What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (review)

Hornbeck's title captures a central question for not just lollard studies but also the study of religion in later medieval England. This is because the period is defined by a dramatic rise in lay devotional use of English texts in the wake of the two generations that came of age after the plague in the later fourteenth century. These readers and writers increasingly used English in politics, literature, and religious devotion. One group of these users, the followers of John Wyclif, produced not just the biblical translation but also a number of other major vernacular commentaries on scripture, including the longest sermon cycle to survive from medieval England. After Archbishop Arundel hereticated biblical translation in 1409, and the Council of Constance condemned Wyclif himself as a heretic in 1414, everything that attached to him and his followers was tainted and therefore gave reason for suspicion—even, theoretically, the use of English itself.

The problem that Hornbeck analyzes here is how (and, in fact, whether) theological belief can be used to define this group. The problem of identification has been analyzed from a number of perspectives. The first is textually: Is a specific text lollard or not? Anne Hudson, the modern progenitor of lollard studies, and her student Jill Havens have both wrestled with the problem from this perspective. Havens has inquired after this by examining the problem of mixed manuscript miscellanies—those with texts that espouse heretical beliefs next to those that don't. Another way to discuss the problem is socially: What is a lollard conventicle, and how do they form? This approach has been taken by, for instance, Norman Tanner (in, for example, the introduction to his edition of the Kent Heresy Proceedings) and Shannon McSheffrey (in Gender and Heresy).

Hornbeck takes a different approach, which is to ask the theological question: When do a person's theological beliefs qualify him or her as lollard? To answer the question Hornbeck seeks to identify a subcultural web of interests, none of which are definitive but only define membership by aggregation. To explain this he takes as his cue Wittgenstein's linguistic theory of family resemblances, uses of which appear, as Hornbeck explains, in other fields; in one explanation, "in a set of four individuals, one might possess the predicates ABC, another BCD, another ABD, and the last ACD, such that there is no predicate common to every member, though each individual shares some of its predicates with others" (12). All, however, would be members of the subculture. This helps some, because it allows him to resist the urge to say that "all lollards must believe in X" and similarly to resist saying that "no lollard would argue for Y." It seeks to imitate the web of social connections that characterizes social communities. Heresy becomes a social practice that uses theology to define itself.

The course of Hornbeck's analysis covers six theological issues: beliefs about salvation, the Eucharist, lay marriage, clerical celibacy, the nature of the priesthood, and the papacy. The implications of the different theological topics vary, but the chapter on salvation might be taken as an example. Hornbeck notes that there are two basic poles to soteriological understanding: salvation by grace and salvation by works (which, at its extreme, is Pelagianism). Within this, variations exist: Are some saved and some damned? All saved? Scholars have attributed to Wyclif "a soteriology according to which God's foreknowledge necessitates double predestinarianism," in which some are fated to be saved and some are fated to be damned (32). Wyclif used this idea threateningly, to attack the legitimacy of the prelacy: Who knows which of our priests are among the saved? There is the devil's church and God's church, and we must work to distinguish which one we belong to and which one others belong to.

Yet Hornbeck cites Ian C. Levy to say that "Wyclif believed free...