Wycliffite Controversies ed. by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (review)

Wycliffite Controversies grew from talks given at a 2008 conference at Oriel College, Oxford, entitled “Lollard Affiliations: Historical, Literary, Theological.” This high-quality collection, whose contributors make up a veritable Who’s Who in “Lollard studies,” comprises sixteen essays framed by a contextualizing introduction by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II, and an afterword by Fiona Somerset. The essays showcase an abundance of approaches—literary, historical, historiographical, anthropological, theological, and codicological—and they demonstrate the intellectual vitality and flexibility that enabled the study of Lollardy to blossom into its own subfield of medieval English studies during the 1980s and to continue thriving into the new millennium.

One of the collection’s main thrusts is to offer a fuller contextualization of Wyclif that yields a less radical thinker. Ian Christopher Levy calls on us to resist the “Netterization” that has defined Wyclif as a heresiarch and to view him instead as a member of a clerical establishment that was deeply jealous of its prerogative and cognizant of the “sworn obligation” incumbent upon a theologian “to speak the truth no matter the disruption it may cause” (36). Thus seen, Levy contends, Wyclif “really was not exceptional at all” (35); rather, he was a theologian engaged in vigorous debate among orthodox professionals over some of the most pressing issues of his day. Alastair Minnis similarly finds Wyclif “participating wholeheartedly in a common enterprise of late medieval scholasticism” (78) in his treatment of sex, death, and dominion within his little-studied Tractatus de statu innocencie (c. 1376). Kantik Ghosh urges scholars to move beyond the consideration of Wyclif as a predominantly insular thinker and to examine him as part of “a much more complex and extensive international network of religious, intellectual, and institutional conflicts and synergies” (32).

The essayists recontextualize not only Wyclif but Lollardy as a whole. Ian Forrest promotes the study of Lollardy in an “orthodox context”: “just as the history of orthodoxy could be invigorated by assuming greater fragmentation within majority culture, the history of lollardy could benefit from assuming greater commonality between lollards and non-lollards” (126). Robyn Malo finds precisely such commonality in Lollard views of relics, which she argues are far closer to orthodox views than many scholars have supposed. When we examine their rhetoric carefully, she avers, we see that Lollard critics of relics are primarily incensed about elaborate reliquaries; what’s more, these critics “frequently work from within orthodox traditions that feature some of the same complaints” (198). While Malo addresses the assumption that Lollards were hostile to relics, Mary Dove challenges the view that they enthusiastically promoted lay study of Scripture. With the exception of the Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, Dove argues, Wycliffite tracts emphasize reading the Bible for “comfort and consolation” rather than “serious study” (221); while Wycliffite writers insisted that Scripture be available in English, they appear to have been singularly unconcerned with providing simple readers with the means of understanding the nuances of what they read.

Several essays are methodologically oriented. To reassess the relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Rob Lutton applies a methodology developed by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse to study religious experience and practice in Papua New Guinea. Shannon Gayk advocates applying to Lollard texts the methods of formal and aesthetic analysis that are being so fruitfully applied to medieval “literary” texts. These tools are rarely turned to Lollard texts because the Lollards explicitly denounced formal and rhetorical embellishment for obscuring the meaning of texts. Gayk maintains that such denunciations should not lead us to assume that their own writings are too formally austere, too devoid of stylistic innovation, to reward the vigorous study of their rhetoric. Indeed, she claims, Lollard authors did use “stylized” and “embellished or figurative language to draw out truth” (146), and she demonstrates that claim by analyzing a trial record, “one of the most non-literary genres of Lollardaffiliated texts” (149).

While new approaches are advanced, long-standing approaches...