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REVIEWS 229 Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (New York: Cambridge University Press 2002) xiii + 298 pp. Like Rita Copeland’s new book from the same press, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Middle Ages, Ghosh’s The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts deals with the Lollards and their textual hermeneutics , but with a distinctly different approach. Where Copeland’s approach is diachronic, Ghosh’s is synchronic, tightly focused on the English university during a period of about thirty years, from 1377–1407. She lines up a series of texts in order to illustrate a historical progression of textual interpretation in the university as it is influenced and, ultimately, partially coopted by Wycliffite hermeneutics. Ghosh’s central argument is twofold. She argues that one major effect of the Wycliffite movement on textual interpretation was to stifle academic freedom of thought. But she also argues that such a collapse was all but inevitable, and that Lollardy “grew out of certain pre-existent and developing problems in late medieval scholasticism” (212). In her introduction Ghosh writes, “For the purpose of a study of the Lollard heresy in its hermeneutic aspects, the central institutional context is provided by medieval academia in general, and more specifically, by Oxford University and its intellectual practices” (3). It is slightly puzzling that Ghosh does not intend to treat Wycliffite hermeneutics outside of the university setting, particularly since it so spectacularly crossed the boundary erected between the university and the general public. But her focus is firmly on the effects of this crossover on medieval academia. She goes on to outline several critical points of dissention in the Wycliffite controversy. There is, of course, the Lollards’ typical privileging of text over gloss, and the concomitant desire to separate the two. She writes, “A crux of the Lollard polemic ... consists in the determination of the extent to which ‘Tradition’ is acceptable as a valid means of determining biblical meaning” (8), where ‘Tradition’ might be represented by both gloss and the Church hierarchy. These issues become increasingly important as Ghosh illustrates a growing discomfort with the accuracy of any text, including the Bible itself. She writes: By its unprecedented placing, at the centre of a scrutiny which was both academic and popular, of learned discourse, of hermeneutic engagement with the most important text of medieval culture, it radically problematized issues fundamental to the very definition of Christianity, and to the perceived validity of the social, political, and intellectual discourse traditionally enjoying its sanction. (15) Ghosh’s tone here is worth noting, as well as her focus on the destructive effects of Wycliffite thought. Indeed, throughout the book Lollardy appears to function most notably (though by no means only) as a catastrophe for the university academic. The overall structure of Ghosh’s book is pleasingly systematic, neatly balancing Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite writing as she moves through the late decades of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth. She begins by pairing, in chapters 1 and 2, the writing of John Wyclif, focusing on De Veritate, and of the early anti-Wycliffite writer William Woodford, focusing on his Quattuor Determinationes in Materia de Religione. Her sympathy with Woodford, and REVIEWS 230 the academic intellectualism he represents, is clear. She cites the “baffled idealism ” (66) of Wyclif’s thought, and the “tension in Wyclif’s thought ... between a sciential attempt at scriptural codification, and a sapiential, caritative reliance on celestial scripture” (61), a tension which she suggests he is not able to resolve . Indeed, Ghosh returns again and again to what she sees as an essential deadlock between “the inherited scholastic binary of ‘reason’ and ‘revelation’” (211) which is evidenced by all of the intellectuals in the book, not simply by Wyclif and the Lollards. She contrasts Wyclif’s “baffled idealism,” and its attendant search for certainty, with William Woodford’s comfort with uncertainty . Ghosh writes, “Woodford is keenly aware that the postulation of absolute meanings independent of the network of ‘authorities’ which constitute ‘tradition’ must presuppose the postulation of an absolute text” (71)—an absolute text Woodford had no confidence existed. Ghosh associates Woodford’s unconcerned skepticism with a time when academic freedoms...

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