Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif

4. Lollard Tales

137  Chapter 4 Lollard Tales In this chapter I investigate a very common and widespread characteristic of lollard writings: their use of narrative forms, especially but not only drawn from the bible, to give their readers models for holy living. In these narratives they provide their readers with a training in feeling. Lollard writers use stories, that is, to show their readers how to feel like saints. Yet lollards are usually thought to disapprove of stories—and they do, at least some of the time, avoid narrative. The English Wycliffite Sermons , as Hudson has noted, contrast strongly with most other contemporary sermon collections in that they contain no exempla, no illustrative stories whatsoever.1 Popular sermons containing entertaining stories were especially associated with the friars; lollards criticize this kind of preaching, and what is more, they do not practice it. The following quotation from Piers the Plowman’s Crede is one example of how lollards express disapproval of stories, among many others that might be given.2 Here Piers is speaking, setting the narrator straight after he has 1. PR, 269–70. 2. Elizabeth Schirmer cites others in “William Thorpe’s Narrative Theology,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 267–99. I am grateful to Liz for allowing me to read her article in draft. Schirmer’s account of the narrative aspects of the Testimony of William Thorpe is marvellous. I disagree, however, that lollard writings more broadly are sharply hostile to narrative forms. Within the wider context of how lollards use stories to talk about sainthood,the Testimony does not seem so anomalous. 138 CHAPTER 4 3. Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, in Helen Barr, ed., The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: Dent, 1993), lines 585–86. 4. See MED, s.v. “tale,” as, for example, in senses 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10. The same may be said of the Latin verb “narrare,” as used repeatedly by Richard Wyche in his Letter, for example: see D.R. Howlett et al., Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 14 fascicles to date (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1975–), s.v. “narrare,” 1, 2, 3. listened to the conflicting blandishments and mutual condemnations of a representative from each of the four orders of friars: Swiche a gome godes wordes grysliche gloseth; Y trowe [believe], he toucheth nought the text but taketh it for a tale.3 This sort of man glosses God’s words in a horrifying way. He does not touch the text—but why, and what does he do with it instead? There is a telling ambiguity here. In taking the text for a tale does he use the text as a pretext for his own, unrelated story, taking it and creating from it a tale? Or does he ignore the text’s meaning because he disparages its literal sense, takes it as nothing but a tale? In the first case, the lollard Piers rejects a friar’s “tale” because it is extraneous to the bible’s meaning—a familiar complaint, here. But in the second case, it is a friar here (by Piers’ report, at any rate) who is rejecting a “tale”—again,the complaint that friars disregard the bible’s literal meaning is also familiar. It is not a lollard who rejects a tale here, not this time. The “tale” this friar might find in the “text” is one he considers not worth touching. If this second reading seems less convincing, we might remember that friars certainly do themselves disparage tales earlier in the poem, as where the Franciscan claims that Carmelites “lieth [lie/lay] on our Ladie many a longe tale” (49); here, the Franciscan dismisses Carmelite tales about Mary as specious inventions. As this poet portrays them,it seems that lollards and friars agree that tales,one subclass of stories,are not worthy of attention. What they disagree about is which stories can be classified as tales: which stories should not be touched,and which should. Some stories are not worth serious attention. But some require serious attention, of a kind that this poet thinks they do not get from friars. Admittedly, Piers does not specify which part of “godes wordes” his friar is taking for a tale. Some parts of the bible are not stories, nor are they amenable to narrative exposition by anything but the most strenuous effort. It could be that what is in question is not a story at all,and indeed (though this does...