The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England ed. by Mary C. Flannery and Katie L. Walter (review)

This cogent, exciting collection of essays argues for the centrality of inquisition to England’s cultural and literary imagination in the late Middle Ages. The editors claim that inquisition “has been the subject of historical rather than cultural investigation,” and so they offer this collection, which persuasively and persistently shows inquisition to have been a creative activity for ecclesiastical authorities, jurists, and vernacular authors alike. In doing so, the collection argues both that inquisition dialogues often assumed a kind of “literary” quality and that vernacular literature often took inquisition as an imaginative opportunity to explore constructions of authority, interiority, and community.

Although the essays display a range of interpretive approaches and objects of analysis, two thematic threads emerge throughout. First, as the introduction makes clear, inquisition here functions broadly as a flexible discourse, rather than as a specific legal practice. Second and more specifically, inquisition is conceptually and procedurally affiliated with confession, insofar as it negotiates between a private self and a public persona. Thus the collection seeks to “recognize the potential of inquisition alongside confession to form a hermeneutics for medieval subjectivity and narrativity.” Edwin Craun’s essay, which reads summae confessorum alongside canon law, most clearly explores affinities between confession and inquisition, though all of the essays pursue the overlaps and frictions between the two to some degree.

The collection is organized chronologically, moving from the fourteenth century into the sixteenth. Its narrow temporal and geographical focus is both its strength and its limitation. Although inquisition was first codified as a legal process in the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council, most of these essays (with the notable exceptions of H. A. Kelly’s and Ian Forrest’s) gloss over the thirteenth century. Moreover, although many essays gesture to the specificity of England’s use of inquisitional procedures compared to the way they were used on the Continent, none provides a sustained discussion of the particular ways English law absorbed and reframed inquisition. This focus permits the collection to be coherent overall, but it doesn’t quite do justice to inquisition’s long history, nor does it explain why England should be of special interest to scholars thinking about inquisition.

Nonetheless, the collection compellingly describes how inquisition worked and the ways it seeped into the late medieval consciousness in England. Indeed, H. A. Kelly’s wide-ranging opening essay is essential reading for anyone thinking about medieval inquisition. In it, Kelly disabuses common, erroneous assumptions about the principles and processes of inquisition, including the all-too-easy conflation of inquisition and heresy inquisition, and he outlines the peculiarities of English inquisitional procedures. By establishing when and how inquisition became the primary form of prosecution in English ecclesiastical courts, Kelly provides a critical overview that supports the following essays’ interpretive work. In the next essay, Craun likewise offers a broad view that marks conceptual distinctions between confessional systems, which sought to rehabilitate the sinner through private penance, and legal systems, which sought to establish legal and ethical norms by making private sins available for public admonishment. Craun surprisingly reveals that sacramental confession and juridical inquisition both operated according to charitable impulses, seeking to protect the innocent from sins/crimes and to persuade the offender to amend his or her life.

Subsequent essays offer arguments that are more historically or textually specific. Forrest and Diane Vincent both track the use of inquisition in the persecution of Lollardy. Forrest argues that the problem of heresy in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England revived English churchmen’s interest in provincial canon law and resulted in a flurry of scribal and juridical productions. He rightly points out that the “energetic updating of old manuscript volumes containing provincial constitutions and the intensive production of new ones” has not been fully explored either in Lollard studies or in canon law scholarship; this is a rich field for further work.

Vincent shows that...