The Call to Read: Reginald Pecock's Books and Textual Communities

Introduction: Reginald Pecock's Books and His Textual Community

Introduction Reginald Pecock’s Books and His Textual Community Fifteenth-century England was a time of intense debate and speculation about the nature of the religious life, the role of the church in Christian society, and the faith of the ordinary Christian. Questions once voiced and discussed by churchmen in places beyond the reach of ordinary lay folk were asked in vernacular writings that circulated among men and women of all walks of life. Controversy about the authority of the Bible, for example, as a supreme source of Christian knowledge raged in both the secular and sacred realms. Questions about the proper way to interpret the Bible, the best way to educate the Christian laity in matters of faith, and proper modes of interaction between the pious laity and God’s ministers were on the minds of many, as we can observe from the contents and concerns of sermons, tracts, treatises, and manuals. Thinking about these kinds of issues was stimulated in large part by the Lollard heresy, which flourished openly in the fourteenth century and underground in the fifteenth and threatened to change the very structure of the Christian community and the practice of Christian religion. Churchmen like John Mirk, John Capgrave, John Audelay, Reginald Pecock, the anonymous author of Dives and Pauper and the Longleat sermons, and other anonymous writers were all invested, in various ways, in finding an appropriate response to the Lollard heresy and in revitalizing orthodoxy through vernacular writings aimed at lay readers. The kinds of 1 questions that the Lollards brought forth, about sacred doctrine, the role of the Bible, and the authority of the church, stimulated orthodox churchmen to seek answers, accommodations, and solutions that would acknowledge and engage with Lollard concerns without tearing the Christian community apart. The range of responses offered by people like Audelay, Capgrave, and Pecock helps us to see the fifteenth century as a dynamic rather than a dull time, in which writers, poets, and preachers were stimulated to come up with new ideas about the best way to structure Christian behavior and belief. Until recently, we have been so fixated on the repressive, restrictive official responses to the Lollard heresy that we have not been able to open our eyes to the way that the threat of heterodoxy drove people like Reginald Pecock and John Capgrave to find alternative means of unifying the Christian community and engaging the laity in the practice and learning of their faith. In their critique of contemporary literary history, Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry write that scholarly attention to Lollardy has limited our understanding of the religious works written in the aftermath of the English heresy: “The scholarly attention paid to the circulation of Wycliffite ideas and of the Wycliffite Bible itself distorts, we contend, the scene of fourteenth and fifteenth century theological speculation in England. Scholarship has presented us with a camera obscura, in which either the influence on religious writing of Wycliffite thought is pictured as all-pervasive or Wycliffitism is perceived as an ideological fiction propagated by the authorities in order to legitimate a tightening of secular and/or ecclesiastical control.”1 Certainly in Pecock’s case, the influence of Wycliffite ideas was not all-pervasive, even though he spent time and effort countering Wycliffite claims; rather, Wycliffite culture galvanized his thinking and made him reach for new ideas about lay religion, ideas from sources as diverse as Aquinas, Aristotle, and Wyclif himself. Scholars such as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton are beginning to paint a new picture of the religious and literary scene of late medieval England, which can be better understood as a dynamic intellectual culture where diversity of thought was possible and customary, as people of all kinds pressed in different ways against and beyond traditional orthodoxies.2 2 The Call to Read The changing picture of late medieval religious culture in England is witnessed by the words used to categorize its literature. The term vernacular theology itself has experienced a shift: first coined by A. I. Doyle in 1953 in his famous but unfortunately unpublished “Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th, and Early 16th Centuries,” the term was used provocatively by Nicholas Watson in his seminal 1995 article “Censorship and Cultural Change” to differentiate a body of challenging and intellectually explorative fourteenth-century religious writing from...