William Thorpe’s Other Books: “Second Generation” Wycliffism and the Glossed Gospels

A set of English commentaries on the four gospels, the Glossed Gospels were produced within the same late fourteenth-century academic milieu as the English Wycliffite Bible translations. The Glossed Gospels were linked to the translation project in a number of ways, but copies also circulated independently of any specific Wycliffite Bible recension. Self-consciously constructed biblical manuscripts in their own right, their layout and design reflected conventions inherited from late-eleventh and early-twelfth-century Latin precursors for citing authorities and clarifying the relationship between scripture and exposition. In this paper, I explore what made such features newly relevant in late medieval literary and intellectual contexts, and how material associated with the Glossed Gospels may have shaped a specific case of vernacular theology and argumentation—namely, the Testimony of William Thorpe (fl. 1381–1407).¹

A Yorkshire preacher, Thorpe was arrested under the provision of a 1406 anti-Lollard statute after coming to the attention of authorities in Shrewsbury, who had accused him of promoting unorthodox religious opinions in a sermon at St. Chad’s church on April 17, 1407.² Some months later, following Thorpe’s removal to Canterbury, he was examined by Archbishop Thomas Arundel at Saltwood Castle, in Kent.³ The Testimony, which survives in three manuscript copies dating to the early or mid-fifteenth century, is Thorpe’s record of his exchange with Arundel, and the only known source of information about his time in custody. Stylized as an autobiographical account but given over in substance to biblical exegesis, the narrative of the Testimony unfolds in the Archbishop’s private quarters, where he and select members of his retinue scrutinize Thorpe’s views according to a schedule of topics he had reportedly discussed while preaching at St. Chad’s.⁴ At one point, Arundel reads from a “litil rolle” enumerating “þe errours and þe eresies” Thorpe was said to have sown in his sermon, and perhaps also in testimony before the abbot of Shrewsbury, who questioned Thorpe a day after his arrest (42.619–22).⁵

Thorpe’s responses to his examiner draw on familiar sources for biblical commentary and exposition, including those compiled in Wycliffite texts such as the Middle English version of the Rosarium Theologie, a late-fourteenth-century alphabetical set of distinctiones adapted from a much longer Latin original. Indeed, Thorpe’s apparent interest in material from the Rosarium is itself a notable feature of the Testimony.⁶ But while several arguments set out by Thorpe include information found in the Rosarium or its abridged versions, and comparatively fewer arguments can be traced directly to the Glossed Gospels, the latter corpus nonetheless figures significantly in the textual and intellectual setting of Thorpe’s work. The Testimony represents the experience of a reader whose literacy has been materially shaped by forms of indexing and reference such as those found in glossed books, perhaps specifically through Thorpe’s use of Wycliffite gospel commentaries. This conjunction illustrates how later stages of the Wycliffite movement, sometimes characterized exclusively in terms of “popular” religion, adapted the textual and material forms of academic biblical scholarship for fifteenth-century English audiences. It also highlights the continued significance of an “erudite” body of vernacular commentary in scripting public debate on belief and practice.⁷

A Glossed Biblical Text?

The relationship between these two texts and their respective cultural registers is not an obvious one. Separated from one another in time as well as function, the Testimony and the Glossed Gospels represent divergent genealogies of Middle English religious writing, reinforced by Thorpe’s polemical critique of Latin pedagogy and the clerical prerogatives underpinning the production of books such as glossed biblical commentaries. Although only one of the three extant manuscript copies of the Testimony is in English (Oxford Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.208), Thorpe prioritizes the vernacular in remarks such as those enjoining the Archbishop to declare the meaning of Latin sentences “opinli in Ynglische,” academic theology being “scole-mater,” he claims, “aboute whiche I neuer bisied me for to knowe in” (55.1018–19, 1030–31).⁸ Given various...