reform-minded thinkers in the period, from the proper uses of [End Page 355] the passion to the nature of Christian community. Availing themselves of the conceptual language of lollardy, and reflecting the influence of Wycliffite thinking, the Bodley annotators nevertheless adapt that shared vocabulary to pursue their own interests, suggesting how lollardy provided discursive materials for a variety of independent projects in late-medieval England. Viewed from the perspective of the Bodley margins, lollardy proves to be not a polarizing force but a resource for conversation—between text and gloss, between marginal hands, and among a variety of representational traditions, from Wycliffite anticlericalism to the arma Christi.

Pursuing this argument further, I turn now to a series of interconnected multimodal annotations in the Bodley margins organized around the key object of the lantern. The interplay of verbal and visual annotation across this “lantern group” provides the strongest support for my reading of key-object annotation as a single, coherent glossatorial system, exemplifying the annotators’ hermeneutic practice. The lantern group of annotations traces a central trajectory in Jesus’s ministry, in which physical signs and miracles gradually give way to prophetic discourse and, finally, to the institution of the eucharist at the Last Supper. The Bodley annotators are here centrally concerned with how physical works/signs are related to divine meaning, and, as we shall see, they understand that relationship to be fundamentally historical, evolving through the gospel narrative and across the various stages of salvation history to culminate in the eschaton.

Just as Jesus’s own gospel ministry begins with a series of signs, of physical works that reveal his divine nature, so the Bodley marginal lantern group begins with an interest in works, exploring the paradoxical nature of spiritual agency. The image of a lantern first annotates Jesus’s famous saying from the Sermon on the Mount, which I will refer to as the lantern/candlestick saying:

зe ben þe liзt of þe world. a cete set on a hil. neiþer men teenden a lanterne & setten it vnder a busshel but on a candelsteke, þat it зeue liзt to al þat ben in þe hous. so shine your liзt bifore men þat þei se зour good werkes & glorifie зour fader which is in heuenes.

(fol. 35v, OOF IV.1, Matthew 5:15–16) [End Page 356]

Figure 7. Detail of marginal annotation with lantern, heart, and eye, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 38r.
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Figure 7.

Detail of marginal annotation with lantern, heart, and eye, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 38r.

Hovering between materiality and disembodiment, works-as-light shine forth from the human agent but in order to glorify God.63 A few pages later the image of the lantern reappears, larger and grander and colored in wash, sprouting an eye from its right side and with the Latin keyword lucerna above (fol. 38r). A heart colored in yellow seems to emerge in turn from the top of the letterforms of lucerna, while a few lines higher on the page appears the English word tresur (figure 7). The annotative elements brought into play here—lantern, heart, eye, treasure—recur in varying forms and [End Page 357] combinations across the Bodley margins, linking a series of interrelated sayings by Jesus that contrast earthly and heavenly goods and perspectives, seeking to prepare his disciples for the kairotic revelations of passion and apocalypse.

Here, in the series’ first and most complex multimodal annotation, the interconnected elements of the lantern group mark two sayings of Jesus, treasure/heart and lantern/eye, which together both assert and complicate the role of human agency in salvation. In the treasure/heart saying, which appears first on the page, Jesus establishes a governing opposition between earthly and heavenly places, material and incorruptible things:

Nyle ʒee tresoren to ʒou tresoris in erþe, where rust and mouʒhe distroʒeþ, and where theues deluen out and stelen. But tresore ʒee to ʒou tresores in heuene, where neiþir rust neiþir mouʒhe distroʒeþ, and where þeues deluen not out, ne stelen. Forsoþe where þi tresor is, þere also þin herte is.

(OOF IV.1, Matthew 6:19–21)64

The chiasmic rhetoric of the Middle English here—“tresore зe to ʒou tresores”—emphasizes the agency of the human treasurer (“ʒee to ʒou”) while at the same time enclosing her within her own possessions (“tresore… tresores”). The lantern/candlestick saying that follows, in turn, marks a new development in the metaphor of works-as-light:

Þe lanterne of þi body is þin eʒe. If þin eʒe is symple, al þi bodi shal be liʒtful. Treuli if þin eʒe is weiward, al þi bodi shal be derkful. Þerfore if þe liʒt whiche is in þee be derknesse, hou grete shul þo derknesses ben.

(Matthew 6:22–23)

Here, too, the mechanics of spiritual agency are complex and paradoxical. While the “simple” or “weiward” operations of the lantern/eye render the entire body light or dark, the light itself was always already “in þee,” the creation of God rather than of the human visual agent. In both of these [End Page 358] sayings, bodily actions have spiritual consequences, but in ways that are hard to reduce to common-sense models of cause and effect, investment and illumination.

The multimodal key-object annotation that marks this double saying of Jesus’s on folio 38r places the lantern/works at the center of this metaphorical nexus, with both eye and heart at once linked and subordinated to the double image/keyword of the lantern. The keyword tresur, above, functions as a visual rubric for the whole: the Christian’s primary choice is between spiritual and material goods, heavenly and earthly investments. The visual centrality of the lantern, the largest item on the page and the most elaborately decorated in the manuscript, posits the operations of the lantern/eye as crucial to that choice, suggesting that the location of your treasure/heart depends upon where you look and what you grant access to your body. But the lantern/eye can only ever work with or upon the light that God has already placed within. The marginal composition as a whole thus emphasizes the co-agency of God and the individual Christian: human actions are always working upon and working with God’s creation and God’s grace.

The two opening entries in the Bodley marginal lantern group together establish the lantern as a symbol for the paradoxical and collaborative nature of spiritual agency, while bringing that central symbol into conversation with the closely related gospel images of heart, eye, and treasure. In so doing, these annotations highlight Jesus’s own discursive strategy of repeating and developing a series of key images and sayings—a rhetorical effect that is significantly enhanced in Clement’s compendious harmony. For example, the association between light and works is reinforced, in Oon of Foure, when Jesus himself juxtaposes the lantern/candlestick and lantern/eye sayings; this passage is annotated in Bodley by the keyword lucerna (fol. 55v, OOF V.11, Luke 11:33–36).65 In between these two moments, the image of an eye recurs in the Bodley margins alongside the keyword amoot, marking Jesus’s injunction to remove the beam from one’s own eye before [End Page 359] judging the mote in another’s (fol. 39r, OOF IV.1, Matthew 7:3–5, Luke 6:41–42); sinful works have the capacity to blind, as well as to render dark the light within. In both of these instances we can see the Bodley annotators using key objects from the “lantern group” to highlight the logic of Clement’s text.

The Bodley marginal lantern group thus tracks conversations that emerge between individual sayings of Jesus in the discursive logic of Oon of Foure. At the same time, as the lantern group continues to develop, the Bodley annotators evoke other biblical passages and other discursive frameworks, bringing Clement’s harmonized gospels more directly into dialogue with lollardy. This becomes especially clear in another dense, multimodal annotation of two paired sayings, one that further develops the imagery of treasure, heart, and lantern initiated above (fol. 59r) (figure 8). In the first of the two sayings that appear on this page in the Bodley manuscript, Jesus enjoins his “litil floc” not to fear, but to give alms, for almsgiving will “make to ʒou bagges þat wexen not olde, tresoure not failing in heuenes … forsoþe where þi tresoure is, þer also þi herte shal be” (OOF V.12, Luke 12:32–34). Clement’s Jesus here glosses his earlier treasure/heart saying, identifying almsgiving as the source of heavenly treasure: we gain immaterial wealth precisely by giving away its earthly, material counterpart. The second saying on the page then shifts the earlier metaphorics of lanterns and light into the eschatological realm: “be ʒoure leendes girde biforne & lanternes brennyng in ʒoure hondes, & be like to men abiding þer lord wan he shal turn aзen from weddingis … blessed be þo seruauntis which wan þe lord schal come he schal be fonde wakinge” (Luke 12:35–36). The light of good works here serves not just to glorify God but, more precisely, to welcome the returning Lord. In a saying that could hardly fail to evoke the Gethsemane story for medieval readers (“vigilate et orate ut non intretis in tentacionem,” Matthew 26:41), bringing to mind his coming passion, Jesus implicitly warns his little flock to be ready to greet him at his Second Coming, the second and final watershed of salvation history.66 [End Page 360]

Figure 8. Detail of marginal annotation with heart and various keywords, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 59r.
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Figure 8.

Detail of marginal annotation with heart and various keywords, in Oon of Foure, ca. 1400. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [2017], MS Bodley 978, fol. 59r.

Just as Clement’s Jesus glossed his own earlier sayings, so the Bodley annotators repeat earlier key objects with telling additions, supplementing Clement’s logic with a series of conceptual links to other biblical passages and other discursive contexts. The keyword tresur appears with “selle зe” just above it, representing Jesus’s immediate injunction to give alms while calling to mind his notorious advice to the rich young man to sell all he has and give to the poor—a saying also marked by “selle ʒe” in the Bodley margins.67 The keyword lucerna, in turn, is here accompanied by the Middle English wake, reinforcing the textual echoes of the Gethsemane story.68 More strikingly still, the image of a heart is colored with red wash [End Page 361] and given several drops of blood springing from its top. These extra-textual drops of blood evoke the traditional iconography of the sacred heart of Jesus and the popular cult of his blood; here, however, true devotion lies not in cultic practice but rather in giving alms to living imagines dei.69

Finally, in the upper right hand margin of folio 59r, a space only rarely used for annotation in the Bodley manuscript,70 appear the keywords litil flok. This annotation and its unusual placement on the page frame both sayings of Jesus found here in ecclesiological terms, while at the same time bringing the Bodley margins into more explicit dialogue with lollardy. “Little flock” was a key phrase in lollard polemic. In the Coventry trial records, it is associated frequently with women and its use amounts to damning evidence—for example, “and he heard his mother reading in the vernacular language this Gospels, ‘Fear not, little flock.’”71 The phrase also appears prominently in the Lanterne of Liзt, where “little flock” is used to identify the true, immaterial church as distinguished both from its material or institutional counterpart and from the devil’s church whose members lurk therein.72 For the Bodley annotators, the purpose of the [End Page 362] institutional church is to distribute alms to the poor and prepare Jesus’s flock for the last days. Rather than suggest that the Bodley annotators knew the Lanterne—or vice versa—my goal here is to show how both texts participate in the same larger conversation, one that proceeds across texts and genres by ringing a series of changes on a shared set of gospel images and phrases.

It is worth pausing here, then, to note that a series of sermons from the Commune Sanctorum in the English Wycliffite cycle (EWS) tracks the same set of gospel passages as the Bodley lantern group. At the very least this provides further evidence to suggest that the Bodley annotators were preachers themselves, immersed in the logic of the lectionary; it might also suggest familiarity with the Wycliffite cycle and/or the resources used by its makers. Sermon 80 from the EWS, for a Common of a Confessor and Doctor, takes as its text Matthew 5:13, glossing the lantern as prelates and the house as the church to argue against ecclesiastical endowment;73 Sermon 81, for a Common of a Confessor and Abbot (Luke 11:33–36), expounds Luke’s pairing of the lantern/candlestick and lantern/eye passages (glossing the lantern as each man, the light within as the various God-given “witts,” [End Page 363] the bushel as worldly business, and the candlestick as “states” approved by God, such as that of bishop), in order to target the hypocrisy of vowed religious blinded by their investment in worldly profit;74 and Sermon 82, for a Common of Many Confessors (Luke 12:35–40), takes up the lantern/wedding saying from Luke, reading the “lendus” as the fleshly nature joined to the soul, the lantern itself as “medful werkys þat men han in þer vertew,” and the bridals as the union between Christ and the soul, and using this to argue that prelates should be a light for the people.75 All three of these sermons, then, use the gospel image of the lantern to critique the overly worldly investments of the contemporary church. We might hear echoes of such typically lollard critiques in the Bodley annotators’ emphasis on spiritual treasure.

The Lanterne of Liʒt, in turn, associates its titular object strongly with God’s law, via Psalm 118, “Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum,” and Proverbs 6, where God’s commandments are imaged as a lantern. The Bodley marginal lanterns may well have evoked these passages for their reformist scribe-illustrators. But where the Lanterne, like much lollard and reformist polemic, is primarily concerned to assert scriptural authority and defend vernacular transmission, the Bodley annotators use the lantern as key object to trace historical shifts in modes of divine communication, across the gospel narrative and across salvation history.

As the gospel narrative of Oon of Foure moves toward the passion and Jesus’s own discourse becomes increasingly prophetic, there is a concomitant shift of emphasis in the Bodley lantern group from works and judgment to signs and reading. The English keyword lanterne, in its first appearance as such in the Bodley margins, marks a passage where Clement’s Jesus repeats the lantern/candlestick saying yet again and adds a prophetic warning: “for no þing is priuy which schal not be schewed, neiþer hid which schal not be knowen & schal come into apert. If ony man haþ eeris to here, here he” (fol. 63v, OOF V.14, Mark 4:2–23). Rather than good works bearing witness to God’s glory, this apocalyptic lantern shines its light to [End Page 364] uncover hidden sins, while the cryptic tag “let him who has ears hear” places this saying in the realm of parabolic discourse and suggests an ultimate truth knowable only to the initiate. A few pages later, the metaphor shifts one last time: in a passage warning the Jews about the Last Judgment and enumerating the many witnesses to his divine mission, Jesus describes John the Baptist as “a lanterne brennyng & shynyng for[soþ] ʒe wolden fulli ioien at an hour in his liʒt”; a trefoil in the Bodley margins is linked by a squiggly line to the word lanterne in this passage. Other witnesses invoked in the passage include Jesus’s own works, the “fader himself,” and the “scripturis in which ʒe gessen to han euerlastyng lijf” (fols. 67v–68r, OOF VI.1, John 5:33–39). God communicates in a variety of ways, and the signs are there for all to read, in a passage that comes close to conflating the “good” or “euyl þingis” for which the dead will be judged with their correct or incorrect reading of divine witnesses.

Especially when read within the hermeneutic framework established by the Bodley lantern group, this passage represents the Apocalypse as a radical shift in modes of signification: God’s role shifts from rhetor to reader, while human works function not to glorify God but as objects of divine judgment. The impending passion marks a parallel shift in the nature of Jesus’s works in the world and how they are properly to be read, from signs to prophesy to sacrament. This shift in signifying modes, however, proves very difficult for the disciples to follow. As the passion approaches, the disciples’ understanding becomes darker, and the lantern, tellingly, disappears from the Bodley margins.

The heart, however, appears twice more, in the form of the oddly spelled Middle English keyword herete, its metaphorics undergoing a parallel shift from spiritual treasure to spiritual understanding. In both passages so annotated, the Pharisees appear as figures of mis-signification. In the first, a saying that appears more than once in Oon of Foure and receives attention as well from both Royal annotators,76 Jesus lambasts the Pharisees for valuing bodily over spiritual cleanness: “forsoþe þoo þingis þat comen forþ of þe [End Page 365] mouþ: comen out of þe herte. and þoo defoulen a man … forsoþe to ete wiþ hondis not waischin: defouliþ not a man” (fol. 75v, OOF VI.9, Matthew 15:11–20, Mark 7:15–23). In the second annotated saying, Jesus chastises the disciples themselves for similarly confusing outer signs with inner truth. This misunderstood sign here is, tellingly, bread. Having neglected to bring enough food on yet another sea trip, the anxious disciples misunderstand as referring to literal bread Jesus’s injunction to “beþ war of þe sourdouw of phariseis.”77 Because they lack faith in his bodily miracles (“ʒe of litil feiþ … I brak fy ue loues in to fy ue þousand”), the disciples cannot grasp his metaphorical usage here (“I seide not to ʒou of breed … but of þe doctrine of farises & saduceis”) (fol. 78v, Matthew 16:5–12; cf. Mark 8:13–21). Lack of faith leads to doctrinal misconception, figured as spiritual blindness: “ʒe knowen not зit neiþer undirstonde[n], зit ʒe han ʒour herte blinded. ʒe hauy[n]g iʒe[n] seen not, & ʒe hauy[n]g eeris here[n] not” (fol. 78v). This, in turn, does not bode well for the disciples’ comprehension of eucharistic bread, which will soon complete the transition from bodily miracles to sacramentality, from one mode of divine signification to another, and from law to grace.78

These two hearts are the final entries in the lantern group proper; henceforth, marginal instances of the group’s main key objects are extremely rare. Soon Jesus will move from teaching and prophesy to sacrament and passion. Bodley’s H2/L2, meanwhile, will continue to develop their reading of the passion itself as a salvation-historical tipping point, a kairotic shift in the nature of signs and the uses of power. Along the way, the marginal metaphorics of light will be taken up by L1, who introduces the new key object of a sun.79 Taking the form of a simple black face surrounded by [End Page 366] squiggly yellow lines, L1’s sun appears for the first time on folio 65r (“þan schul iust men schyne as þe sunne,” OOF V.15, Matthew 13:43), where it overlaps with H2/L2’s lantern group: appearing between the two marginal instances of L2’s “herete,” L1’s sun here shares its margin with the keyword tresur and the image of a cornfield in L2’s hand, both marking the parable of the pearl of great price. The sun does not appear again until 2 Peter, where it annotates the double image of a lantern shining in a dark place and a day star springing in one’s heart (fol. 195r). This usage stands in contrast to the “erring stars” of Jude (fol. 205), also annotated in the Bodley margins by a sun with a face. The final instance, which perhaps explains in retrospect the annotator’s habit of giving faces to his suns, represents the angel standing in the sun toward the end of the Book of Revelations (fol. 281 2r): “& I sau” aungel stonding in þe sunne & he cried with gret voice & seide to alle briddis þat flowen bi þe mydle of heuen. come ʒe & be gedred to þe gret soper of god” (fol. 281. 2r, Revelations 19. 17). This, significantly, is the final marginal image in the Bodley manuscript. Just as L1 closes out Oon of Foure’s annotative program with his unusual Ascension image, bringing Jesus’s human form into the margins just as he leaves earth in the body, so L1 concludes the manuscript as a whole by bringing the metaphorics of light into the eschaton, where day stars are separated eternally from erring stars, light from darkness.

What does it mean to identify a marginal notation as “mnemonic”? More than once, when sharing my readings of the Bodley 978 margins with colleagues, I have been met with puzzlement at the effort: could these not simply be finding aids? While the answer is yes, I have tried to demonstrate the value of taking such unpromising marginal devices seriously as intellectual work: both as readings of the texts they annotate, and as participating actively in larger cultural conversations. The key-object annotations of Bodley 978 develop a hermeneutic program conversant (in all senses) with [End Page 367] lollard uses of scripture. In so doing, they not only demonstrate how marginal finding aids functioned as instruments of scriptural inventio; they also suggest how lollardy itself functioned as a discursive resource for thinking and preaching in the vernacular.80 [End Page 368]

Elizabeth Schirmer
New Mexico State University

Footnotes

1. The full text of Oon of Foure awaits a scholarly edition, but see Paul Smith, “An Edition of Parts I–V of the Wycliffite Translation of Clement of Llanthony’s Gospel Harmony Unum ex Quattuor known as Oon of Foure” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Southampton, 1985). Smith has also transcribed the full text from British Library, MS Royal 17. Cxxxiii; Paul Smith, Oon of Foure, http://www.wycliffitebible.org/2html (1984–2016). Unless otherwise noted, I cite the text here from Bodley 978, silently expanding abbreviations and modernizing punctuation. On the marginalia of Bodley 978, see Ann Elj enholm Nichols, “Oon of Foure: The Marginalia of Bodley 978,” Journal of the Early Book Society 1 (1997): 135–40.

2. For an image of this annotation, see Elizabeth Schirmer, “Form and Sign in the Margins: Annotating Oon of Foure,” forthcoming in the Yearbook of Langland Studies 31 (2017).

3. Schirmer, “Form and Sign.”

4. Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner note that the three items of belief most commonly cited in the Coventry heresy trials are the sacrament of the altar, pilgrimage, and the veneration of images, including, frequently, the “common lollard saying” that images are dead blocks of wood and offerings are better made to paupers; McSheffrey and Tanner, eds., Lollards of Coventry, 1486–1522 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21–22.

5. Nichols, “Oon of Foure,” 137.

6. On Wycliffite approaches to scripture, see Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 22–66, 113–45); Ian Christopher Levy, Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2014), 55–91; Mary Dove, “Love ad Litteram: The Lollard Translations of the Song of Songs,” Reformation 9 (2004): 1–25; and Fiona Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014), 63–98 On lollard iconology, see Mary Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon, 1984); and Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9–12, 15–44.

7. For recent overviews of these debates, see Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, 1–8, 15–22; and J. Patrick Hornbeck II with Mishtooni Bose and Fiona Somerset, A Companion to Lollardy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1–23.

8. Sarah James, “‘Hospitable Reading’ in a Fifteenth-Century Passion and Eucharistic Meditation,” in Devotional Culture and Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 593–605 at 595, 596 See also Kelly and Perry’s introduction to that volume, 1–16.

9. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, “Devotional Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England,” in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 363–80 at 365.

10. Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, 16 As Somerset persuasively argues, “Lollards, then, are writers and readers engaged in a textual culture that collaboratively produced writings about reformed forms of life and that attempted to make them a way of life.” My focus here is on how that textual culture functioned rhetorically.

11. Mary Carruthers, The Craftof Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 34, 30.

12. Carruthers, Craftof Thought, 1–3.

13. On the genre as a whole, see Christina von Nolcken, “Some Alphabetical Compendia and How Preachers Used Them in Fourteenth-Century England,” Viator 12 (1981): 271–88.

14. See Anne Hudson, “A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?,” in her Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon, 1985), 166–73 Somerset makes a similar claim regarding the use of keywords in the Middle English Biblical Summary in Trinity College, Oxford MS 93 (Feeling Like Saints, 184).

15. See Mary Raschko, “Re-forming the Life of Christ,” in Europe After Wyclif, ed. J. Patrick Hornbeck II and Michael van Dussen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); and Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, 173–202.

16. Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, 167.

17. See Smith, “An Edition,” ccxxii, ccxxxiii.

18. On the manuscripts of Oon of Foure, its status as translation, and its contested relationship to Wycliffite biblical programs, see Mary Raschko, “Oon of Foure: Harmonizing Wycliffite and Pseudo-Bonavanturan Approaches to the Life of Christ,” in The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition, ed. Ian Johnson and A. F. Westfall, MSC 24 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 341–73 at 343–45, 370. On the language of the translation, see Paul Smith, “Could the Gospel Harmony Oon of Foure Represent an Intermediate Version of the Wycliffite Bible?” Studia Neophilologica (2008): 160–76 Drawing on both manuscript and linguistic evidence, Raschko and Smith are both inclined to emphasize the text’s Wycliffite affiliations. Mishtooni Bose shares Anne Hudson’s skepticism; see Bose, “Reversing the Life of Christ: Dissent, Orthodoxy, and Affectivity in Late Medieval England,” in Johnson and Westfall, The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 55–77 (67 n. 45), citing Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (1988; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 267–68.

19. Schirmer, “Form and Sign.” I explore the relationship between Oon of Foure manuscripts and Wycliffite biblical forms more fully in that article.

20. Kathleen Kennedy, The Courtly and Commercial Art of the Wycliffite Bible (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 22 See also Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 88–92, and Matti Peikola, “Aspects of Mise-en-page in Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible,” in Medieval Texts in Context, ed. Graham D. Caie and Denis Reveney (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28–67.

21. On glosses in manuscripts of the English Wycliffite Bible, see Dove, First English Bible, 153–71; on marginalia in the Oon of Foure tradition, see Schirmer, “Form and Sign.”

22. “Open” is a common term in lollard discussions of scripture. For example, the Prologue to the EWB famously records an effort “to translate aftir þe sentense and not only aftir þe wordis, so þat þe sentence be as opene or openere in English as in Latyn, and go not fer fro þe lettre”; Mary Dove, The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), 81.

23. British Library, MS Harley 1862; for a fuller discussion of this possibility, and of the Royal manuscripts generally, see Schirmer, “Form and Sign.”

24. Cf. British Library, MS Laud Misc. 511, a collection of sermons and sermon material whose marginal notations include squiggles (often with eyes and noses) used for “emphasis or even bracketing” as well as “marks reminiscent of Grosseteste’s indexing system” that align with mendicant, and particularly Dominican, practices; Mary E. O’Carroll, SND, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook: Studies in MS Laud Misc. 511 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1997), 81, 103, 107

25. Ann Elj enholm Nichols, “The Illustrations of Corpus Christi College MS 32: “Þe Glose in Englissche Tunge,” in Image, Text, and Church, 1380–1600: Essays for Margaret Aston, ed. Linda Clark, Maureen Jurkowski, and Colin Richmond (Toronto: PIMS, 2009), 37–67 at 56 A digital reproduction of the manuscript is available through the Parker Library online, Corpus Christi College and the Stanford University Libraries, http://parker.stanford.edu, accessed 17 March 2017.

26. Nichols, “Illustrations,” 40.

27. Nichols, “Illustrations,” 48, 46.

28. Smith, “An Edition,” xx. On the close relations between the language of Oon of Foure and of the Wycliffite Bible, see Smith, “Intermediate Version.”

29. Kennedy, Courtly and Commercial Art, 22

30. Nichols notes that David Rundle dated both hands, H1 and H2, to “ca. 1400, plus or minus ten years” (“Oon of Foure,” 139 n. 3). H2’s Secretary forms would, however, seem to place him a bit later, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century.

31. In addition to dialectical variations (e.g., exchanging d and thorn, fricative variants), H2 frequently leaves off the overline for n, giving þig[is] for ‘things’, sig for ‘sign’, goig for ‘going’, etc. Also, despite a low number of instances overall, H2 uses several forms of key words like ‘days’ and ‘disciples’. Other unusual forms include kunte (country), eiui[n]ng (evening), heraris (hearers), moþ (mouth), maknowe[n] (made known), ca” (came), whe (why), to ge þere (together), afeste da (a feast day), and heiue (heavy).

32. Matti Peikola notes that “as a liturgical device, this system [of tituli] predates the list/table of lections; it seems to have become more or less obsolete by the end of the Middle Ages”; Peikola, “Tables of Lections in Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible,” in Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible, ed. Eyal Poleg and Laura Light (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 351–78 at 360; according to Peikola, a few early manuscripts of the English Wycliffite Bible contain these tituli but lack a table of lections, which quickly became standard in the tradition.

33. There are exceptions: on several pages a calendar letter is in the lighter ink of the liturgical occasions, versus the darker keywords, and rarely liturgical occasions also appear in darker ink—or in two shades of ink on the same page. At least one liturgical occasion overwrites a keyword, and in one instance the dark-ink keyword dette is followed by “or ferding” in lighter ink (fol. 95v).

34. Perhaps significantly, this double interest in Mary and the Magdalene also characterizes the lay-directed illustrative program of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 32, where the Magdalene’s feast-day lection from Luke receives a bas-de-page illustration—as does the Ascension; see Nichols, “Illustrations,” 50–53

35. While I suspect that Bodley’s H2 and L2 are the same person—that is, that the images and keywords are by the same hand—I cannot prove this and so refer to these primary annotator(s) in the plural throughout.

36. Raschko, “Oon of Foure,” 351.

37. Lillian Swinburn, ed., The Lanterne of Liзt, Early English Text Society, o.s. 151 (London:K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1917), 24, 3 Somerset lists the Lantern among texts that “most closely follow the concerns of those early lollard writings that draw heavily on Wyclif” (Feeling Like Saints, 7). The Bodley annotators, as we have seen, associate the key object of the boat closely with Jesus’s own ministry; in the two Royal manuscripts, boats are instead associated with the disciples: in Royal C, the calling of Philip is marked with a picture of five haloed men in a boat (fol. 24v), while in Royal D, the calling of Peter is marked not with keys and shield but with the image of a boat and net (fol. 35v). And where Bodley’s H2/L2 uses the boat to mark moments of Jesus’s preaching, Royal D’s annotator prefers instead to illustrate elements from his sayings, e.g., a heart on fol. 70v (where Bodley has a boat, fol. 61v) and loaves and fishes on fol. 85r (where Bodley has two image-text boats and a single loaf of bread, fol. 78v).

38. O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, 149.

39. Swinburn, Lanterne of Liзt, 75.

40. Christina von Nolcken, ed., The Middle English Translation of the Rosarium Theologie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), under “prechour.”.

41. Von Nolcken, Rosarium Theologie, under “absolucio” (citing the “Master of Sentences”).

42. Von Nolcken, Rosarium Theologie, under “edifying.”

43. Probably predating Bodley 978, Laurence Bedeman, one of Wyclif’s original circle who was never condemned as heretical though he remained interested in Wyclif’s ideas, made notes in the margins of his own preacher’s handbook for a sermon on the keys of St. Peter; see Jeremy Catto, “A Radical Preacher’s Handbook, c. 1383,” English Historical Review 115, no. 463 (2000): 893–904 at 895 Later, the (entirely non-academic) Coventry lollards whose trial records are collected by McSheffrey and Tanner (Lollards of Coventry) were still returning to the theme: one Robert Cowther was deposed as believing “that neither bishops nor priests nor curates of churches have power in confession to bind and loose” (67), while one John Blumson further had believed “that the power given to blessed Peter in the church of God by our saviour Jesus Christ did not directly pass to his successors” (64–65).

44. A similar shield enclosing three circles marks the Pater Noster (fol. 50v).

45. By comparison, the Rosarium entry for Ecclesia allegorizes the net thrown by the fishermen in Luke as the institutional church, which includes both the chosen and the reproved; in Royal C, the passage is marked by the drawing of a net (fol. 35v).

46. Notably, at the text describing how Jesus warns his disciples that he comes to bring not peace but a sword, the Royal D illustrator draws a sword in the margins (fol. 54v), while Bodley’s H2 writes the possibly misleading keyword, pees (fol. 44v).

47. It is preceded only by a shepherd’s crook in yellow wash on fol. 15r, marking the shepherds of the nativity—a passage annotated in Royal D by the keyword shepherd (fol. 21v).

48. Power is also a common keyword in the Bodley margins (e.g., fols. 41v, 120v, 155r).

49. See, e.g., Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, 59–65.

50. Fols. 46r (OOF IV.V, Matthew 10:38–39, annotated in Royal D, fol. 54v, by the image of a man praying), 88r (OOF VII.6, Matthew 16:24–25), and 97r (OOF IX.4, Luke 9:23–25).

51. Fols. 88r (OOF VII.6, Matthew 16:21), 90v (OOF VII.9, Matthew 17:21–22), 111v (OOFIX.1, Matthew 20:17–19), and 118r (IX.7, John 12:30–33).

52. Cf. Somerset on the Middle English Biblical Summary, whose use of keywords similarly “requires readers, over and over, to position themselves in salvation history, between stories of the past and prophesies of the future in an uncertainly positioned, aspirational here and now,” a “self-positioning in biblical history” that is “repetitive and also recursive” (Feeling Like Saints, 184).

53. For a more detailed reading of the Bodley marginal passion sequence as a reformist arma Christi, see Schirmer, “Form and Sign.”

54. For the text of “O Vernicle,” see Ann Elj enholm Nichols, “O Vernicle’: A Critical Edition with Notes and Commentary,” The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 308–92; on the poem’s relation to the larger Arma Christi tradition in England and beyond, see also Nichols, “‘O Vernicle’: Illustrations of an Arma Christi Poem,” Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers and Illuminators (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 139–69.

55. Fol. 155v has been repaired, with a piece of paper covering the central part of the margins. I cannot discern any images below this paper, but there may be one or more there.

56. On this on this textual crux, see Nichols, ‘“O Vernicle,” 155–56.

57. Schirmer, “Form and Sign.”

58. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), III.xviii.

59. The Electronic Manipulus Florum Project, “CRUX,” 2001–17, accessed 17 March 2017. The Wycliffite Rosarium includes entries for “crosse” and “passion,” but neither is included in von Nolcken’s selective edition.

60. I had this experience at the biennial meeting of the New Chaucer Society, Portland, Oregon, July 2012.

61. This is how the artist of CCCC 32 illustrates the scene (fol. 56r). For other instances of the “disappearing feet,” see the St. Alban’s Psalter, p. 54; the French Bible Historiale of Jean de Vaudetar (1372), Den Haag, MWW 10 B 23, fol. 555; or, a bit later, the Bible Historiale of Edward IV, British Library, MS Royal 15 D 1, fol. 370v, available online through Europeana Collections.

62. One of the more idiosyncratic beliefs recorded in the Coventry trial records, attributed to Richard Gest, is “that Hatchet taught him, concerning the Eucharist, that Christ at the time of his Ascension gave his body to his disciples”; McSheffrey and Tanner, Coventry Lollards, 144

63. The Rosarium cites this passage under “prechour,” to illustrate the second condition of a good or true preacher, namely, “for to luffe like or conformely as he techiþ: Math. 5. ‘So schyne зour liзt before men þat þei se зour gode werkis and glorifie зour Fader þat is in heuen.’” It seems likely that the Bodley annotators were thinking of their own complex agency as preachers here. This, we recall, is the same entry in the Rosarium that cites the Lucan passage chastising those who withhold the “key of kunnyng,” that is, the Word.

64. OOF cited in Smith, “Edition.”

65. The compiler of the Fasciculus Morum cites this passage in the course of his discussion of pride of deeds in knowledge, glossing lamps (lucerna) as those in the church who possess wisdom and knowledge (one is reminded of the “key of kunnyng,” above); Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, I.v, p. 53.

66. The gospel lection here continues with the memorable analogy of Jesus returning as a thief in the night.

67. The text reads, “зit oo þing failiþ to þe. if þou wilt be perfiзt: go & selle alle þing which þou hast & зif to pore men, & þou schalt haue tresour in heuene, & cum þou sue me” (fol. 106r, OOF VIII.12, Luke 18:22).

68. The marginal note “wake ʒe” also marks a parallel parabolic saying in which Jesus warns that the servants know not when the lord of the house will return (fol. 131r); the Gethsemane passage, “wake ʒe rise ʒe & preie ʒe þat ʒe entre not into temptacioun,” is marked in the Bodley margins by a trefoil (fol. 147r).

69. This is a commonplace in lollard discourse on religious imagery; see, e.g., the “Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards”: “pilgrimage, prayeris and offeringis made to blynde rodys and to dede ymages of tre and of stone, ben ner or kyn to ydolatrie and fer fro almesse dede’; pilgrims should rather ‘don almesse dede to men þat ben nedy, for þei ben þe ymage of God in a more likenesse þan þe stok or þe ston”; Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 27.

70. I count six keywords, one image, and three liturgical occasions in this location passim, plus the enumeration of three “portents” in the Apocalypse.

71. McSheffrey and Tanner, Lollards of Coventry, 22, 205–6 Cf. also the deposition of Rose Furnour, who “admitted that she had fallen into heresy, at the prompting of Hatcher, and that she had promised Hatchet she would never reveal their counsels. She says he often spoke about the Gospel, ‘Fear not, little flok’” (228); also of Agnes Corby, “At last, she admits that she heard Alice Rowley explaining the gospel, ‘Fear not, little flock,’ etc.” (235).

72. Swinburn, Lanterne of Liзt, 22–23, 4, 121 The phrase “little flock,” while more commonly associated with Tyndale and the reformers, also appears in lollard polemic beyond the Lanterne; see, e.g., Anne Hudson, ed., The Works of a Lollard Preacher: The Sermon Omnis plantacio, the Tract Fundamentum aliud nemo potest ponere, and the Tract De oblacione iugis sacrificii, Early English Text Society, o.s. 317 (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2001), 218–19, where the author of the “Titus tract” argues that “þe power of byndding and vnbindding þat antecrist presumeþ” is actually the “power of alle Cristis chirche, and not as power singlerli ʒeue to Petur,” and that regardless of corruption, simony, and heresy in the institutional church, “þis power abideþ in þe chosen chirche of Crist, alþou” þei ben here but a litil flok.” The English Wycliffite Sermon for the Translation of St. Martin (which in the old Roman missal was the octave of Saints Peter and Paul), on Luke 12:32, focuses on “drede” and its species, as well as on the “tresur” that is won by a good life; this sermon also echoes the earlier heart/treasure saying; Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, English Wycliffite Sermons, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–96), 2:273–76 Several of the tracts published by Matthew use the term flock to distinguish different (sub)categories of church, though the phrase “little flock” only appears once, in a prayer at the end of “How Antichrist and his Clerks Travail to Destroy Holy Writ” that asks God to strengthen his “litil flok” against the four wheels of Satan’s chair;F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works of Wyclif, Early English Text Society, o.s. 74 (London: Trübner, 1880), 262.

73. Hudson and Gradon, English Wycliffite Sermons, 2:142–48.

74. Hudson and Gradon, English Wycliffite Sermons, 2:149–53.

75. Hudson and Gradon, English Wycliffite Sermons, 2:154

76. This passage is also annotated in both Royal MSS; British Library, MS Royal 17 C.xxxiii, fol. 97r, and MS Royal 17 D.viii, fol. 83r.

77. This passage appears in the Rosarium under the heading “ypocrisy.”

78. One prominent “path” of verbal key objects in the Bodley margins marks a trajectory from literal cups and platters, bread and wine (fols. 46r, 48r, 56r, 74v, 94v) to their sacramental counterparts (fols. 135v, 136r).

79. As part of its lengthy treatment of the passion, the Fasciculus Morum enumerates Christ’s threefold coming, in Mary’s womb, man’s heart, and the final judgment, and develops a detailed list of the signs, letters, and messages that herald each (III.xvi). Many of the passages that interest L1 appear here, including Revelations 12 on the woman clothed in the sun (identified here as Mary) and Luke 21 on the signs in sun, moon, and stars.

80. Jeremy Catto makes a similar claim about very academic Wycliffism of Laurence Bedeman’s preacher’s handbook (ca. 1383), arguing that it reflects a “forgotten phase of Wycliffism when the evangelical doctor’s idea would still inspire a wider world than sectarian Lollardy” (Catto, “Radical Preacher’s Handbook,” 903). My work with Bodley 978 suggests that lollardy was still inspiring wider, vernacular worlds of discourse well into the fifteenth century.

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