Anne Hudson

Selections from English Wycliffite writings

Selections from English Wycliffite Writings gathers together the main sources for the study of the Lollard movement, the documents of the Lollards themselves. Inspired and influenced by the writings of the heretical fourteenth century Oxford professor John Wyclif, Lollardy was the spiritual predecessor of the sixteenth century Reformation movement in England. Persecuted for their radical beliefs after 1425, the Lollards were well known for their possession of books, quires, and pamphlets in English, and left behind a considerable body of literature discussing religious and political reform which remain the best source for understanding the Lollards and their beliefs. Anne Hudson has gathered together a wide and varied selection of twenty-seven primary texts written between 1385 and 1425 by members of the Lollard sect in England, illustrating the variety of Lollard tracts, sermons, and satires, as well as the range of Lollard interests and preoccupations. The book is divided into four sections: The Nature of Wycliffite Belief; The Lollards and the Bible; Lollard Polemic; and Lollard Doctrine. The text is in Middle English with extensive supplemental notes. Originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1978, this new MART edition comes with a newly revised and updated bibliography by the author.

English Wycliffite sermons

This volume completes the edition of the long English Wycliffite sermon cycle and two related tracts; This final volume contains a detailed commentary on the text, essential for the study of the earlier text volumes. The material here, along with the introductions to the three text volumes and the survey of the main polemical issues repeatedly under discussion in the sermons in Volume IV, will enable scholars to assess the background and importance of this extensive body of vernacular preaching, tracing the sermons, debt to a wide range of Wyclifs own Latin works, and reveals their relationship to other works of the Wycliffite movement.

Heresy and literacy, 1000-1530

1. Heresy and literacy: earlier history of the theme Peter Biller 2. Literacy and the making of heresy c.1000-c.1150 R. I. Moore 3. Wisdom from the East: the reception by the Cathars of Eastern dualist texts Bernard Hamilton 4. The Cathars of Languedoc and written materials Peter Biller 5. Italian Catharism and written culture Lorenzo Paolini 6. Heresy and literacy: evidence of the thirteenth-century exempla Aaron Gurevich 7. The literacy of Waldensianism from Valdes to c.1400 Alexander Patschovsky 8. Waldensian books Anne Brenon 9. Waldensians in the Dauphine (1400-1530): from dissidence in texts to dissidence in practice Pierette Paravy 10. Were the Waldensians more literate than their contemporaries (1460-1560)? Gabriel Audisio 11.Writing and resistance among Beguins of Languedoc and Catalonia Robert E. Lerner 12. Religious reading amongst the laity in France in the fifteenth century Genevieve Hasenohr 13. Laicus litteratus: the paradox of Lollardy Anne Hudson 14. Literacy and heresy in Hussite Bohemia Frantisek Smahel 15. Heterodoxy, literacy and print in the early German Reformation Bob Scribner 16. Literacy, heresy, history and orthodoxy: perspectives and permutations for the later Middle Ages R. N. Swanson.

Lollardy: the English heresy?

Sythen witte stondis not in langage but in groundynge of treuthe, for tho same witte is in Laten that is in Grew or Ebrew, and trouthe schuld be openly knowen to alle manere of folke, trowthe moueth mony men to speke sentencis in Yngelysche that thai han gedired in Latyne, and herfore bene men holden heretikis. Such is the opening sentence of the tract known in the only surviving manuscript as Tractatus de Regibus. The text owes much of its material to Wyclif’s De Officio Regis, though the prologue does not derive from this source, and is undoubtedly of lollard origin; its date cannot be later than the early fifteenth century. The sentiments of the first part of the sentence are typically Wycliffite, though not exclusively so. The interesting part of it is the last clause, and particularly the word herfore. I want in this paper to investigate the implications and validity of this word. The meaning of the word is superficially clear: ‘for this reason are men considered heretics’—most modern writers would use ‘therefore’.

A Neglected Wycliffite Text

Modern accounts of the Wycliffite movement and of the beliefs of its adherents have been based for the most part upon records compiled by opponents. Most obviously hostile are the episcopal registers and documents, though these have the advantage of being relatively prolific and almost always dated and localised; inevitably, secular records about the movement become more ample as Lollardy was identified with sedition. The surviving chronicles, such as those of Knighton or Walsingham, were largely written by members of those orders that Wyclif castigated throughout his teaching. The picture constructed from these records has sometimes been filled out with details from overtly hostile and polemical texts such as Netters Doctrinale . Given such sources, it is hardly surprising that the accounts appear incomplete, even at times incoherent and contradictory. Episcopal registers, as has been suggested elsewhere, present only fragmentary records of the views they condemned; polemical authors, and even chroniclers, often wrote with hindsight, an advantage to their own argument, but a disqualification to their usefulness as historical sources. Particularly in the case of Lollardy, where increasing opposition from the ecclesiastical hierarchy was reinforced after about 1400 by suspicion of treason so amply confirmed in the Oldcastle revolt, late texts are peculiarly unreliable. McFarlane, in his posthumously published lectures, suggested that many aspects of the movement ‘are irremediably hidden from us’, unless ‘new material is found of a kind and quantity so far unsuspected’.

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.

Comment: Senses of Censorship

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has written a challenging study—one that seems likely to provoke further research and discussion. The core term in her investigation is “censorship.” This, especially as it has come to be used in contemporary historical and literary criticism, is a capacious and somewhat slippery term. In reference to an age of manuscript circulation rather than print, it is used in a variety of ways that arguably could helpfully be differentiated. This claim is illustrated by some specific examples: when, during the investigations against sympathizers of the heretic John Wyclif (d. 1384), Archbishop Chichele’s officials in 1415 ordered the scrutiny of books owned by the Londoner John Claydon, a list of seventeen reprobated opinions was compiled from Claydon’s copy of The Lanterne of Light. Following Claydon’s affirmation that he agreed with these opinions, and his admission that he had abjured heresy once before, he was condemned, and he and the book were consigned to the fire. The case is well documented, and here censorship cannot be doubted: the ecclesiastical and civil processes of inquisition and execution are plainly located, and the copy, along with its owner (who had commissioned and paid for it), was destroyed in pursuance of those authorities’ edict. The authorities were only sporadically effective: two other copies of the work survive, though from these it is possible to verify all but one of the seventeen opinions. It is interesting to set alongside this a couple of cases discussed by KerbyFulton (Claydon is only mentioned, perhaps inappropriately, in the prefatory “Chronology of Non-Wycliffite Cases of Heresy and Related Events”). A notebook put together by Peter Partridge and mostly in his hand begins with a list of its contents; among these contents are “Epistole multe Iohannis Wytcliff,” but at the point where, according to that list, these should occur, two leaves have been cut out. But when? By whom? And why? Kerby-Fulton (175–80) assumes that their inclusion dates to Partridge’s early academic career, when, as other evidence suggests, he was not entirely hostile to Wyclif, and that the excision reflects Partridge’s later apprehension that it was imprudent for one who was rising in the established ecclesiastical hierarchy to be associated with such material; to her this is equally censorship, albeit self-censorship. This provides answers to my three questions, but only by hypothesis. A number of alternative answers could be formulated—at an extreme is the possibility that a sixteenthor seventeenth-century Protestant antiquarian extracted the leaves as a memorial to an admired predecessor. The other case concerns two poems, one English, the other Latin (this is also included in Digby 98), that have been roughly crossed through, leaving the texts legible. Kerby-Fulton (162–64) again sees this as censorship, though she explains the continuing legibility as a deliberate ploy to allow for the apprehension