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

1. Pecock’s Audience

o n e Pecock’s Audience This chapter considers the question of Pecock’s audience. As Paul Strohm notes in his work on Chaucer’s audience, there is general acceptance within literary studies that “a literary work achieves its meaning in the interaction between a text on the one hand and an audience on the other” but that any discussion of audience must first consider the question: “Which audience?”1 This chapter examines evidence for Pecock’s intended audience, his historical or actual audience , and his implied audience. The intended audience is perhaps most easily identified, because Pecock provides lengthy prologues to his works identifying the readers he is attempting to reach. Within the category of his intended audience, there may be a difference between the audience Pecock hopes to reach and the audience he knows he can reach. The historical audience is harder to reconstruct, since readers of Pecock’s works do not appear on record. We lack documentation like wills that could tell us about patterns of ownership, and we lack evidence of Pecock’s possible influence on subsequent publications of vernacular theology. Indeed, we lack most of the books that Pecock claims to have written, and we can only speculate about the identity of the opuscula referred to in his trial documents. The performance of various searches for Pecock’s books in the province of Canterbury and at Oxford may be the reason why so few books remain, and it seems likely that anyone who successfully hid Pecock’s books from the authorities would have been sure to avoid making reference to these forbidden books in official documents such as wills.2 It is difficult, 27 therefore, to get a sense of Pecock’s reception among an actual audience . My procedure will be to investigate the question of his historical audience by balancing two kinds of evidence: Pecock’s direct observations of the tendencies and capacities of London lay readers, and historical evidence documenting Pecock’s involvement with various kinds of people in London society. This analysis will point in the end to a possible or likely actual audience for Pecock’s corpus among the London mercers, and it will briefly explore some of the factors that influenced this audience’s “horizon of expectations.”3 Finally, I investigate Pecock’s implied audience, defined by Strohm as “a hypothetical construct, the sum of all the author’s assumptions about the persons he or she is addressing.”4 Implied readers are those who will respond to the work in an ideal fashion—those who can follow its directions, share its assumptions, get its jokes, and understand its allusions. The investigation of implied audience will draw on Iser’s theory of aesthetic response, which “focuses on how a piece of literature impacts on its implied readers and elicits a response”—I will examine what kinds of responses are elicited by Pecock’s habit of multiplying illustrations of moral truths.5 Intended Audiences We meet Pecock’s intended readers in his prologues. His opening statements divide his corpus into two different kinds of books intended for two different types of audience. The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy and The Book of Faith open with polemic, addressing members of the laity who have descended into errors that include criticizing the clergy, refusing to accept the clergy’s teachings on faith, and refusing to accept any teachings other than the Bible on moral matters. These errors belong to a group among the lay people that he labels Lollards: they are the holdouts from a “wickidli enfectid scole of heresie among the lay peple in Ynglond which is not yit conquerid ” (Repressor, 89). Pecock says in conclusion to the first part of the Repressor that he writes it “for to convicte and overcome tho erring persoones of the lay peple whiche ben clepid Lollardis, and forto make hem leve her errouris” (128). Similarly, The Book of Faith is writ28 The Call to Read ten to draw back, “fro lengthe and breed of erring, and of untrewe wyde wandring,” the “sones and doughtris” of God’s “hole chirche” (BF, 114). Did such Lollards still exist in the London community, as Pecock suggests? According to Wendy Scase, “London was often named by Lollard suspects as the place where they learned their heresy. James Wyllis, tried in 1462, said he had lived in the London parish...