James Simpson

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents

Introduction 1. Two Hundred Years of Biblical Violence 2. Good Bible News 3. Salvation, Reading, and Textual Hatred 4. The Literal Sense and Predestination 5. Bible Reading, Persecution, and Paranoia 6. History as Error 7. Thomas More and Textual Trust 8. The Tragic Scene of Early Modern Reading Abbreviations Notes Index

The Reformation of Scholarship: A Reply to Debora Shuger

This polemical essay takes issue with an essay by Debora Shuger, “The Reformation of Penance,” which took aim at revisionist scholarship on the English Reformation. I argue that Shuger: mischaracterizes pre-Reformation theology of penance; and deeply underestimates the seriousness with which Reformation soteriological theology undoes its principal pre-Reformation counterpart. I use the occasion of this rebuttal to define some ground rules for the increasingly powerful encounter between late medieval and early modern English literary studies. The Reformation of Scholarship: A Reply to Debora Shuger

Vernacular literary consciousness c. 1100–c. 1500: French, German and English evidence

Whilst it is reasonably assumed that there extended from the Merovingian period a long tradition of oral poetry in France which embraced the lyric, hagiography, epic and drama, a tradition which drew on Indo-European traditions, more localised folklore, and historical events, it is certain that vernacular French literature (i.e. what has been set down in letters) owes its emergence entirely to the church. It is doubtful whether the romana lingua of the Strassburg Oaths (as sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in June 842) can really be called French, but the short Sequence of Saint Eulalia ( c . 881–2) from the area of Valenciennes is certainly French, as are parts of the Sermon on Jonah, also produced near Valenciennes, towards the middle of the tenth century. A Passion narrative and a Life of St Ledger copied c . 1000 have been preserved in the south-west of France, whilst in the following century we have fragments of Occitan and, from Normandy, two literary masterpieces, the Vie de Saint Alexis and the Chanson de Roland . With the exception of the last two we are dealing with works written in a supra-dialectal koine or scripta , designed to find favour with supra-regional audiences who could not tackle whatever Latin originals were available. Secular French literature written in a relatively standardised language (ultimately identified with that of the Ile de France) is the product of the twelfth century. It was preceded in England by the curiously precocious literary productions that owed much to the patronage of Henry I and II.

Human Prudence versus the Emotion of the Cosmos: War, Deliberation and Destruction in the Late Medieval Statian Tradition

The Thebaid of Statius (d. 94 CE) provides the great model of militarist catastrophe for the European Middle Ages and beyond. The Olympian gods, humans (often excellent, justice-loving humans), and the Furies each participate in a relentless dialectic of inciting each other to furious, exhausting, and destructive combat. Emotion dominates the poem’s action and cosmos, both enormous emotional energy, and total emotional exhaustion. By contrast, the medieval tradition, as represented by Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (1421–22), almost wholly absents the gods. Fury drives the war in an over-determined historical process, to be sure, but that fury has human origins, and could have been checked in deliberative fora. In this tradition, bad committee practice, rather than the mythic violence written into the cosmos, impels almost all players to disastrous ends.

Religious forms and institutions in Piers Plowman

Which comes first: institutions or selves? Liberal democracies operate as if selves preceded institutions. By and large, pre-Reformation culture places the institution before the self. The self, and particularly the conscience as the source of deepest ethical and spiritual counsel, is intimately shaped, by the institution of the Church. This shaping is both ethical and spiritual; by no means least, it ensures the soul’s salvation, though administering the sacraments especially of baptism, penance, and the Eucharist. The conscience is not a lonely entity in such an institutional culture. It is, rather, the portable voice of accumulated, communal history and wisdom: it is, as the word itself suggests, a ‘con-scientia’, a ‘knowing with’. These tensions generate the extraordinary and conflicted account of self and institution in Langland’s Piers Plowman.