The Call to Read: Reginald Pecock’s Books and Textual Communities (review)

Reginald Pecock has the reputation of being a difficult and idiosyncratic writer. During his lifetime, he went from being an influential and apparently well-regarded cleric attached to the Whittington Hospital in the City of London to become bishop, first of St. Asaph in Wales in 1444 and then of Chichester in 1450. But from 1447 he seems to have aroused hostility among the clerical authorities because of his teaching; in the 1450s he was charged with heresy on various scores, recanted, and was forced to consign many of his writings to be destroyed; he was deprived of his bishopric in 1459 and died a year or two afterward. Work done by Wendy Scase has done much to elucidate both Pecock’s life and more particularly the London environment in which he moved in his earlier career. But the precise stages behind his alienation from that environment and the details of the charges against him are still not entirely clear; the very poor survival of some of his works and the complete absence of others (whether because they were incomplete or because all copies were destroyed remains unclear) are two of the factors that make an overall view of his career hard to perceive. Kirsty Campbell, rather than searching for further details of Pecock’s life, gives an account of the content of his writings (p. 5) and aims to show through them how far Pecock conformed to normal medieval lines of discussion and how far his views and modes of expressing them were individual.

Pecock saw himself as providing a series of writings that would answer and defeat those whom modern historians usually call “Lollards” but that Pecock described by a variety of terms, most frequently as “the lay party” or “Bible men.” Unusually, and probably rashly, Pecock chose to do this for the most part in English, although for certain knotty subjects such as the Trinity he often moved into Latin. As Campbell indicates, Pecock speaks of a number of texts he has composed beyond those that are available now; again, a retreat into Latin seems to have marked some of the lost works. Campbell makes much of Pecock’s expressed desire to meet his opponents in argument and his hopes of converting them back to orthodoxy. She spends much time outlining previous educational efforts by the medieval and especially English clergy; at some points her citation of earlier critics on well-documented developments takes undue space and precludes the closer analysis of Pecock’s own mode of procedure (for instance, she could well have examined in detail Pecock’s teaching against Lollard disregard of images and the saints they represent in his Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (c. 1449)—arguably his most sophisticated surviving discussion). Important suggestions tend to be submerged in a wealth of familiar points: Pecock’s texts are not reading for beginners in medieval religious literature, and Campbell could have had more confidence in the competence of her probable audience. The notion of “textual communities” invoked in her subtitle and again in chapter 7 could well have been linked more closely with Pecock’s endeavor and also with Pecock’s life and his downfall. This is a case where life and writings can hardly be kept apart—Why did his endeavor turn out so disastrously for himself? Who were his real enemies? Why were his writings perceived as heretical and burned? Campbell’s book has some interesting ideas that deserve further consideration.