The Lollards (review)

Reviews 211 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Rex, Richard, The Lollards, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002; paper; pp. xv, 188; RRP US$21.95; ISBN 0333597524. Before the book proper begins, Rex warns his reader that the attention paid to the Lollards bears little relation to their ‘actual importance’ (p. xv). The Wycliffites have been over-rated because of ‘the disproportionate survival of Lollard texts’, in particular the Wycliffite Bible, and because of ‘the romantic appeal of Lollardy as a criminalised minority’. Hard-headed historians, one infers, rank real lives lived above literary remains, and avoid being seduced by the glamour of lost causes. Does Rex succeed in cutting the Lollards down to size? Writing a book about them seems a strange way to do so, and what comes across is his appalled fascination with this ‘small, scattered minority of dissidents ... overwhelmed by the boundless seas of mainstream church practice by which they were surrounded’ (p. 149). This inversion of ‘Dover Beach’ is perhaps intended mockingly, but to me it suggests that his repudiation of romanticism is only skin-deep. While he argues for the cultural hegemony of traditional religion in late medieval England, the ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ is sounding in his, and our, ears. The lineaments of Wycliffite mentality have always been traced as effectively by their foes (starting with Thomas Walsingham) as by their friends. With anticlericalism and anti-ecclesiasticism now being identified almost everywhere in fourteenth-century England, we can do with being reminded by Rex of how unexpected and surprising the appearance of a new heresy was (p. 11), and how, for the leaders of the church, the 1381 uprising was literally ‘a godsend’ (p. 52), proving to the temporal authorities that heresy brought sedition in its wake. Rex’s compendious first chapter, ‘The Church of England in the Later Middle Ages’ (pp. 1-24), students will find accessible and teachers will find convenient. After this survey, he goes on to argue that in almost every respect Wyclif’s theology (developing logically out of his nominalist philosophy – a good point) challenged contemporary Christian practice. Wyclif’s programme, as he justly says, was too uncompromising to attract more than transitory support from nobility or monarch; it was sympathisers among the gentry who enabled the early diffusion of Lollardy throughout the larger part of central and southern England. The spread of the heresy was brought to an end by the Oldcastle Rising, ‘an ill-conceived conspiracy of hotheads’ in Rex’s view (p. 86). His account of Lollardy’s survival and Tudor revival is more nuanced. Puzzled about why anyone would have found Lollardy more appealing than 212 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) traditional religion, Rex provocatively questions the thesis that Lollardy empowered women. It did so no more and no less, he concludes, than did orthodox Catholicism. His final chapter contests ‘the claim that Lollardy contributed to the rise of Protestantism’, finding this ‘implausible’ (p. 119) on geographical, ideological, theological and social grounds. All said and done, the Lollards’ sole contribution to the Reformation was that ‘[r]eformers availed themselves of the figleaf of historical continuity which the Lollard tradition offered them’ (p. 142). In several places, Rex shows that he is aware of the obvious answer to his argument that Lollards were insignificant because they were small in number; that is, that heresy was viewed with peculiar terror and horror. Ian Forrest, who has examined the tropes associated with heresy in the writings of the antiWycliffites , puts it well: ‘[i]n terms of crime, sin, ecclesiology, doctrine, eschatology, social control and moral danger, the heretic was a fundamental threat gnawing away at the roots of society’ (‘Ecclesiastical Justice and the Detection of Heresy in England, 1380-1430’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2003, p. 66). In attributing to the Lollards all manner of perversity and unreason, the Lollards’ contemporaries glamourised them as much as any modern scholar may be seen to do. The ‘disproportionate survival’ of the writings of the Lollards, in particular their translation of the Bible, is a point revisited more than once in The Lollards. Rex does not wish to concede that the ‘impressive statistics relating to Lollard literature’ imply any kind of ‘sophisticated organization...